Bug Fixes
Our community and team have fixed a lot of issues in the last couple of months. Many of you will be familiar with these bugs because thanks to you for reporting these bugs and using our tool to drive change in your community, we get to know where our Ushahidi platform is lacking and how to fix it to make it more user friendly.
Some of these bugs are;
- Allowing users to create posts in the Armenian language; reported by @arturp-a
- Newly created surveys are now visible in the import list.
- V5 API now provides translated content for surveys in a minimal format.
- Adding and saving translated surveys was an issue reported by @hcmakilan, and happy to say it is now working without problems.
- A bug causing issues with uploading images on a survey form, reported by @botiq
For more information on the list of bugs that have been fixed, please take a look at our release notes on GitHub.
To all our contributors and Outreachy/ GSoC intern applicants, huge ❤️💣 in making this release happen.
Donations Pilot launch
We recently did a pilot launch of our Donations feature, working with a few deployments to help us test it before we publicly launch it to all our deployers.
This feature will not appear in your deployments unless it is explicitly enabled using an administrative command.
How does this help our deployers, you ask?
Ushahidi looks at how to better support communities enact social change beyond providing our technology tools and strategic support.
One major constraint for small organizations and grassroots groups is insufficient funding. As a response to this need, we at Ushahidi want to empower our deployers to drive fundraising efforts through our Platform and see if this helps push the needle.
Thanks to Grant for the Web's support, we have produced a feature that makes Ushahidi deployments compatible with the Web Monetization standard, enabling individuals globally to donate to their choice of sector or grassroots organization directly through Ushahidi deployments.
Next step
We are still looking for deployers to join as the first cohort of testers. If you are a Ushahidi deployer and would like this feature enabled, you can reach us at support@ushahidi.com, and we will make this happen.
Where we are at
During this pilot phase, we have faced a few obstacles that we are still working diligently to fix and support all users;
- Of the wallets available in the Web Monetization ecosystem, the one we found most usable is not available to all countries, which means that some of our deployers will not be able to use it.
- The other wallets we were testing might not be easily accessible or user-friendly to most users, so we are still searching for an alternative that will be user-friendly and easy to use by all deployers.
- People do not entirely trust or understand cryptocurrency. This applies to a lot of people around the globe. Cryptocurrency is not something that people use or see the need in their everyday lives. As an organization, we are looking for avenues of collaboration with cryptocurrency services and experts to help bridge this gap.
- We desire that Platform will offer its deployers access to practical and trustworthy monetization and payment systems in the future.
Feel free to reach out to us. Let us talk more about web monetization, cryptocurrency, and how this can be helpful to you as a deployer.
To support one of our testers, take a look at this deployment.
To see how this can work with your deployment, check out our user guide.
To apply to be a tester, fill out this form, or if you have questions, let us know at support@ushahidi.com
Improvements
Change of default user
I’m sure many of our self-hosted deployers who have installed our self-hosted version of the Ushahidi platform v3+ in their servers will be happy to have this fixed and documented.
Check out the GitHub ticket to get more information
Support for WhatsApp as SMS through Twilio datasource
WhatsApp is one of the sources that most people around the globe, if not all, use as a means of communication.
This is one of the data sources that is highly requested by our deployers, and we are excited to announce as the first step that users supported by Twilio (support varies by country) can enable their number for WhatsApp.
Nb: Whatsapp is currently not directly supported by our tool, this only means Twilio provides a WhatsApp gateway service that operates almost identically to their SMS service, hence these messages will not be presented as "WhatsApp" in Platform, but they may still be found under the "SMS" source.
More articles on this courtesy of Twilio
Overview of the WhatsApp Business API with Twilio
Request to enable your Twilio numbers for WhatsApp
Get started with the Twilio Sandbox for WhatsApp for testing.
Take a look at our GitHub ticket on this for details.
What to look forward to on our next blogposts
Accessibility
Accessibility is one of the projects that we are genuinely passionate about, and we got to work on it and improve it with the help of our former Outreachy rockstar intern Renu Jain.
Web accessibility helps us make our tool more usable to many people, especially to users with disabilities.
v5 REST API
This release marks the beginning of the gradual introduction of our new version 5 REST API. We have designed this API to accommodate some new features (Entity Translations, for
instance). It also makes it easier to retrieve some resources that are particularly cumbersome to obtain with version 3 (thinking of survey definitions).
Version 5 doesn't yet offer the same level of functionality as version 3 (not all the endpoints are there), but the basics of posts and surveys are well covered.
Version 3 of the API is still fully functional and won't be retired until v5 is feature-complete and mature.
We have also started putting together Javascript and PHP SDKs to interact with the REST API, and we'll be providing more details shortly.
Entity Translations
For any deployment owner, this is not something new. In your deployments, you have come across “+add translations” in your survey editor forms and may have asked yourself, hmmm, what does this do? 🤔
Entity Translations is one of my favorite features, it allows deployers to add more languages and translate content under surveys, posts, and categories into the different languages added. This feature highly tackles and improves the language barrier for countries with more than one speaking language, making it easier for the deployers to reach a larger audience in their country and even beyond their country and have them involved in their project to drive change.
Learn how to add more languages in your deployment on our user guide documentation.
Read more about accessibility, API v5, and entity translations in our next blog posts. See you soon 🙂🤗