πŸ₯₯ Nat'l Coconut Day bugfixes

Now, today is a day worth celebrating! The coconut: oh so tasty in both sweet and savory dishes, and whose name came from an Iberian bogeyman. In honor of this dynamic fruit, we're sharing some haunting bugs we defeated and a tasty change to our Homepage area.

Up first, the bugs:

  • Previously, if a reader or author favorited an article and the article was then archived or deleted, their favorites list was not updated to remove that article. This was a pain because there was no way for them to remove the article from favorites. But a pain no more! This has been fixed, and we will now remove defunct articles from authors' and readers' favorites. 
  • When you merged tags, some articles that had the old tags weren't being properly updated, breaking tag search and tag filters in Manage articles for those articles. That's since been resolved, so merging tags will now work as expected.
  • When searching a phrase of two or more words, the API was returning this error: "Call to a member function safeOutput() on string." We fixed this so you can now search for coconut health benefits or any other multiple word phrases via the API.
  • Testing Search weights in Settings > Search on a large knowledge base would sometimes time-out, giving you no search results and making it impossible to test search weights. We've restricted the Search testing results to the top 20 results to fix this.

Homepage UI tweaks

And finally dessert: we've made some improvements to the Homepage page.

Configuring your Homepage in KnowledgeOwl is a process that evolved over time.

Back in the 2010s, we put most of the Homepage HTML and content into the top-level Homepage. In 2022, we released a different starting theme to all new knowledge bases, and we moved all of the underlying HTML and content into Settings > Style > Custom HTML > Homepage. We were trying to make things less confusing by moving it all into one place.

But we've noticed that this change became a source of confusion, both for new customers trying to build their first knowledge base and for existing customers who wanted to do a homepage makeover. It wasn't clear when you should edit Homepage directly and when you should head to Settings > Style to edit it.

So we've released some new explanatory text and links into the top-level Homepage to try to demystify things a bit:

The Homepage page, which contains new explainer text and an Appearance settings section.The top of Homepage now has more explanatory text and links to guide you

In case this setup has confused you in the past, here's a quick summary:

  • Homepage is where you can add additional content to your homepage, like announcements, instructions, welcome materials, and so on.
  • If you want to edit your homepage's overall look, such as with HTML or CSS, go to Settings > Style (then into either Custom CSS or Custom HTML > Homepage).  

We hope this change helps make the distinction clearer. We'd love your feedback on this one, as we do expect to improve on what we have so far.