Hey everyone,
We have been working hard behind the scenes squashing bugs and improving the platform.
I want to introduce you to the version 1.5 update!
If you haven’t updated your plugin yet on the site I strongly suggest you do this ASAP to keep functionality working and to minimize any issues with communications to the Split Hero platform.
When I first started Split Hero, I had a well-laid plan in place for the development of the platform and we thought we had everything figured out. Well... I can hand on heart admit that didn’t really work out. You see, even the best-laid plans have hiccups and not just from a development point of view but just from feedback from ‘real world’ use. Things we thought would be non-issue for users became issues and vice versa.
This is why we have our public roadmap for users to vote and suggest features that are important to them.
What’s in the update?
Logging in you probably haven’t noticed any difference in the platform but I promise you, that behind the scenes we’ve made some fundamental changes to how Split Hero works which will make a difference for everyone.
We have moved from PHP based solution to a JS solution.
Why does this matter? More of our users than anticipated use a combination of one of many caching plugins as well as a security plugin of some sort. This was causing communication issues from our plugin back to the platform. We did have a fix for this in the way of ‘white-listing our IP’ in the security plugin and setting up bypass rules for the cache. The problem was this wasn’t very user-friendly for our non-techy customers and goes against our policy of ‘simplicity’.
By rolling out this change all of the above is now gone. No need to white list us in security plugins and as long as you have flushed your cache just once after installing the plugin, you will be good to go from now on!
What’s next?
Now the platform is on very solid ground and we are happy with how it’s functioning at its core, apart from some minor tweaks here and there, we are giving the front end some much-needed love.
Platform Dashboard V2.
I know the dashboard sucks. It doesn’t really show anything. The byproduct of this is that for new users the in-app onboarding is not up to scratch. New users don’t know where to start without looking at the docs. A big problem.
We have a very basic initial dashboard lined up with some account stats but also some quick action buttons such as connecting a domain and starting a campaign.
This should help give direction to new users as well being more useful for current users. It will actually be a dashboard vs just a repeat of the campaign list. In the future, I can see more revisions of the dashboard to perhaps include news and updates of the platform but first of all, I really want to hear user feedback once we roll out this first iteration.
Quality of Life Update
On top of the dashboard launch, we are filling in some holes in the UI/UX.
Some users were confused about what it meant when after creating a new campaign, the status changes to ‘pending’. This is merely waiting for the Split Hero cron to run and push the campaign info to the selected sites plugin. It normally only lasts about 1 minute but it wasn’t clear what was happening. We are working on a simple message to say everything is getting set up and to check back soon.
Likewise, there is some time after the campaign is set up when the status changes from ‘Pending’ to ‘Running’ where it’s not quite obvious if the campaign is truly running as there are no stats instantly.
The reason for this is that although we are always collecting the data we only push back the information to the platform approximately every 10-15 minutes so as not to overload our servers. So for this short time after creating a campaign, there are no stats in the dashboard - hence the confusion.
To combat this we are going to introduce a success message to reassure the user that the campaign is up and running, we are collecting data and to check back soon so you will no longer see a blank campaign for those first minutes after setup.
One final minor update will be when there are no active campaigns or connected domains, instead of showing a blank table, we will display a message with a relevant ‘get started’ button.
Plugin Update
We are working on giving the plugin settings page a slight tweak. By changing the layout we are hopefully going to make it clearer with a 3-step process on what the user needs to do.
Conclusion
I hope this update will make a big difference to all of our users as well as give you an insight into what’s coming next.
One final thing I want to mention is our affiliate program is now open for applications. If you love Split Hero and want to earn a 20% recurring commission by recommending it to your friends or audience, you can sign up here.