Changelog Archive
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February, 2022:
- Pushed a simplified, much faster-loading, much more accessible homepage
- Began redirecting category pages to the new Directory app
- Surpassed 5,000 project entries
February, 2020:
- Created pages for Poland, Washington DC, and South Africa (with additional project data from the curators coming shortly)
- Fixed over 50 broken or missing project links
- Removed clutter from submit listing page
- Fixed 478 project screenshots that went missing due to a site migration bug
- Updated navigation menu links to point to improved table of contents pages
- Added all project categories (instead of just one) to card view in lists across the site
- Fixed broken map pins on sub-page maps (example)
- Fixed projects’ featured images not appearing on when their map pin is selected
January, 2020:
- Fixed a pagination bug where proceeding past the first page of search results and category pages would reset the filter to display all listings.
- Organized and cleaned up tags, and began making them discoverable.
- Added categories for campaign event tools and official campaign apps.
- Made the full hierarchy of categories visible on project cards, and restored the category list to listing profile pages.
- Created a table of contents page for Advocacy tech and Media tech sections, with category descriptions and suggested readings.
- Updated supporter logos in the footer to their negative versions to better match the dark background.
- Rewrote submission page confirmation copy.
December, 2019:
- Imported 171 new project entries.
- In partnership with the Narrative Initiative, added a Narrative Tech page and relevant subcategories: Story tech, Big listening, Listening, Story-based campaigns, and Internal coordination and communication. More information here.
- We’ve added a “commercial” tag to distinguish tools that are mainstream and/or commercial products, but used toward civic ends. For example, WhatsApp and Slack in the Internal coordination and communication category.
- Expanded the short description field on project cards across the site so they aren’t truncated.
- Added Trustmarks category to the table of contents.
- Improved formatting of profile RSS feeds with line breaks.
- Hid main content area block on profile pages if it’s blank.
- Added a ‘Message received’ confirmation dialog on the Contact page.
- Removed extra whitespace in header of blog, and cleaned up blog post header to remove extraneous cruft.
- Added introduction text at https://civictech.guide/new, and expanded it to include the 50 most recently added entries.
- Updated the reply-to in site confirmation emails to point to info @ civictech.guide.
- Added useful sidebar widgets to the blog feed and blog posts.
- Made the Description field optional on the Submit Listing page to improve the user experience of adding new projects.
November, 2019
- The NYC page’s map now begins focused on NYC, rather than zoomed out
- We’ve extended grayed-out background shading to Graveyard entries site-wide, so users can easily distinguish live projects from dead ones.
- Created a Govtech table of contents page with more category descriptions
- Improved the homepage world map on mobile to show more than 2 aggregated pin bubbles
- Upgraded site to PHP 7.3, the latest and most performant version of PHP
- Updated to WordPress 5.3
- Optimized CSS, HTML, and Javascript to improve page speed (reduced 44 CSS files to 4)
- Created a High-tech civic tech table of contents page with category descriptions
- Fixed line spacing on lists to match normal copy
- Expanded the “Shows” category to “Shows and films“
October 31, 2019
- Added Internet governance, Public project trackers, cameras, advertising, govtech vendors, and Narrative Tech categories
- Removed repeating globe image from banner on category pages
- Removed categories for health, housing, and mobility, as we will be using tags for issue verticals.
- Added country flag emoji to country pages
- Created an actual page for the Civic Tech Graveyard
- Created a better table of contents for the Engagement Tech section
- Created new country pages with new curators
September 31, 2019
- Redesigned pillar table of content pages e.g. Civic data
- Broke the 30 individual civic maps and 39 mapping tools and platforms out into two distinct subcategories.
