The January 2018 Kitewheel release brings together several streams of work that we have been performing on the back end and the underlying user interface technology. A lot of these changes have no immediate noticeable user interface impact but set us up well for what is coming in future releases.
Release Highlights:
There were also many bug fixes.
Kitewheel now enforces a stricter password policy than it did before. All passwords in Kitewheel must now meet the following requirements:
Passwords will now expire after 90 days and you will be asked to choose a new password when you log in:
You should then follow the user password reset process by first clicking on the "Forgot my Password" link on the home page:
then request a new reset token by email:
There was an embarrassing oversight in that when an Owner was reseting a users password this was shown in plain text. We tried to argue that this was a feature but then agreed that it wasn't. Now when an owner is resetting a users password the password field will be masked and will follow exactly the same rules as when a user resets their password.
There have also been changes to the plain text display of various password-like connection settings. For example the AWS Secret Access Key is no longer shown in plain text.
For some time now following thirty minutes of inactivity the user is logged out. Previously this left the browser at the current page in the application and it may have given the impression of still being logged in, some of the interface components would still react. To avoid any confusion now when the user is logged out after 30 minutes of inactivity the browser will return to the home page.
The Email adaptor now supports the optional CC, BCC and Reply-To fields. These fields are shown under an Optional Fields menu
In Email terminology:
As with the other adaptor fields you can use a literal or a schem location to specify the email address. Depending on which email service provider you are using you may need to specify the emails using the descriptive format:
rather than just the plain:
The former is always preferred as it improves deliverability.
The front end of Kitewheel (the web application in your browser) was using a deprecated package called AltJS and this has now been replaced with Redux. This was a large change as every component in the front end used this package - however the replacement by Redux should make no visual change at all but may have a modest performance improvement. This changes allows us now to upgrade in the next release to Facebook's React 16 which should bring a significant performance improvement to the front-end.
Once we have upgraded to React 16 that is then the basis for larger user interface changes that we have planned for later this year. We tried to fix some obvious UI bugs as we went through the code - but not get distracted from the main job of replacing the AltJS component. The following issues were cleared up as we went through the code:
The Acquia Lift Node now supports a Visitor Query action.
