6th October 2022

A mini update today, though there’s plenty in the works that we’ll be able to report on soon. Sometimes we have a flurry of delivering big headline features, and some periods we’re focussed on smaller incremental fixes and steady progress. All of it is essential to getting us where we want to be.

One particularly exciting bit of news since our last update is that we had our busiest week so far — six events running on Vito with a combined count of 18,801 active participants! Not bad for a platform that hasn’t even officially launched yet…

New features

• Embed pages within pages

  This one actually got missed off the last changelog entry but you can now create pages that don’t live in the sidebar, and embed them within any other page. This opens Vito up to all sorts of new exciting use-cases from blogging, to showcasing case studies, to publishing long-form content, to creating interactive courses and more!

  

  And because you might want to link to these pages individually, you can now also set social preview images and descriptions on a per-page basis.

• Banner to join a public hub

  If your hub is public, you can share the link to any page and visitors will always see the option to sign in or join your hub from the top menu.

  

• Search chooser modals

  In a bid to make it even easier to find and embed content anywhere around your hub, we’ve added search to the cards, videos, livestreams, pages and events chooser modals.

  

• Switch between simultaneous livestreams

  Hubs now feature a dropdown live indicator when multiple streams are happening at the same time, to allow for speedy channel hopping.

Improvements

• Added an events-specific landing page to our marketing site
• Fixed bug where stream credentials would be hidden for some users
• Brought back ability to change hub slug
• Fixed up email delivery status notifications
• Better CSV validation for imports
• Allow showing participant profiles even if directory is hidden
• Display Code of Conduct page to visitors as well as logged in participants
• Show a permission denied modal if you don’t have access to violation reports
• Ensure newly created cards are added to a block
• Tweaked prose styles for more balanced typography
• Brought back mysteriously disappearing bullet styles
• Tidied the profile dropdown and menu
• Cleaned up Settings area
• Updated how moderator badges are displayed
• More style fixes on mobile
• Switched new hub form to Vue
• Fixed tutorial link when creating a new hub
• Display page titles when navigating a hub
• Added missing titles for built-in pages
• Don’t send announcement emails to participants who haven’t completed onboarding
• A slew of dependency upgrades and maintenance tasks

28th June 2022

Since our last update, we’ve soft-launched Vito meaning anyone can now sign up for an account and play around with setting up a hub before deciding whether to subscribe to a paid plan. Here’s what else we’ve been up to behind the scenes.

New features

• Onboarding tutorial

  We heard feedback from our early customers that Vito is so free-form and flexible, it can be tricky to know where to start. To that end, we designed an optional onboarding tutorial to help brand new users navigate the platform while learning how the key features work. It gives you step-by-step instructions with real-time feedback as you perform each action.

  

• Hub settings modal

  In addition to streamlining the admin-related dropdown menus and improving how they appear on mobile, we’ve brought hub settings into its own modal to help you customize your hub more easily. You can now also add a social image and description for your hub, and hide any of the default menu shortcut icons, such as All Posts, Events and Participants.

  

• Moderator permissions

  Grant participants moderator permissions to allow them to hide comments, block and restrict other hub members, and view Code of Conduct violation reports. Moderators can also display an optional badge next to their posts and on their profile.

  

• Collaborator only posts

  It’s now possible to set the discussion feed on any page to only allow collaborator posts. Use this to create an announcements feed on your custom homepage or anywhere you like, and control who can reply to your posts.

  

• Social sign-in

  Easily log in to Vito using your Google or GitHub account. This one's pretty self explanatory!

  

• Notification grouping and filtering

  Building on the improvements we announced in the previous update, faves are now grouped to minimize the total number of notifications, and you can filter by notification type: announcements, mentions and replies, faves or follows.

  

Improvements

• Improved sign-up flow
• Stripe integration at hub level
• Display previews for post attachments
• Show page and block visibility more clearly in editing mode
• Display Cards grouped by type in the chooser modal
• Added dedicated email address field on Cards
• Auto-publish links in sidebar
• Reworked livestream pages to show placeholder full-size when offline
• Restyled post content form
• New UI for viewing CoC violation reports in-hub
• Fix for a scrolling bug on custom homepages and pages with discussions
• Fix for aspect ratio bug on some images
• Fix for disappearing posts
• A whole host of other small formatting and bug fixes
• Various dependency and security upgrades
• Spruced up our own hubs for Vito and Tito

9th May 2022

Continuing with quality of life improvements as our public launch inches nearer.