- On mobile, moved the Listing sidebar blocks containing the map, project URL, and social links to the top of the Listing entry, instead of the bottom
- Improved pin clustering on the maps to reduce visual clutter
- Fixed homepage map pin clustering on mobile
- Improved map and header sizing on country pages
- Improved search layout on subpages
- Fixed category descriptions overlapping with ‘view map’ link
- Fixed homepage “Add to guide” button breaking out of design on mobile
- Updated favicon and social avatars to compass
- Created a cleaner page template without the top banner – e.g. https://civictech.guide/civic-data/
- Fixed broken search functionality on sub-pages on mobile, and improved its design layout
- Granted stronger edit permissions to users who have claimed their project pages
- Added more specific subcategories for the AI section so we can follow specific technologies
August 31, 2019
- Made site style more closely resemble Civic Hall CSS
- Added some TICTEC presentations to their project pages
- Fixed duplicate locations
- Reduced blog post header buffer space to a more reasonable size
July 31, 2019
- Added sitemap
- Fixed padding issue on category descriptions
- Replaced “Join Now” nav item for logged out users with “Add Project”
- Cleaned up copy on “Claim listing” modal
- Updated WordPress to version 5.2.2
- Added placeholder image for listings missing a featured image
- Imported 838 new projects – we’re now at over 3,000 entries!
- Opened permissions to that Contributor-level users can add and edit more data, including images
- Removed 9 extraneous data fields from listings in WordPress
June 30, 2019
- Added page explaining How to claim your page on the Field Guide
- Rewrote “claim your page” modal to improve the copy, and removed phone number required field
- Added categories for Journals, Glossaries, Government trainings, Civic tech community surveys, Shows, Certifications, Circumvention tech, Surveys, Interactive Voice Response, Fintech for low-income communities, Decentralization, Whistleblowing, Direct action, Network visualizations, Civic imagination, Canvassing, Report cards, Satellites.
May 20, 2019
- Created https://civictech.guide/new/ for a longer list of recently added entries
- Fixed Twitter timeline embed on many entries
- Updated homepage: we’ve hosted visitors from over 100 countries
- Resolved issue with search autosuggestions, so that clicking category autosuggestions now go directly to the category page without requiring further action
- Backfilled parent category hierarchies for submissions that were missing them to improve consistency of category data
- Added project URLs to project cards in the Grid view so that users don’t need to click through to each profile. https://civictech.guide/new/, for example
- Added feature icons to homepage to replace some of the wall of text
- Updated Knight Foundation logo with white background for improved visibility and cropped Luminate logo to standardize sizes
- Create country- and city-specific maps to populate geographic pages. https://civictech.guide/france/, for example
- Added bit.ly links to track calendar downloads, removed Berlin timezone parameters from calendar URLs
- Fixed issue with CSS caching to clean up homepage fonts and category page bullet points
April 24, 2019
- Updated 3 months of WP theme improvements
- Added Home navigation item to menu, along with Blog, Name generator, Adjacent fields
- Added action buttons to civictech.guide/timeline
- Resolved some broken Twitter embeds
- Prototyping country-, city-, and topic-specific pages like https://civictech.guide/france/, https://civictech.guide/access-public-benefits/, https://civictech.guide/nederland/
- Cleaned up primary nav menu so it doesn’t break
- Added Whatsapp field for mobile-based projects
- Removed images from submission page for faster loader time
- Cleaned up extraneous categories
- Divided “open data platforms” into discrete categories for portals (14) and platforms (33) and fixed images for all of them
- Set new entries to automatically included featured images from the media library, or a default fall-back image if there is none
- Added TICTeC presentation to the timeline page for additional context
- Rescued ~20 listings that lost their category when they were originally imported
- Removed character limit on project cards so that project titles no longer get truncated.
March 28, 2019
- Fixed the raw HTML that was sending in transactional site emails, and rewrote email copy for all emails
- Added Founded year data for over 2,000 entries and pending entries
- Added the environment and sustainability category to the adjacent fields index
- Fixed password recovery link not appearing in recovery emails
- Added pages for About Us, Guiding Principles, and How to use this, and added “What can I do with” to the front page with more explainer text
- Added Civic Hall, Knight, and Luminate support logos to site footer
- Added Civic Hall link, About Us, Guiding Principles, and What can I do with… to the primary navigation
- Moved ‘Related entries’ recommendation engine to appear below Twitter embeds (example)
- Resolved issue with primary navigation submenus not loading
- Fixed issue with long URLs breaking the project card design on mobile by truncating human view of the links while retaining the link value upon clicking
- Added categories for Artistic interventions and Government AI strategies
- Fixed SSL certificates
- Updated https://civictech.guide/what-can-i-do-with-the-civic-tech-field-guide/ with images and space
February 24, 2019
- Updated Listing template to display all categories a Listing has, instead of only one category. For example, https://civictech.guide/listing/public-school/ actually belongs to ‘Graveyard’ and ‘Supporting specific public sector efforts from outside government’. Ordered these by hierarchy, with commas separating.
