Whenever a major release or service release is installed, Telligent Community leaves the user experience of your community as it was. If any changes were made to components of the user experience, the administrators of the community will get a system notification providing next steps to review and publish those changes.
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Notification of user experience changes
As part of the upgrade process of Telligent Community, the platform components are updated and your community's user experience is preserved to allow you to review user experience changes and choose which changes you'd like to incorporate within your community as a post-upgrade step. If changes were made from the previous version of Telligent Community to the newly upgraded version, a system notification will be set to the administrators of the community:
Clicking this notification will open the message which will identify your user experience (and other upgrade-related) options:
Depending on the version of Telligent Community that you upgraded from, the options available will change. Each optional post-upgrade step includes a description to help guide you to make decisions appropriate to your community.
For sites using the Social theme, the Update the Social Theme process should be used to start a review of the updates to the default user experience of Telligent Community. To start reviewing the updates to the Social theme, click Update the Social Theme.
Beginning the Review
When you first select to update the social theme, the User Experience Upgrade panel will show:
This explains the review process in a little more detail and allows you to begin the review. Click Review Upgraded Theme to start. When you click this button, the user experience changes that were made between the last version installed and the newly upgraded version of Telligent Community will be staged for your review. The staged changes are only visible to you and are not published for any other visitor to your community. When the staging process is complete, you'll be taken to the Preview Staged Changes panel and preview mode will be enabled for you.
Reviewing Changes
The changes should now be presented to you within the Preview Staged Changes panel and the preview should be enabled. This allows you (and only you) to navigate around the community and see how it looks with the latest user experience upgrades provided in the default user experience in Telligent Community. For more details about previewing and reviewing staged changes, see How do I preview UI changes in the community?
The Preview Staged Changes panel categorizes changes by their type and includes a few unique categories that are only shown as part of a user experience upgrade:
- Upgraded Customized Widgets: These are widgets that have been updated that were previously customized for your community. These widgets require the most careful review. You may want your development team (the one that made the customizations) to review these widgets. If you click the change count button, the list of specific widgets to review will be shown and each will have an Edit option to open the widget in Widget Studio where a visual diff can be performed to review and merge the changes as applicable.
- Upgraded Widgets: These widgets were not customized for your community but were updated as part of the current upgrade. These widgets should be able to be visually reviewed by navigating the site (developer review is not required).
- Removed Widgets: These widgets were removed from the platform as part of the latest upgrade. Generally this is because their functionality was merged with other widgets and any necessary page changes related to widget removal are listed within the Pages category in the Preview Staged Changes panel.
The recommended review is to
- Navigate around the site and review general styling and functionality changes.
- If you notice any anomalies, you can directly edit pages and theme styles using the existing page and theme edit tools to address the issues. These changes can be staged for preview on top of the user experience upgrade changes so that all changes can be published at once.
- Specifically review the widgets in the "Upgraded Customized Widgets" list. Consult with your development team to review these changes.
- Approve or deny all changes, either at the category level or by reviewing the specific changes within a category.
- When all changes are approved or denied, click Commit Reviewed Items.
Review Effort Notes
In general, if your community has used the page editor and widget configuration options for customization, your upgrade should be easy -- there should be no widgets in "Upgraded Customized Widgets" and the changes should be easy to review by navigating around the site and accepting all of the changes.
If you had previously invested development effort in customizing widgets or overriding default styling via custom cascading style sheets (CSS), you will need to review your development changes and overrides as part of the user experience upgrades. It is possible that you prefer your customizations over the changes provided by the platform upgrade and you'll want to make a decision on a case-by-case basis.