Welcome to the first of five spotlight threads for WoltLab Suite 5.2 in which we will introduce some of the new features of the upcoming version! This thread outlines two new features for your users, reactions and cover photos, and two new features for you as the administrator.
Reactions
Across all of our apps, users are able to like or dislike content via a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down”. WoltLab Suite 5.2 introduces a new system that lets users react to content: reactions. Instead of just two options (or even only one if dislikes are disabled), reactions are completely configurable down to the reaction name and image.
By default, WoltLab Suite 5.2 comes with the five reaction types shown in the animated image above but new reaction types can easily be added via the ACP and existing reaction types can also be edited or delete, of course.
During an update from a previous version, existing likes and dislikes will be kept as “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”, respectively.
Cover Photos
With WoltLab Suite 5.1, we added user profile cover photos that let users customize their profile by uploading an image that is shown at the top of the profile page. In version 5.2, cover photos will be available in more places: They can be added to articles written in WoltLab Suite Core, to calendar events, to blogs, and to blog articles.
Based on these cover photos, we have also updated the presentation of articles in lists to make use of cover photos.
First Setup
To make it easier for new administrators to configure WoltLab Suite, we have added a new “First Time Setup” page that is shown after the initial installation and allows setting some of the available options that administrators might want to change immediately after installation.
Emails on Errors
Whenever an error occurs, it is logged and the error message can be accessed in the ACP (or directly via the filesystem if the ACP cannot be accessed). To inform administrators quicker about potential problems with their site, we have added a new cronjob that periodically checks for new errors and if there are any new errors, an email is sent to the administrator.
