What’s new: A New Search, Easier Past/Future Events and Tweet Images

It’s been some time since we published our last update. That is because we made an exception to our one week sprints and instead had a four weeks sprint over the holidays. But now we’re back on track and want to share the latest features and improvements available on Colloq.

New Global Search

When we launched we knew that the search we had in place to find events wasn’t very capable. It actually was a PHP-based search limited to a couple of database fields and was rather dumb on purpose.

As we have more and more events on the platform this surely wasn’t serving the purpose well anymore. That’s why we’ve now built a search that is more capable and allows all users to find events, event series and users.

Future & Past Events

With the new search in place we also changed how users can view future and past events. Previously we showed them on one page but now the default is future events and you can choose past events or a calendarized view via a tab navigation bar in the page header. This makes it easier to find events in exactly the timeframe you want to see and improves the site performance and usability.

More Changes

• Tweets containing images or videos are now displayed in the Twitter coverage cards.
• We improved the rendering of the event navigation if the event has a lot of information.
• We now show the coverage tab in the event navigation all the time to make it easier to add and view coverage for events. Note that even free users are encouraged and allowed to add coverage and will be able to see these items.
• We now show the same font-size for all text in an event’s description.
• We now limit the available height of venue card images previously causing not so nice portrait cards and unnecessary grey areas.
• Blockquotes and other paragraph styles are now shown in a nicer visual way to make articles easier to read.
• We improved the wording in the FAQ about blocked passwords.
• We fixed an issue with current subscriptions not prolonging their end date when renewing.
• We fixed an issue where no notification email was sent to users who suggested an event when the event is published and available on Colloq.