Bablab Changelog

February - March 2024 Changes

Websites Performance

Refactored much of the Javascript code with efficient, modern code, taking advantage of new available Javascript features.

• Replaced code for lazy-loading images, reducing the amount of code by 88% (!!).
• Replaced code for Sliders/Carousels to be more robust and snappy.
• Improved code for Image-Zoom (when clicking an image in a gallery).
• Improved code for Mobile/Desktop Navigation to be more robust and snappy.
• Improved server-side pages engine, cherry picking and compiling only the required CSS & Javascript, speeding up pages loading even more.

New Feature:

Added ‘PHOTO + PHOTO’ block, each photo has independent control over its size, align, vertical-align and image-ratio. Allowing for better, more diverse and interesting layouts.

January 2024 Changes

Admin:

• A more consistent look & feel to components.
• Added gradient options to blocks background.
• Added gradient options to the footer background.
• Changing fonts is now instantly applied to the Admin preview, also when reverting back.

General

• Bug fix: fixed an issue with custom html text editor's image upload.
• Bug fix: fixed an issue with preview of gallery images in columns layout.

December 2023 Changes

Settings:

• Added tag type `Google Tag Manager` to allow using variouse tags via Google Tags.
  * Please note: Tags will not be able to load external scripts!
• Some Meta tags are now only available to websites with a connected domain name: Analytics tags, Google Tags and Site Verifications.
• Added another experimental feature: the ability to send Core Web Vitals metrics to Google Analytics as custom events, via Google Tag.
  * This also works combined with the ability to load and run the tags in a web worker, basically eliminating its impact on page load and performance.

General

• Improved fonts loading efficiency and performance by loading only the weight that is used in Appearance fonts settings.
• Bug fix: fixed an issue with storage usage measurements.
• Bug fix: fixed a small issue with logo-image width control.

August - November 2023 Changes

New Feature:

Added ‘before-and-after’ photo block, to show off your editing skills and post-production delivery quality.

Account:

Added complete control and visualization over your subscription and past payments, with the ability to change your subscription plan.

General

• Implemented PayPal as Bablab's subscriptions billing processor.
• Replaced the website-admin text sanitation engine, bringing another major performance improvement to content saving.
• Bug fix: fixed a bug that caused gallery images to duplicate.

June - July 2023 Changes

New Feature:

Added an Accessibility Button - in case you want to make your website (even more) accessible.
The button will allow visitor to adjust the font size, emphasize the titles and headings, highlight links, Dyslexia friendly font, increase letter spacing, increase line height, bold text, as well as color adjustments for readability.
Find it under Settings.

Client Galleries:

• Added ‘Order by name’ button to each Set in a Client gallery - for easier and faster photos ordering.

Website Admin:

• Indication of slow response from server when saving page/blocks. (Should not happen, but if it does..)
• Added RTL support for the Main Menu items (pages), and also the Contact Form block.
• Bug fix: fixed few issues around deleting & duplicating blocks.
• Bug fix: fixed an issue around text direction when editing texts blocks, also improved the text editor behavior in the footer.
• Bug fix: fixed an issue with adding multiple items in Block Settings.

General

• Improved efficiency and performance of server-client sync in the Admin.

January - May 2023 Changes

General

RTL support (Right To Left text) - You can now “enable” RTL on a page, then all the texts and blocks in that page will support RTL automatically. Hebrew and Arabic speaking photographers: أهلا שלום!

Website Admin:

• New Blocks Settings Interface - looks pretty much the same, but the code went through serious refactoring. Now looks and works consistently and stable.
• New Page Settings - the controls are now divided to three tabs: General, SEO, Keywords analysis. It's so much easier this way.
• Bug fix: uploading SVG files as website logo was fixed.

November - December 2022 Changes

Website Admin:

• Improved performance by using smaller images throughout the Admin.
• Improved upload performance - dramatically reduced time required for uploaded images to be registered in the app.
• When adding photos from other pages or client galleries, added loading indicator when waiting for photos to show up.
• Fixed an issue where photos order was not saved after deleting photos from a gallery.
• Changed the way photos are distributed in columns layout, making it easier to control photos order.
• To avoid accidents, hiding Set Delete button when selecting photos in a client gallery.

Websites:

• Changed the way galleries photos are distributed in columns layout, improving responsiveness and experience.

