Release notes

A summary of most important changes to the Newspack suite. For detailed changelogs, see the releases pages of respective Github projects.

April 13, 2021

• Newsletters
  • Fixed a bug with the Posts Inserter block where it wouldn’t display authors even if the “Display Author” option was enabled
• Campaigns
  • Added a new option to hide the border that appears around inline prompts
  • Added support for inserting inline prompts inside Classic Content blocks
  • Fixed a bug that prevented draft prompts from appearing in previews
  • Fixed a bug that sometimes chose the wrong above-header prompt to be displayed to readers

April 6, 2021

• Newspack Plugin
  • Potentially Breaking Change: Collection of News Tagging Guide analytics data is now opt-in, for performance reasons. If you want to track News Tagging Guide data, please visit Newspack > Analytics > Custom Events and toggle ON the option as described in the support docs.
  • Whitelisted Google Web Stories as a supported plugin. This plugin can now be installed with a single click from the plugins dashboard.
• Blocks
  • Posts Carousel blocks will now render without duplicating posts if there are other Posts Carousel blocks or Homepage Posts blocks on the same page.
  • Added new block patterns for Homepage Posts.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented posts without a featured image from being rendered in the Posts Carousel block.
• Campaigns
  • Fixed a bug which broke tag filtering: assigning tags to a prompt will now correctly cause those prompts to be displayed only on posts and pages with at least one matching tag.
  • Traffic originating from common crawlers and bots (such as search engines) will no longer be tracked in Campaigns analytics data.
  • Various performance enhancements.

March 30, 2021

• Campaigns
  • Fixed a bug that caused Campaign analytics recorded since March 24 to not be displayed in the Campaigns dashboard.
• Newsletters
  • Added support for custom excerpts, which will be shown for public newsletters in all archive pages and Homepage Posts blocks.

March 24, 2021

• Theme
  • Added a new Customizer option to select a footer logo image size
  • Added support for Web Stories
• Blocks
  • Moved all Newspack block patterns to the standard block inserter UI (no longer in a custom sidebar)
  • Added many new block patterns for the Homepage Posts block
• Newsletters
  • Added support for featured images to Newsletters (especially useful for Newsletters that are published as a public page)
• Campaigns
  • Introduced a new Custom Placements system for placing prompts manually in post and page content
  • Fixed a bug where newly published prompts would automatically get assigned a default category
  • Several improvements for performance and stability

March 16, 2021

• Newsletters
  • Added support for revisions when editing newsletters.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some sent newsletters not marked publicly visible to be shown on archive pages.

March 2, 2021

Important note: This week’s releases include several potentially breaking changes for the Newspack Campaigns plugin. Please review the detailed summary of breaking changes here and verify that your campaigns and segments are functioning as expected after the update.

• Newspack Plugin
  • Introduced a new option to disable News Tagging Guide analytics reporting. If you don’t need to track NTG events, you can now turn them off by visiting Newspack > Analytics > Custom Events in the WP admin dashboard.
• Campaigns
  • Added the ability to assign multiple segments to a single prompt.
  • Changed the logic that dictates which prompts are displayed to readers who match multiple audience segments. This change is significant and may break functionality for existing prompts. Read more about the change here.
  • Improved the behavior of preview sessions so that prompts now behave more like they do to real readers. Specifically, frequency settings and prompt dismissals now behave as expected in previews.
• Newsletters
  • Fixed a bug that sometimes caused draft newsletter ads to be inserted into newsletter content.

February 25, 2021

• Newspack Plugin
  • Some minor design updates throughout the Newspack dashboard and onboarding experience.
• Campaigns
  • Fixed several sorting-related bugs in the Segments tab. It’s no longer possible to re-sort the list while a sort operation is already in progress, or if the segments list has previously changed in another browser instance.
• Ads
  • Improved the rendering of non-responsive, multi-size ad units. Now, if multiple sizes exist for a non-responsive unit, any size can potentially be rendered, not just the largest size.

February 16, 2021

• Homepage Posts block
  • Fixed a bug that caused incorrect rendering of excerpts in the editor for posts that included certain blocks with fallback content.
• Campaigns
  • Added handling for the “Uncategorized” category: previously, this category was hidden from Campaigns UI because a prompt with only this category was assumed to be the same as a prompt with no categories, but this assumption was found to cause issues with rendering these prompts. “Uncategorized” can now be managed and behaves like any other category when configuring category filtering for prompts.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented certain prompts from ever being displayed if there are more than ten prompts of the same placement type active on the site.