New features

• Daily digests

  Daily digests are here! From tomorrow some of you will start receiving an email overview of any activity that takes place in a hub you are a member of. Posts, mentions, follows — it’s all there!

  

• Improved notifications page

  We’ve given the notifications page a lick of paint and it now shows the content of the posts that triggered the notification.

  

• Add-to-calendar button

  Want to add a Vito event to your calendar? With the click of a button you now can. Yeay!

  

• New date picker

  A personal raison d’être for Paul, we now have a date picker that’s easier to use! Protip: it also supports natural language input when typing or copying & pasting.

  

• Mux low latency mode

  You can now enable low latency mode when creating a livestream channel! Perfect if you’re running a stream and want the least amount of delay for interacting with your viewers.

  

Improvements

• Bring back scrollbars
• Tidy up the /profile page
• Tidy up the magic link flow
• Lots of smaller bug fixes and upgrades

4th March 2022

Since our last major update shipped, we’ve been getting Vito ready to enter public beta. Our focus has been on adding support for paid subscriptions and incremental improvements to promote and measure hub engagement.

New features

• Plans & billing

  Hub owners can now subscribe to a paid plan to access all features in Vito! Add and edit payment details and see usage and invoices from within our new Plans & Billing section. New signups can try out some of our core features for free before upgrading. We’ve also added support for pay-by-invoice subscriptions in our admin interface.

  

• Analytics

  See a count of hub views and filter to a specific time period in the new Analytics section under the Manage menu. You can drill down into individual page views, and we’ve been doing work behind the scenes to bring video view counts into the mix shortly as well.

  

• Livestream discussion settings

  Our customers called for more granular options when configuring the livestream discussion and we listened. You can now choose whether to display a dedicated post feed, use the global “All posts” feed, or disable the discussion feed altogether for each livestream channel.

  

• Link unfurling

  Posting a link to the discussion feed now displays a preview image and text. Sometimes, it’s the little things that make all the difference.

  

• New Vito homepage

  We’ve simplified the Vito website to make it easier for collaborators and participants to log in or sign up to Vito. Our updated marketing copy now lives on its own separate page, complete with plenty of screenshots and graphics featuring the updated UI. We think it’s a lot clearer what Vito does, now.

  

Improvements

• Majorly fleshed out our help center documentation
• Made participant imports much faster (and fixed an issue where large imports would sometimes fail)
• Allowed ticket types to be specified when using the Tito Webhooks integration
• Improved how the hub sidebar works on mobile and smaller screens
• Fixed a timezone bug for new events
• Various other small bug fixes and optimizations
• Copy updates throughout the hub, admin and email views
• More standardization of UI elements
• Various dependency and security upgrades

24th October 2021

It’s been an intense few months as we’ve been reworking almost every single aspect of Vito’s implementation in an effort to bring us closer to delivering the experience we’ve had in mind from the start. The result is a bumper update full of UI improvements to the hub plus new features that give you more flexibility than ever before.

New features

• Easier hub navigation

  You’ll notice a new explore bar with icons to navigate to your hub’s home page, all posts, events, livestreams and/or videos, and list of participants. This makes it quicker to populate your hub, and it facilitates a more consistent browsing experience for participants.

  

• Add content blocks to pages

  In addition to adding text blocks and card lists, you can now embed images, videos, live-stream blocks and events on any page. Customize the order in which each block appears and which type of user can see it to make each page in your hub your own. We display a label in edit mode indicating who can see which block, to make sure you always have an overview.

  

• Attach rich content to posts

  As an organizer, you can now add any content type to your discussion post. Share images, cards, events, livestreams and videos, and even send them as an announcement to folks’ email inboxes. Participants can also add images to their posts, allowing for more engaging interactions.

  

• More flexible sidebar

  We’ve done away with the idea of “above and below the line”, so you can set pages in the sidebar in whatever order you like. You can also add an internal link, for instance to a specific session or video in the hub, or an external link to your website, social media accounts and more. Finally, add dividers to create custom sections.

  

• Improved mini-player

  The picture-in-picture player has had a complete redesign. You can now change its size and position and we’ve added quick options for pausing, muting, entering full-screen and exiting the video, giving your participants greater control over their individual viewing experience.