January - October 2022 Changes

Website Admin:

• Dramatically improved the performance of Client Galleries Admin Section.
• Changed the way numeral values are entered and controlled throughout the Admin, changed to a percise slider accompanied with stepper buttons for a more accurate control.
• Added control over gallery images loading animation: slide-up or grow to size.

General:

• Added support for Google's tag manager to allow using their new Analytics (GA4).

Websites:

• Improved photos loading for better performance.
• Fixed an issue where on iOS mobile phones cached images were not showing up on page reload.
• Added lazy loading to all images in all blocks.
• Added gallery images loading animation: slide-up or grow to size.
• Fixed an issue where the website default page had a wrong canonical meta tag.

November - December 2021 Changes

Website Admin:

• Enhanced positioning and scaling of block Photo+Text, allowing much more versatility in styling
• Duplicating any block now have the option to copy to a different page.

General:

• Added auto-focus and keyboard shortcuts to all dialogs to improve work flow.

New Feature:

• Lightbox - visitors can save a Lightbox and share it, or create a PDF of their Lightbox.

New look to Bablab website!

September - October 2021 Changes

Client Galleries:

• Fixed a bug in deleting sets.
• Added Order to client galleries list - you can now have newest gallery on top.

Website Admin: 

• Blocks background color - you can now change a block background to stand out of page background.

New Block:

• Vids Theater - showing several videos in a single “stage”, with a full-screen experience.

Appearance:

• Added more control over “floating “ menu - you can now control the start position and scrolled position of the logo, background and menu.
• Also, the width control now allows full width of background while constraining the logo and menu to page width.

Page Settings:

• The page keywords pane is now integrated with the Page Settings.

Footer:

• Added control over the footer’s width to match header.
• Also allows setting a background color to the footer and footer text color.

Websites:

• Improved photos aspect-ratio implementation using modern CSS.

May 2021 Changes

Pages:

• Re-factored Gallery Manager and the Uploader for better performance and stability.
• Fixed a bug in SEO Keywords Analyzer that prevented multi words keywords from being displayed.
• Changed the distribution of blocks to sections in the Blocks Menu. Soon more blocks will be added!
• Blocks with photos and text now have the option to link through the photo.

Settings: 

• Added Behance to social profile.

Websites:

• Improved photos sizes creation and handling, improving performance even more.

January - April 2021 Changes

The past few months were crazy here as everywhere else I guess.. We focused on our public website content and experience. Added more pages and fixed a few issues that made it a “little” hard to join Bablab. We implemented a new, hidden captcha to protect us from bots.

Pages: 

• Drag pages from ‘Navigation’ to ‘Other’ to remove them from the website navigation and vice-versa.
• Added ‘Preview’ under Page-Settings to allow previewing a draft page before publishing.

Client Galleries: 

• Zoom client selections and likes - in case you want to inspect selected photos.

Settings: 

• Added Plausible Analytics integration, to have a more detailed view of your traffic while respecting your visitors privacy.
• Performance improvements.

Websites:

• Schema tags syntax improvements.
• Performance improvements - websites are being served faster by optimizing the server caching system.

September + October 2020 Changes

Here are few enhancements we released during September and October 2020:

General:

• A fresh new look to the Admin - a more consistent experience throughout the admin sections.

Pages:

• Page Keywords summary - quickly see each page keywords distribution, to better fine-tune your pages content and photos meta data.

Gallery:

• A new size for photos, providing more control over gallery layout.
• Label for showing a title or a unique code for each photo.
• When managing gallery's photos, you can now empty the gallery - remove all existing photos.

Client Galleries:

• Added the favicon to all Client Galleries for consistent experience.
• Fixed an issue where downloaded selections were the wrong size.
• Share buttons on Zoomed photos.

Child Pages block:

• Allow full customisation of layout, text position, font size, font weight, photo dimensions.

Videos block:

• Rewritten the videos block, leading to 60% reduction in videos load time!
• Videos are lazy loaded.

Navigation:

• Mobile navigation was rewritten, it is now easier to click on links, easier to scroll, mild animation entering the navigation.

August 2020 Changes

Here are few enhancements we released during August 2020:

• Launched Bablab's Traffic Analytics - read more here.
• Optimized Javascript loading mechanism, improving performance even more.
• Changed the way Google Analytics is loaded, saving roughly 1 second in load time.
• Fixed a bug with downloading selections in Client Galleries.
• Added structured data for photos (Google licensing), and for navigation (breadcrumb).