Since June 22nd, Google has begun requiring an API key in order to use google maps on your website. Without the key, you see an 'Oops! Something went wrong.' notice instead of the map. This affects anyone using WSN's maps features on a new website. Pre-existing websites are exempted from this requirement, at least for the moment, as google doesn't wish to break the entire internet -- but they warn that the quality of service will be lower for the legacy keyless sites and recommend getting a key.
If you're in the European Union, or some of your clients are, you're probably aware of the EU requirement to notify visitors that your website uses cookies. In today's WSN 10.0.9 Beta 1 release, I've added an 'EU cookie privacy notice' switch at Admin Panel -> Settings -> Switches. Enabling this switch automatically handles your legal obligations by adding a cookie notice in a semi-transparent bar at the bottom of the screen. The visitor can dismiss the notice by clicking the X (which, appropriately enough, sets a cookie lasting one year to remember that they've dismissed it).
For a long time, it has been easy to convert a WSN site to use https:// secure URLs by default: simply change the http to https in the URL at Admin -> Settings -> System Configuration -> WSN Links Installation Details -> URL. But this misses two common scenarios: the case where you want non-secure to be the default but want to allow people to use a secure version if they choose, and the case where you want to forcibly redirect to the secure version of each URL. What if you want to optionally enable https, while leaving http as the default?
The big enhancement in WSN 10.0.8 is submenus support for the main menu in the menu manager. This solves the problem of having more pages than you have horizontal space for on the menu bar. In new installations, the Options menu is a submenu associated to the member home menu, such that everything from the member home menu automatically shows on it. If you wish you can disassociate this and build a custom options submenu. Bootstrap themes use the native bootstrap menu javascript and css. Non-bootstrap themes use superclick.
When you set up a website, there are two ways people can access it: www.yourdomain.com, or just yourdomain.com. This creates a couple of problems. First, unless you've set the site's cookie domain to .yourdomain.com, when someone logs in at yourdomain.com they won't be logged in at www.yourdomain.com -- which leaves them confused if they end up on the other version from a link they found somewhere. Secondly, search engines don't like the duplication. The solution for this has always been to add redirection into the .htaccess file to redirect www URLs to their non-www equivalents or vice versa.
Today I've been enhancing WSN's 'add from web search' option to allow you to add articles from a bing news search. There are 8 categories of news to narrow the results to. If you're running a directory of news articles, this should be a huge help. If you find this useful, let me know if you'd like the ability to set a category to automatically add new content from search results at an interval. I've also added a checkbox to specify that the contents gathered from web/news searches should be held for validation.
Lots of changes in tonight's WSN 10.0.5 release. Fixes I fixed a situation where sponsor type separation had been on by default when it shouldn't be, by disabling it for anyone who hasn't declared the sponsor types in the template. Fixed a bug with sponsor type separation where it wouldn't show sponsored results in a search if there were multiple sponsored types. Fixed the link checkers to not check unvalidated listings. Fixed the ability to disable automatic bug reports, which was only disabling one of the two types of bug reports before. Corrected some wording on updating passwords.
As you upgrade through the 10.0 series in the coming days/weeks, you may notice that there are a ton of small template changes and you may wonder what these are for. These changes are part of ongoing efforts to merge as much of the default theme and the bootstrap theme as possible without changing the appearance of either. The reason: bootstrap needs to be a first class citizen, so that you can feel secure building on it and easily apply your own custom bootstrap themes even if you start from the default theme.
For a while now, WSN has had an option to add new listings to a category by using a google search for a given term. Unfortunately this isn't officially supported by google so runs the risk of getting your server blocked. The solution? The bing search API. WSN 10.0.2 Beta 2 introduces the option to add listings from a bing search, using any of their dozens of country/language locales and the search term of your choice. To use this you'll have to sign up for an API key, but the good news is it's free for the first 5000 searches per month and you're unlikely to need more than that.
WSN 10.0 is now available. The initial new feature is an adblock detection and nag tool, which allows you to show a message to people who are blocking your ads asking them to please whitelist your site. This should increase your advertising revenue, if your ads are inoffensive enough that people are willing to leave them whitelisted. Go to Admin Panel -> Revenue -> AdBlock Prevention to activate this tool (it requires that your ads be set up through WSN's advertising slots system).