June has seen a lot of changes across the Baack console experiences for admins and we are excited to hear feedback from users. If you have any thoughts feel free to reach out to us directly via support@.
Improved on-boarding experience
As part of our adoption friction deep dive we identified a few friction points in our new customer on-boarding experience. To make it even easier for companies to get started we have simplified the flow down to only a few clicks.
- Sign-in on Baack via Google
- Complete a few details about your company. This is important if you intent to use the startup / charity free tier so that your business can be verified.
- Configure your account company. We have added a helpful task in your task view to get you started.
Admin console redesign
Our main focus is on in page editing but there are some fallback scenarios where being able to edit via the admin console is required. In June we updated the navigation, restructured the insights tab, created a new editor function and enhanced the tasks UI and improved client to support multi tenancy.
The admin console is still catching up with the experience offered by the API, expect more changes to come in the next few weeks. If you have any feedback about the experience please reach out or submit a feature request for the new user support centre coming soon.
Multi-tenant improvements
Baack was built for multi-tenant deployments with Baack being the first customer on our own platform. We have made multiple improvements to the way that account creation is handled to make it easier to set up multiple accounts. Whether you are building a separate test instance or are an agency and need to deploy multiple client accounts, launch as many instances as you need from the new seamless account creation flow in the user home.
Each account has completely separate billing, permissions and security. Billing accounts use a separate root 'company' to contain their data and support company structures in separate domains nested under an account organisation. The root company is similar to a 'space' in other content management systems and acts as the owner for all content. A company isn't necessarily a business and may refer to a non commercial organisation, think of it like "the fact or condition of being with another or others, especially in a way that provides friendship and enjoyment", the non business definition.
Add user flow improvement
Inviting admin users to your accounts used to take a few steps with the new user needing to log in before they could be linked. We have improved this process so that now adding a user to your accounts is a two click process.
The user concept is scoped to the baack.co company as we use the platform for identity management of our own customers. The user 'login' on Baack can also be used with the editor, task and other clients to support embedded editing in your site using login on Baack rather than editing requests needing to be routed via your server.
Expanded insights
We have added more metric insights into the admin console with usage details for all of our content types so that you understand cost on the platform both from a traffic and storage so that pricing is transparent.
Webhook tooling
Anyone who has built webhook integrations knows that building and debugging webhooks can be really challenging. That's why we have used our years of experience building and integrating webhooks from countless vendors to design the webhook developer experience that we would want. We think this will be a game changer for companies needing really amazing event driven integrations.
Use fine grained subscriptions for just to the events you need then track all event triggers, replay and test.
The webhook subscriptions also have triggers which is useful as your integration can monitor changes to your subscriptions in real time.
When it comes to testing we have made it super simple to replay any trigger in the webhook console to see it's delivery logs.
Content item history
As we already announced we also released content history for all of the content items on the platform. User research has shown that versioning is a critical feature for most companies looking for a headless content solution so we have made ours super easy to use via the API.
The origins of the Baack CMS baked versioning into every piece of content associated with an entity. Your integration can now access the full history of content and go back or forward in the published version history so undoing an unintended change or seeing what your content looked like last month when you had a spike in sales is just one link away.
JSON content item support
You may wonder why Baack is only now adding support for JSON content and the answer is simply that our existing rich content model and flexibility has so far meant that it wasn't needed. Our general philosophy is that unstructured, un-schematised arbitrary content is probably a sign that the solution needed might be a document store.
Unstructured data allows powerful flexibility however with great power comes great responsibility. As objects become more complex the inconsistencies between them typically multiply. While that has been our internal philosophy it's also true that customer demand has highlighted this capability so we are happy to announce support for JSON which, like all content items is also versioned.
In page editor enhancements
Our editor client for use on sites which want to allow the content team to edit in place has seen multiple improvements including:
- Support for instant preview when a new version of content is added. This means editors can update the site and see changes immediately.
- Publication step moved to the admin console.
- Our integration includes support for text, markup and pricing updates. Others coming soon.
- New versions of content are returned via callback.
- Standardised the parameter to
versionacross all API surfaces. - View content at a given point in time by passing a timestamp to see the latest version of the site at that time.
Removal of the 'edit item' form endpoint
We have removed form encoded content updates as the regular REST endpoints support a richer integration experience and these forms were unused.
A huge thank you for the feedback which have driven all of these changes.
If you are interested in seeing what Baack can do to enhance your content production experience and sharing your feedback get in touch to arrange a demo and discuss your requirements.