Organic Product Release Notes

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Sprint Dates

05/30/23-06/12/23

Content

💎 New Features

• Template primitives for easier frontend generation using Next.js/React are now live on elements.organic.ly. Version 1 of the full template and component library will be completed this summer.
• When Organic Content core is released, a version update PR is now automatically created on all dependent site repos. 

📈 Improvements

• All projects are now updated to NodeJS version 18.
• Adjustments have been made to the FAQ block on the headless frontend to ensure eligibility for Google Rich Results.

Ads

💎 New Features

• In the Ad Block section of Ads Settings, users can now block by CSS selector. This means users can block if the article has a product card, or if the URL 404s. 
• Organic Platform Wordpress Plugin v1.12 was released

📈 Improvements

• The ad stack has been updated to Prebid 7.5.0

Affiliate

🛠 Fixes

• WordPress admin URLs are now no longer listed as tracked pages in the platform.
• After an update, the product card widgets were not displaying correctly in WordPress. This has been fixed.

 

Product Release Note: 05/30/2023

Sprint Dates

05/15/23-05/30/23

Product Release Note: 05/01/2023

Sprint Dates

04/17/23-05/01/23

 

Content

📈 Improvements

• Technical documentation about global scripts has been added to docs.organic.ly
• Technical documentation about custom queries has been added to docs.organic.ly

Ads

📈 Improvements

• For clients that rely on Organic for CMP integration and data privacy compliance (be it through Organic Ads or Organic Content), CMP scripts are now always loaded with high priority.

Affiliate

📈 Improvements

• Users can now customize the button color for their product card and product carousel widgets.
• Organic Affiliate now integrates with Partnerize affiliate partnership management software.

Product Release Note: 04/17/2023

Sprint Dates

04/03/23-04/17/23

Content

💎 New Features

• The Organic Web now allows themes to create custom queries, further enabling highly-custom third-party development for the frontend.

📈 Improvements

• The Organic Content WordPress plugin is now formally decoupled from the “Empire” theme used by many, but not all, Content clients.
• A new ACF “Count” field has been added to the Social Media tab under Options. Users can now note how many followers or subscribers they have for a given social media account.
• More ACF fields were added to the Newsletter Block tab under Options. Users can now add logos, a Terms URL, a Privacy URL, a disclaimer, and images.

🛠 Fixes

• Some brands were missing the Edit Image Crops option on the post editor page. This has been resolved.
• Some brands experienced 404s when attempting article previews. This has been resolved.

Ads

💎 New Features

• Pingdom alerts and monitoring have been improved to note changes to ads.txt.
• Organic WP plugin 1.3.0 has been released

🛠 Fixes

• SupplyChain Object is now being passed correctly on Prebid

Product Release Note: 04/03/2023

Sprint Dates

03/21/23-04/03/23

Content

💎 New Features

• Sites using Organic Web can now put sponsored messaging with brand logos on category taxonomy pages.
• Sites using Organic Web can now use the promo stripe on the homepage to tout special projects or offerings.

📈 Improvements

• Organic Web now uses Next.js 13.2.
• More Twitter metatags have been added to the Organic Web’s SEO component.

🛠 Fixes

• Some Organic Web sites were experiencing a flash of an old template upon page load after clicking on an internal link. That has been resolved.
• Some Organic Web sites were experiencing ad load issues upon a user’s second pageview on the site, when they engaged in a particular browser behavior. That edge case has been resolved. 

Ads

💎 New Features

• Within Placement settings, users can now dictate placement prefill container size, both as a ratio and with pixel sizes.
• Users can now specify geo locations (via inclusion or exclusion) of Demand Partners.

📈 Improvements

• Prefill container CSS has been improved in the following ways:
  • An issue on Safari, wherein media queries were ignored because of an extra ( ), resulting in a prefill container being displayed instead of hidden, has been resolved.
  • Organic Ads has removed an unnecessary resize issue related to the Connatix player.
  • Organic Ads now uses CSS Flexbox for Prefill to better handle use-cases like Connatix and others.
  • Organic Ads now uses min-height instead of fixed height to better handle cases where Ads use fluid sizes (Connatix being one example)
  • Organic Ads now adds min-height per device type for the Sticky Footer placement to minimize CLS impact.

Affiliate

💎 New Features

• Organic Affiliate now integrates with Avantlink’s affiliate platform.

📈 Improvements

• Organic Affiliate now supports file uploads for zipped CSV files, making it easier to upload Amazon earnings reports.

Product Release Note: 03/20/2023

Sprint Dates

03/06/23-03/20/23

Content

💎 New Features

• In Organic Web, Storybook is now available to manage isolated UI components and templates.
• For Organic Web clients, there is now a CLI to generate an initial boilerplate for new Next.js projects, based on @orgnc/core initial pages and configurations.