  

• New events and livestream views

  Display all your events with their own schedule of sessions, and optionally attach livestream channels, display cards and more. We’ve baked in logic to indicate when an event or session is happening now, and how much time has elapsed. Edit the duration of a single session and the following ones update automatically in real time.

  

• Participants view

  We’ve reworked the entire participants view in the admin area to allow filtering by source and access status and to make the labeling clearer, so you know exactly what stage all your invited participants are at.

  

Improvements

• Preview your hub’s content as a collaborator, participant or visitor
• Redesigned cards display better on all devices
• Full-width cover images
• Design review to make UI elements more consistent, including colors, buttons, modals, borders, padding and more
• Alt-text improvements
• More reliable hub duplication
• Countless bug fixes
• Dependency upgrades
• Performance optimizations and monitoring
• Improvements to our internal alerting
• Added the ability for users to grant and revoke access to our support team for easier troubleshooting

28th July 2021

It sure doesn’t feel like 3 months since our last update…

But in putting this list together it’s easy to see where the time has gone — we’ve shipped a ton of improvements. There's lots more in the pipeline, so it shouldn't be too long before we have another bumper update for you. In the meantime, we're moving to shorter cycles so that we can release new features and improvements even more regularly.

New features

• Multi-streaming

  This is a big one! You’re no longer restricted to adding a single stream to a hub. Create additional livestream channels to handle multi-track conference scenarios and more. 🎉

  

• More flexible public pages

  We realised it didn’t make sense for the public page to be powered by form fields in the admin area when we could use the same modular approach as we do to customize pages within the hub. So now your hub can have a member view and a public view!

  

• Tito webhooks integration

  Connect Vito to Tito’s registration platform in 3 simple steps, and whenever someone places an order in Tito, they will be sent an automatic invitation link to access your Vito hub.

  

• Quick switcher

  We’ve added some handy options behind the Vito logo within your hub to grant you quick access to your most recent hubs, let you search for hubs, or even create a new hub.

  

• Web monetization

  Vito now supports the proposed web monetization W3C standard. If you have an Interledger Wallet, you can add the pointer to your hub and get paid by visitors who have a web monetization provider enabled.

  

• Leave (and rejoin) a hub

  Finally, you can easily leave a hub if you no longer want to be a member of it. And if you change your mind later, you can simply rejoin.

  

Improvements

• Simplified the signed-in homepage to show a unified list of hubs with options to filter by live, upcoming, past or all
• Added a list of your pending hub invitations to the signed-in homepage
• Added the ability to transfer hub ownership to another collaborator
• Added the option to exclude draft pages when publishing all changes
• Added a link back to the original post in the Code of Conduct violation report
• Added an extra layer of security by requiring users to confirm their email address when signing up
• Updated the marketing site footer to include useful links
• Fixed a bug that prevented some hubs from being deletable
• Fixed a bug to ensure the latest post always shows at the top of a livestream discussion
• Made the stream key hidden by default for increased security
• Various style and microcopy tweaks and some menu rejigging
• Performance improvements
• A bunch of dependency upgrades
• Created a new customer support dashboard for our internal use, so that we can respond to support queries more quickly and easily

13th April 2021

We’re partway through the current cycle but there’s already enough to report to merit an update in the meantime! The headline is that we’ve switched to Plyr for an improved livestream and on-demand video experience.

New features

• Plyr for video

  As recommended by Mux, the video API we use, we’ve switched to Plyr’s media player. It has support for displaying VTT captions and preview thumbnails for on-demand videos, speed controls for pre-recorded and livestreamed content, and offers a more stable and reliable viewing experience.

  

• Help Centre

  We now have a help centre where you can find instant answers to your questions. We’ve added the Intercom chat bubble so you can search our documentation or send a message to our support team from any screen of the app.

  

• Code snippets

  You can add a code snippet to a text block via the floating formatting menu or using markdown.

  

• Tooltips

  Pages now have clickable tooltips with help text when in admin mode, to help guide you through your hub setup.

  

• Website updates

  Our marketing site now features a How it Works page and Case Studies.

  

Improvements

• Tidied UI on mobile devices
• Better reporting of email invites delivery
• Clearer livestreaming instructions and status
• Styled notification icon to make it more prominent
• Homepage is now preserved when duplicating a hub
• Streamlined logged-in homepage
• A whole slew of bug fixes, dependency upgrades, and minor UI improvements plus some code clean-up

22nd February 2021

Woo! We have been busy!

