Recent ShortStack upgrades

We’ve got a massive, awesome update regarding campaign accessibility – buckle in! The following improvements have been made to improve the campaign experience for visually-impaired users who use screen readers:

• When an error occurs in a form, we scroll to the first error (we’ve always done this) and focus the control (this is new).
• Error messages and field instructions are now associated (via the aria-describedby attribute) with the control. This helps screen readers understand when to read these messages when they appear.
• The status messages that appear above the Submit button (e.g., “Sending, please wait…”) are rendered using an output HTML tag instead of a div. Again, this is for the benefit of screen readers.
• The CSS Classes section shown in most widget config dialogs has been renamed to Advanced HTML. (The one exception is the Rich Text Widget, which will be updated soon.)
• In the Advanced HTML section, there is a new Main Tag setting available in most widgets (form and form containers always use the form tag, which can’t be changed) where you can change the HTML tag rendered for that widget. The default is the div tag, which is what we’ve always used in the past, but this new option lets you change it to tags like header, footer, main, section, etc. This helps users who need to create accessible campaigns to use semantic markup. For example, header should be used when creating the header for a campaign, footer for the footer section and main for the main content area.
• When you change the order of date parts (year, month, day) in a Custom Date field, the tab order will be correct. Previously, it wouldn’t necessarily correspond to the visual arrangement of the date parts.
• The Upload field can have it’s focus style changed in the style panel). This makes it easier to style the Upload field so it looks the same as the other fields when you use the Tab key to navigate between fields.

All of our plans now get UNLIMITED page views. This is reflected in the Account Summary page in your ShortStack account. This means that the branded header (that provided a reminder of remaining page views in the allowance) for campaigns built on free trial accounts has been removed – but the branded footer will still appear.

Mailchimp users – we got you. Mailchimp has a tagging system that allows its users to add tags to any of their contacts… and now our Mailchimp integration supports this. You’ll see a “Tags” option in the Standard Fields section of the integration’s configuration dialog, where you can map a form field to collect the tags. Just make sure to set up a Field Widget to add a default tag value (or values) to each collected entry.

Now when sharing a ShortStack campaign to Twitter, it will share as a Twitter card – as long as you have a share image in place. This will share the same image that would appear if shared to Facebook or LinkedIn; just set it up in the Share section of your Campaign Settings.

We have an additional IP address (13.211.199.127) that can be used for S2 custom domains. It’s located in Australia – so if you’re in that part of the world you will benefit from using that IP address for custom domains, as campaigns will load a bit faster. The Publishing Wizard will show all available IP addresses and recommend one based on your location (we test the response times to each IP address from your browser and recommend the one with the shortest time). However, you’re free to choose any IP address – it doesn’t have to be the recommended one. For example, an Australian agency configuring a campaign for a USA customer would still want to use the N. Virginia (USA) IP address. Domain validation is instantaneous and will notify you if your domain doesn’t resolve to one of our IP addresses.

Back by popular demand, you can download your campaign’s QR code by clicking on it in the Publication Panel! It downloads as a 600 x 600px png image. Note that this is different from the mobile preview QR code, which is for previewing your campaign on your phone while designing (and won’t work to share).