📈 Improvements

• Docs detailing (a) the onboarding process to the headless frontend and (b) creating custom blocks in Organic Web have been added to Organic’s technical documentation portal under Content > Frontend.
• Quote blocks are now fully supported in the Organic Web frontend core.
• Organic Content stg and feature environments now have HTTP basic authentication.

Ads

📈 Improvements

• An Organic Ads term glossary has been added to Organic’s knowledge base.
• The WordPress plugin is now available in the official WordPress Plugin Library.
• Historically, Connatix data has been reported in EST/EDT instead of UTC, causing misalignment with GAM data in shared tables. The Connatix exports were updated at 5:45 ET on 12/23/22 to start reporting in UTC. Now, all existing Connatix data synced before 5:45 ET on 12/23/22 is now in alignment.
• Connatix Revenue in Organic Ads now includes Connatix Publisher Demand.
• Organic Ads documentation for Ads.txt specs has been updated to reflect the IAB ads.txt spec.

Affiliate

💎 New Features

• Users can now upload Amazon reporting CSVs into the platform, incorporating Amazon revenue data into Organic’s affiliate reporting.

📈 Improvements

• Affiliate now accommodates Skimlinks. For participating domains, any URLs that do not have affiliate tracking can still be monetized via Skimlinks.
• Product cards and product carousels now allow for custom font families.

Product Release Note: 03/06/2023

Sprint Dates

02/21/23-03/06/23

Content

💎New Features

• To improve the usability of the Migrator tool, Organic has included an example project to act as a data reference.

Ads

📈 Improvements

• Improved Selectors to give better flexibility while setting up Ad Placement injection points. 

Product Release Note: 02/21/2023

Content

📈 Improvements

• In order to support external ads providers on Organic Web frontends, Organic has moved the ad support to the theme level. Organic is currently working on a re-architecture project that will ultimately allow Recurrent to own the theme and make preferred ad changes without Organic involvement.
• In order to improve the UX of content creation in Organic WordPress, Organic has adjusted the standard content well size to be max width of 780 pixels and right padding of 50 pixels for all sites not using the Organic Web frontend. For sites using the Organic Web frontend, the content well width mirrors the content well width on the frontend.

Ads

📈 Improvements

• Several improvements to Organic Wordpress Plugin to ensure the plugin is fully compatible with the latest version of our SDK as well as wording updates and bug fixes.
• Improved our Selectors/Relatives pairing to allow more refined placement settings
• Discontinued our FBIA monetization support since Instant Articles will no longer supported by mid April 2023 (source: Meta)

Product Release Note: 02/06/2023

Sprint Dates

01/23/23-02/06/23

Content

🛠 Fixes

• Sentry errors spotted on some sites have been resolved.
• Some in-content images were not displaying with accurate aspect ratios on the Organic Web frontend. This has been fixed.

📈 Improvements

• Organic’s WordPress ecosystem has been updated to WordPress version 6.1.
• Due to changes underway with AWS, two RDS for PostgreSQL databases have been upgraded.
• Due to changes underway with AWS,, RDS instances with certain MySQL minor versions were updated.

Ads

📈 Improvements

• Previously, the final ads.txt compiled entries from multiple sources (Demand Partners ads, Publishers ads, Site ads). This created more friction than expected. Now, the Publisher ads.txt layer was removed, with the existing lines added to each Site ads.txt.
• A placement-check condition has been added to Organic Web frontend. The prefill container will now only be added if the placement is enabled. 
• The latest IAB’s Ads.txt 1.1 version recommends that managerdomain and ownerdomain variables to ads.txt files. These are now added.

Product Release Note: 01/23/2023

Sprint Dates

01/09/23-01/23/23

Content

🛠 Fixes

• The checkbox that populated the “More to Read” section was re-setting after client side deployments. This was fixed client side and validated by Organic.

📈 Improvements

• The product card fields in WordPress have been simplified to only the necessary, well-used fields.
• The Robots meta tag can now be set up on the post-level for headless frontend sites. This improvement allows for individual articles to be marked noindex and/or nofollow according to post-specific configs set via Yoast.
• Robots.txt alerts and modified date alerts can now be routed to a client-specific Slack channel to allow for client-side technical resources to adjust quickly after clientside code/script releases.
• Technical documentation is now being published on Docusaurus, for client side and third-party engineering teams.
• The Kubernetes cluster and Fastly Plugins have been updated.
• The Rewrite & Republish feature has been deprecated as of 1/15/2023.

