Development Report Q2 2015

In this last quarter, we welcomed three new back-end developers to our team and they went off to a flying start. Let’s take a look at what they have helped deliver in the past three months.

Attention grabbing headlines
Everyone spends a good amount of time on perfecting headlines and the corresponding ‘slugs’ of releases. That is why it is essential to have a lot of options to present them using advanced headline modules. Our development team has delivered multiple updates in Q2 to make sure headlines keep grabbing attention in PressPage newsrooms. 
For example, the new ‘related’ option in the headline module allows our users to quickly add a module which displays similar stories that already exist within the newsroom. Furthermore, the block headline layout now also supports dynamic loading of headlines. Another update to the headline module significantly increased performance and will have a positive impact on SEO. 
Our team also improved the archive of headlines, which can now be configured to show featured images and the first paragraph of releases, resulting in a more visual and lively overview.

Get the word out
In our distribution flow, we encourage the use of social media channels. To make sure these are put to optimal use, we added notifications through the general notification system that inform users on the status of social posts. 
Another development in the social arena is the introduction of the new Facebook plugins. Our team had some concerns at first, as Facebook seemed to ignore limitations concerning design. However, they were resolved after our team (and many other development teams) provided them with feedback.

Leveraging your media
A lot of people are looking for media files of our clients. That is why we spend a significant part of our R&D on functionality to manage and present media. 
The new Media Library (3.0) is a result of that and brings massive design, usability and performance upgrades with it. Dynamic filters and improved caching provide audiences with a seamless and interactive experience to discover a brand’s media. In the PressPage Manager, our team added support for TIF(F) files as this file format is often used by photographers. We save the original for download and convert to JPG for use within the newsroom. Copyright options within the Media Manager have been expanded to support different rights for individual media items.

Harder, better, faster, stronger
Our development team is allocating a lot of resources to the development of a completely new underlying framework and API, on which the PressPage Manager and Newsrooms will be built in 2016. However, in the short run there are still a lot of updates developed that improve performance, security and structure of the current codebase.
For example, two updates regarding caching and compression resulted in major improvements in page load times. This will have a positive effect on the search engine rankings of all of our clients’ newsrooms.To enable our clients to host our newsroom technology on any URL, we improved our support for subfolders. This means that no matter what the preferred structure is, PressPage can be integrated without the use of frames or other techniques non-friendly to search engines.

Certified Secure
Security is critical to our business and the business of our clients. That is why we do not only do internal audits but hire external auditors to make sure PressPage is as secure as possible. After an in-depth external security audit, we are very happy to announce that PressPage completely passed all tests and is therefore deemed ‘certified secure’. This formal acknowledgement underlines the dedication of our team to secure the data and reputation of our clients. For more information/documentation, please contact our office.

Coming up
A lot of our development team’s resources are being allocated to the new underlying framework and API. This will result in a lot of performance and functionality updates in Q4 2015 and beyond.

In parallel, there is a lot of work going into usability and experience improvements which streamline workflow for our clients working with the PressPage Manager. Concerning newsrooms, we will mostly focus on design possibilities and performance.

For more information on upcoming features, please see the roadmap (top-right menu after login). If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact our office.