Today we are releasing Sparkle 4.2, a must have release. We have made many improvements to smooth out user interface rough edges, some that come from as far back as Sparkle 1.0.
The most visible change has to be the new sidebar, which can now show pages and layers at the same time. For people who use layers often, it’s a great change because you no longer need to click back and forth between pages and layers, and if you work on a large screen Mac it just makes sense to keep that view all the time.
If anything the release notes understate the polish we have added to make using password protected pages simpler and more understandable, particularly with complex configurations with several groups and complex per-element visibility configurations.
For starters, selecting which users have access to a page has been clarified and is presented like this:
Managing users has also been radically simplified and clarified, so you now have all information about the user in one compact and easy to use panel in the site settings:
The additional interface touch that helps with many user groups, is viewing the canvas in a way that simulates access from members of one group or another. When the site has the password protection configuration, you can now limit visible items to those visible by one group:
Finally for password protection a popular request, making a different post-login page based on the group. This makes perfect sense for some scenarios, and is now part of the login form settings:
Moving on to a contentious point: setting the sensitive data password. In Sparkle 4.2 it is now possible to make a project password-less, which addresses the frustration many users found with not knowing what password to set, or not remembering the password they set later:
Many website owners have gotten a warning about switching to Google Analytics 4, we added direct support for that in Sparkle. Since we were in that area of code, we also added support for the Facebook Pixel.
We get how some people who need to switch analytics packages might prefer switching away from Google Analytics entirely, so we also added support the open source Matomo analytics package, which can be self hosted for the safest privacy compliance.
