Changelog
Learn more about the latest updates, improvements and bugfixes happening at Helptail.
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Build your own forms
Since launch, Helptail came with a bunch of versatile templates to collect feedback, ask questions or let customers get in touch with you. But until today there was no way to customise the forms to your needs, let alone add fields.
You can now make changes to existing templates, change the label, placeholders and the validation rules (is the field required or how many characters max) with the new Form Builder. In addition to that you can add more fields for various types, like a textfield, textarea or a field specific for emails.
This is a truly exciting new and big feature, that makes Helptail, along with the powerful automation rules, even more an indispensable tool for SaaS companies that want to be more customer focussed.
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Match entries with your users
You can now more easily match entries to your users without them having to fill in any extra fields. Say hi to the identifier! This little one-liner allows you to add a unique id to the current user. This identifier is then added the entry’s metadata.
It get’s better: the identifier is also used for certain automation rules. For example: to hide a certain embeddable form if that user already submitted an entry.
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Liquid templating for Inbound Streams
Helptail keeps on trucking. 🚚 A tonne of new features, improvements and bugfixes were shipped lately. Being able to use Liquid templates in your Inbound Streams might be the most exciting as it allows you to add extra context around the, newly introduced,
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New
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Add Liquid templates in your Inbound Streams
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Set the ReplyTo address to the sender’s email for Inbound email notifications. So you can simply click Reply to answer them.
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Enable or disable streams right from your Streams overview screen (no need to go into the stream edit screen anymore 🐢)
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New “fancy” radio button options (check them out with the new NPS and Helpful Article templates)
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Added “contains”, “starts with” and “ends with” Rule operators
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Improvements
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The actual values of Inbound entries are now added to your email notifications
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Consistent behaviour for show rules: only show a Stream if a rule matches and hide it otherwise
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Some empty states within the app are improved, linking to the docs where applicable
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Many little UI improvements throughout the app
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Fixes
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Modal Streams without a backdrop are not hidden when you click outside of them
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You can now use automations with rules
How about starting 2022 with a bang?! 🎇 V0.8 is here and it is a big one! One of the most exciting new features are rules. Rules allow you to decide when (or if) to show or hide a stream. Slowly the vision for Helptail is starting to unfold and I’m truly excited about 2022. 🚀🌙
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New
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Set up rules when to show or hide a stream. Example: show after 30 seconds and hide after a successful form submission
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An unread badge does now appear with the unread entries count (perfect for a changelog)
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New modal template type
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You can now also use liquid in your inbound streams
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Added webhooks: get the full entry inbound payload on any endpoint
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See metadata, like the URL and (masked) IP address, for inbound entries
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A new referer survey template (that fully utilises previous two points)
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You can now add custom properties to your JS snippet to auto-fill your form. See the docs for more
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Don’t want to load the JS snippet (for example in your local set up)? You can now add
enabled: falseto disable Helptail globally. See the docs for more
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Improvements
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Events (when they read an entry or submitted a form) are now stored in a better and scaleable way
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The template selection does look a tad bit smarter
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Your stream auto-refreshes after you fetched new entries for your RSS feed (no more manual page refreshes!)
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You are now redirected to the requested page if you were not logged in
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Your publicKey (used to “authenticate” your JS snippet) is now actually called publicKey and not account
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On smaller devices you can now expand/collapse the naviation
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Better looking early access modal. Now showing some of the unique features instead of redirecting straight to Stripe checkout
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Many little UI improvements
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Fixes
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The selector check (to see if the stream can be attached to the page) is somewhat smarter now
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Marking entries as read is now only applied for that stream (and not all outbound streams)
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Beautiful and versatile broadcasts with Liquid templates
You can now send highly customisable broadcasts to your customers by using Liquid. Liquid is an industry standard for eg, email templates. It allows for many customisation features, that were previously impossible. This is, in a way, moving Helptail into low-code territory (opposed to nocode). I’ve added three foundational templates for articles list (for your latest blogposts), a banner (to show app-wide company announcements) and items within a beacon (to show a product changelog, for example). Truly exciting all the possibilities this gives. Now, I’m off writing all the docs for these new features. 🤠
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New
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Support for Liquid template on outbound streams
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Support for Liquid template on beacon (create varied buttons)
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Entries on your dashboard are now collapsed by default (click to view all its content)
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Improvements
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Added viewport collision detection to the beacon modal; make sure the modal is always visible to your customer
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Various empty states are now looking better
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Success action + the message can now be customised; for example link them to a “thank-you” page
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Fixes
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Multiple streams on one page (yes, that’s possible!) caused some buggy behaviour
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Previously when parsing a RSS/XML feed with an URL, things would break; not anymore
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Form submits to not-active inbound stream won’t process them anymore
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Get notified of new entries by email
v0.7 was just released. It’s the release where I focussed on the foundation, but with email notifications as the headline feature. Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
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New
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Get notified of new entries by email
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Open outbound streams as a beacon (perfect for a changelog)
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Many new icons to choose from
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Outbound entries can now be marked as read; this will hide that entry from view
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Improvements
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Button for outbound entries is now optional, it will make the content fully clickable
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Added many UX improvements to form fields (especially useful for mobile devices)
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Stylesheets are now inject onto the page; no need to manually include it
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Powered by link won’t show when no entries are present
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Live previews of streams
Here we go! Helptail’s first changelog entry. The biggest improvement (and hey, at this stage every improvement is big!) is the live preview of your streams when you edit them. No need to embed onto a page anymore.
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New
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When you make changes to your stream, you now see a live preview in your dashboard
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Select a template (currently 3 options total) when creating a new stream
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Outbound streams are now available, with support for XML feeds (public beta)
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Improvements
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Inline validation messages for your forms
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Set an inline (optional) message on successful form submit
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