Publii hotfix 0.26.3 now available, includes free GDPR cookie consent popup
Bob MitroThe hotfix release on our way to moving out of beta is now ready for download; to update, download the latest installation package from the Download Page and run it, and Publii will take care of the rest. And if you prefer to know what you're getting into before downloading, you'll find full details of what's been added below!
GDPR cookie popup
The EU General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, comes into effect on the 25th May 2018, and includes new requirements on how data is collected, stored and utilised by all websites that collect data from EU residents, even organisations based outside the EU. Uf you're not up to speed on the GDPR, you can get a simple breakdown in our guide to making your website GDPR compliant on the Publii blog.
One of the big requirements is that explicit and discrete consent must be obtained from your users for each type of cookie that you use on your site, whether they are for tracking user behaviour, or marketing and social media functionality like Disqus comments.
To help Publii users meet this requirement we've created a new cookie notification popup in our themes that will allow users to specifically consent to each cookie type, as well as added new helpers for developers to implement the popup in their own themes. Users may add their own title and description text, include a link to their privacy policy page, and set labels and popup type via a new sub-section in the Advanced options area of Publii, where they can also configure cookie groups that will be added as individual checkboxes on the live site, allowing each every type of cookie you implement to be clearly consented to.
What happens if visitors don't explicitly consent to one or more cookie groups? Then the cookie popup will block scripts that require those cookies. You can see this implementation in action on this GDPR popup demo page. Notice that the comment section, which is powered by Disqus and requires a cookie that we've separated into a 'Functionality' group, does not load until the visitor confirms that they accept the functionality-related cookies. This means that even without consenting to specific cookies users can still see your non-cookie-related content.
Note: In order to use this new cookie popup it will be necessary to update the theme as well as the main Publii app; you can do this via the Site Settings section. For more information, check out the Updating your theme section of the Publii documentation.
Theme developers looking to add support for the popup to their theme can check the How to implement GDPR cookie popup support in your theme? article in the Publii dev documentation.
Other improvements
As well as the big new addition, we also make some smaller improvements to Publii:
- Added ability to force the addition of index.html to the end of links for platforms which do not support URL rewriting.
- Unassigned menus are now available under the {{ unassignedMenus }} variable in all views; they are no longer available in the {{ menus }} variable.
- Added close buttons to the top of the author, tag and menu item editors.
- Tags are now sorted alphabetically in the application UI, and in posts.
- Preview button now works when manual deployment is set as the upload method. The sync button will display the last render time in this case.
Bugfixes
In this release we've taken the swatter to the following bugs:
- Fixed issue with closing the color picker.
- Fixed issue with wrong color picker value being displayed under theme settings.
- Fixed issue with post preview when no theme is selected.
- Fixed issue with the "Select a website" text appearing randomly in some cases.
- Fixed issue with "Create a first backup" button when creating your first website backup.