 

Ads

📈 Improvements

• Regular Prebid.js stopped supporting older browsers, causing errors for some consumers. Ads created a custom Prebid.js to address these errors, and possible declines in fill rates.
• Single-Page Application (SPA) support has been improved, including the potential to load two SDKs on one domain. 

💎New Features

• Ads now has additional mechanisms to tune refresh even further, according to three dimensions:
• Time of day (Browser Local) - the hours of the day that the rule would apply to
• Placement - which placements on the site
• Device - options are Desktop (Mac), Desktop (Non-Mac), Tablet (iOS), Tablet (Android), Mobile (iOS) and Mobile (Android)

Product Release Note: 01/09/2023

Sprint Dates	12/26/22-01/09/23
Total Tasks Completed	62
Special Notes	U.S. holidays on Week 1 and Eastern Europe holidays on Week 2 led to fewer releases this sprint.

Content

🛠 Fixes

• Organic Content’s image crop tool is back in working order, after a brief disruption.
• Users can now disable AMP at the article level.

📈 Improvements

• Category pages can now be targeted in GAM like any other page.
• Non-admins can now add authors.

 

Ads

🛠 Fixes

• An issue with checkboxes “flickering” within the Ads app has been resolved.

📈 Improvements

• Some demand partners are not running safeframe or systematically clearing their creatives, which can cause issues while refreshing. To resolve the issue, Organic Ads now clears creatives before refresh for units that do not run safeframe.

 

Campaigns

🛠 Fixes

• Facebook data is now pulling into the Campaigns app, after a brief disruption. Data has also been backfilled.
• An issue with the channel icons within the Campaigns Explorer has been resolved. All channels should now be represented when filtering results.

💎New Features

• Manual Asset Assignment is now available for the Email channel. Users may assign mailings to Campaign Assets by clicking on the Source field in the Campaign Report and following the prompts.

 

Product Release Note: 12/26/22

Sprint Dates	12/12/22-12/26/22
Total Tasks Completed	84
Note	Holidays led to fewer deployments.

Content

🛠 Fixes

• Domains with Organic Frontend now display search “no results found” text if search queries do not pull any relevant articles.

📈 Improvements

• SEO test variables like canonicals are now viewable on stg/dev environments for logged-in users.
• Images are now capable of being hyperlinked in Organic Frontend.
• Internal post search and reader-facing site search is improved via ElasticPress.

💎New Features

• The new Content Type field allows for hierarchical cohort analysis based on strategic function (i.e. timeline > evergreen, timeline > non-evergreen, type > commerce > buyers guide, type > news).

 

Ads

📈 Improvements

• In addition to pageviews, the following additional metrics is pulled into the hourly audience data report:
• Sessions
• Pages per Session
• Users
• Bounce Rate
• Avg. Session Duration
• Avg. Page Load Time
• Page Load Sample
• Sites configuring Connatix with the WordPress app are now using the Organic Ads SDK, allowing for easier rule setting and display flexibility.
• Users can now enable or disable lazy loading for all placements in the dashboard.

 

Campaigns

🛠 Fixes

• Trailing spaces no longer cause duplication within Advertiser and Agency models.

Product Release Note: 12/16/2022

Content

💎New Features

• Organic Web now supports AMP.

• Appending /edit to any production URL redirects to the editor post page (or CMS authentication, if not signed in).

📈 Improvements

• Mandatory Fields are now less intrusive.

• Author image uploading is now streamlined. 

• Export plugin is now automatically de-activated every 24 hours, to improve performance.

• Typography tab no longer exists under Options, to declutter this section of the CMS.

• Organic Web markup enhancements improve communication with Organic Ads.

• The SWP “frontend” redirects to the React frontend, to avoid user confusion.

• The error message for empty contributor fields have been improved, to prevent user confusion.

Ads

📈 Improvements

• Custom refresh rates are now configurable in the Organic Ads platform.

Campaigns

💎New Features

• Facebook Ad Campaigns are now syncing to Google Big Query.

 

Product Release Note - 11/28/2022

Content

🛠 Fixes

• To ensure ads are consistently and correctly populating in the content well of Organic Web sites, the Ads SDK is now initialized on every page load.

Ads

🛠 Fixes

• After a recent Prebid.js upgrade, older browsers were getting errors. Organic built a custom Prebid.js to ensure older browsers are supported.

📈 Improvements

• To consolidate the approach to ads.txt files according to current best practices, Organic has updated the ads.txt URLs and redirected as needed.

• GoogleAds Library has been updated. The previous version will be deprecated in February 2023.

Campaigns

💎New Features

• Sort options for reporting have been expanded to include:

  • Source

  • JIRA issue

  • Start Date

  • End Date

  • Channel