Work on this new version started at the end of last year and we’re delighted to have this out on the wild for folks to start using.

New

• An updated user interface

  We’ve taken everything we’ve learned in the last ~11 months and are excited to have released a cleaner and more flexible hub design.

  

  The crux of this change has been to move all of the content creation and content management out of the admin view and into the hub itself. This gives organisers a much better preview of what will be shown to participants.

  This interface also moves us away from having a design centred around a stream and schedule. They are still part of our core offering but if organisers choose to omit them they aren’t left with a large part of the screen being wasted space.

Improvements

There are a whole bunch of improvements associated with the new UI, we’ll list a few key ones here:

• A cleaner, lighter design
• A Set-up Guide to step you through setting up a new hub
• Cards: a HyperCard inspired way to manage your hub data
• A fixed or pop-out menu depending on your preference
• A page for hosting your on-demand videos
• Better management of pages and sections
• Clearer participant menu

1st December 2020

The last cycle allowed us to ship a few smaller features while working on some larger infrastructure changes. This brings us nicely to the last few weeks of the working year where we’ll be clearing our plates of some hefty features before wrapping up for the holidays.

New features

• Duplicate a hub

  If you’re running recurring events as seprate hubs this should save you some time!

  

• Hide your post

  Typo? Posted to the wrong channel? Well, you can now hide your posts. Note, for the safety of others, organisers and moderators will still be able to review hidden posts.

  

• Resources

  New to livestreaming or running online events? Here you’ll find guides, tutorials and tips to help you on your way.

  

• Set a custom thumbnail for uploaded videos

  The autogenerated thumbnail could sometimes be a little... unflattering. Now you can set your own!

  

Improvements

• Better asset uploads
• Fix a bug where email notifications might be sent more than once
• Sort visible participants by when they joined the hub
• Improve the hub admin layout when using a smaller device
• Link to relevant section when editing the hub
• Switch to Video.js
• Added a video to our marketing homepage
• Restyled hub onboarding and log in screens to make better use of space
• Fix for the participants pagination bug
• Avoid empty replies that are just @ mentions

23rd October 2020

We’ve come out of our 2-week cooldown period and are now a couple of weeks into our next development cycle. We’ve been addressing some smaller tasks that were left over from our last cleanup, and some new ones we’ve added since. Enjoy!

New features

• Name pronunciation guide

  After seeing a participant squeeze the pronunciation of her name into the display name field we thought this might be handy! Paul talks more about this feature in a series of Tweets.

  

• What do you do?

  Wondering who you’re chatting with? Participants now have the option to add a short description of what they do!

  

Improvements

• Fix overflow-hidden issue on post dropdowns
• Remove ability to post when hidden
• Improvements to suggested @mentions in replies
• Add Google Analytics (with IP Anonymisation) to the marketing site
• Fix images in emails
• Preserve post formatting when sending it by email
• Remove Gallery view
• Better “From” address for emails sent from the hub

5th October 2020

So much to log! We’ve been taking a leaf out of Basecamp’s Shape Up development methodology and just finished our first 6-week cycle. We split the time between working on small batch features and entering cleanup mode. We’re still learning as we go, trying to balance transitioning back to a calmer company while still iterating quickly.

New features

• Participant imports

  You can now import your participants from other systems or a mailing list, either using copy & paste or a CSV import.

  

• Email notifications

  They’re finally here! Participants will now receive an email notification if they are @-mentioned in a hub. Emails will only be sent to participants who are not signed into Vito.

  

• @hub announcements

  Collaborators on a hub now have the @hub superpower to message all of their participant. Perfect for important announcements or schedule changes this will also only be sent via email when the participant is not signed into Vito.

  

• Invite only hubs by default

  We’ve decided to make newly created hubs private by default. This is more inline with our safety and security principles and means that public access to a hub has to be set explicitly. You can change the access control for a hub under Settings > Access.

  

• Post threading

  You can now reply to posts in a thread! Woo!