- Also removed the duplicate Listing title from this breadcrumbs section, since it already appears immediately below it.
- Distinguished Graveyard entries throughout the site with light gray background color (listing-category/graveyard/)
- Broke News to Action tools out into their own category and fixed Media section so it’s not all under Solutions Journalism header
- Added site to the Internet Archive
February 15, 2019
- Added this changelog to site
- Configured new calendar and calendar widgets (see footer area) system, replacing the buggy Jetpack widget that was intermittently synchronizing with Google Calendar.
- Refreshed and reformatted the events in both calendars as well.
- Added and populated “In the news” block to homepage for hot topics
- Improved and updated the Tech and the People table of contents pages
- Got Related entries recommendation engine working below posts, example
- Fixed bug where Links URL spills over into main body section of Listing
- Determined cause of a bug that was routinely breaking image filepaths
February 5, 2019
- Improved visibility of the footer font, including the site CC license
- Removed duplicate admin data fields in the Listing edit page to clean things up
- Added an XML site generator to improve SEO
- Added a live “happening now” block for key conferences and events
- Fixed ability to use WordPress.com logins on the site
- Profile page improvements:
- add “Founded” year to profile
- add “Closed” year to profile for graveyard projects we have date info for
- Move “Language” ACF higher in the template, immediately under “Date founded” and “Date closed”
- Corrected “Founded” line to read “Founders”
- Changed “Parent organization” to instead read “Host organization”, and fixed the broken link where this data wasn’t appearing correctly
- Fixing ‘Links’ section so link description text is hyperlinked
- Added a field for postmortem links and displayed it in the “What happened” section
- For entries where we have their Twitter information in the ACF Twitter field, it will now automatically embed their recent tweets at the bottom of the listing
- Improved ‘Get in Touch’ section copy to:
- Contact page
- Open jobs
- Upcoming events
January 25, 2019
- Restored category descriptions and moved them to the TOP of category pages, instead of languishing at the bottom underneath listings.
- Completed category descriptions for all Tech categories
- Speed optimizations:
- Optimized / defragmented WordPress database
- Set up “lazy loading” of images, videos, iframes, etc. to drastically improve user experience of speed
- Installed a database viewer to facilitate admins adding data quickly
- Fixed an issue with custom fields plugin not updating
- Removed the “tag” icon clutter on listing cards.
- Fixed a bug where the second pages of certain categories would display all Listings, rather than displaying the second page that category’s Listings.
- Fixed a bug where the grid view design was broken on the second page of some results.
January 22, 2019
- Updated category pages to show 40 entries per page
- Speed optimizations:
- Brought page render start from 1.7 to 1.3 seconds
- Brought render complete from 3.79 to 2.95 seconds
- minify, aggregate HTML
- minify, aggregate, and pre-load CSS
- minify, aggregate Javascript
- remove WordPress cruft
- Combine and load fonts asynchronously with webfont.js
- Disabled Gravatar
- Re-hosted testimonial images locally to cache
- Cleaned up the copy at https://civictech.guide/submit-listing/
January 15, 2019
- You can now view and click the links for each entry from their category pages, so you don’t have to click through to individual page profiles first. (example)
- The search bar in the header no longer performs its silly entrance animation
- Removed duplicate search bar on Category pages so you can see the listings faster
- Profile pages now display section and other headings only if the data exist, making for cleaner profile pages
- Category pages now display only the category title, like “Participatory budgeting”, instead of “Results for Participatory budgeting Listings”.
- Fixed a bug where some Listings displayed a second Website URL, “h”, underneath the first URL.
- We’ve updated the Civic Tech Graveyard with a more complete collection, and brought it more information to the profiles from previous reporting (and will continue adding to it).
- We’re adding sub-categories for political social networks, chat apps and bots, and campaign call tools (with entries for these on the way).
- We’ve cross-posted the problem with impact measurement and civic tech graveyard pieces on the site
- Updated the theme
January 1, 2019
- improved styling of the ‘Explore the Guide’ Table of Contents on the homepage
- Updated the theme