  

Improvements

• Include a participant’s posts in their profile page
• Add Intercom support for hub organisers
• Add link to changelog for hub organisers
• Allow setting session/segment start and end times explicitly, as well as setting a duration
• Always link to a Presenter and show the View Profile link
• Remove the need to “Join the Community” when joining a hub
• Give the existing emails a facelift
• Add ability to add lists in page blocks with an icon
• Hide progress bar on livestream
• Add pronoun badges to post
• Add a mini bio to the participant dropdown on a post
• Increase the size of the code of conduct, welcome message and invitation message fields and allow them to be resizable
• Dynamically autosize the post box when more is typed
• Allow manual sorting of presenters
• And the usual flurry of bug fixes and performance improvements

12th August 2020

It's been a while since our last update, but what a bumper update it is! We've added a ton of improvements and new features over the last month…

Improvements

• Dates on a hub are now optional so you can create an ongoing community hub
• You can now set a pre-recorded video to go live at a specific date and time
• Added in-app notifications for follows and mentions
• Added ability for hub owners to lock or disable discussions per page or across an entire hub
• Following is now across Vito rather than just within a single hub
• Theatre Mode is now more usable
• A whole bunch of infrastructure tweaks and admin UI improvements
• Fixed a bug which caused some email clients to pre-click and invalidate the links
• Fixed a bug where hub schedule wasn't showing correctly on mobile

1st July 2020

After a couple of months working away on chunky projects behind the scenes, we're excited to have shipped some high-priority features this week.

New features

• Dynamic pages

  In the Vito back-end you can now preview your hub and add content in-line. You can create and edit pages and sessions, and as soon as you click "Publish", your changes will be visible in the hub without your participants needing to refresh!

  So if a session is overrunning and you need to change the time, or you need to add a page with some useful content in the middle of an event, you can do it in the Dynamic Pages view and preview how it'll look, and then publish when you're happy. Your participants will see the changes immediately, without needing to interrupt your content.

Improvements

• Added a new suite of safety/moderation tools including banning, in-app reporting, restricting the ability to post, and removing posts
• Added Dynamic Pages allowing you to create and preview custom content pages in the Admin UI and publish so that they appear instantly in participant hub
• Added support for playing pre-recorded videos within a hub and creating a playlist. Choose whether to have your hub be only pre-recorded content, only livestream, or a mix of the two!
• Added the ability to favorite a post
• Added support for adding banners and teaser videos to the public page
• Added initial support for hub templates: choose “simple” to start from scratch or “event” to populate some sensible default pages
• Switched to a new server stack
• Bug fixes
• Had two pre-launch customer events run on Vito:
  • SofaConf: a 5-day design conference from the folks at Clearleft.
  • Introduction to Being an Antiracist: 3 hours of antiracist training from Kim Crayton. Over 1,200 tickets sold and 650+ watched the livestream and participated on the day. The hub is now being used to sell access to the recorded feed in preparation for her next two events.

26th May 2020

We've been doing lots of behind the scenes work lately, so there's not as much to show from a user perspective. But exciting things are coming…

Improvements

• Shipped a chunky back-end project to migrate to hubs model
• Made progress on Dynamic Pages (this will be big!), mentions and favorites features
• More dogfooding of Vito, using it to run our Admission Online event series
• A bunch more bug fixes
• One of the first customer events took place on Vito:
  • HalfStack Online: Epic 16-hour conference run by long-time Tito customer Dylan Schiemann. A superb achievement with excellent feedback from Dylan and his participants.

6th May 2020

The last week has mainly consisted of big picture planning and work on our move to hubs, plus a healthy dose of dogfooding and documenting.

New features

• Hubs

  We're adding the ability to create hubs in Vito. Formerly known internally as the "attendee area" or "participant area", a hub is a single interface containing a media player, agenda, discussion panel, directory, pages, Code of Conduct and user settings.

  You could create a hub for an event, but a hub doesn't have to be date specific, so could also be used to host communities, regular meet-ups, ad-hoc livestreams, or collections of content. We're pretty excited about the potential opportunities this opens up!

Improvements

• Running some small-scale internal events on Vito for user testing
• Put together a comprehensive publicly available Playbook for Livestreaming on Vito
• Added the ability to download Order and Participant data from a hub
• Various bug fixes

29th April 2020

As well as shipping a bunch of smaller features and improvements, we're working on a reframing and renaming exercise to move towards a "hub" model. More on that in the next update…

New features

• Pages

  Pages is a light-weight CMS feature that allows you to add custom content to the participant area in Vito. Use it to add an about page, a list of useful resources, or whatever your event needs!

Improvements

• The agenda in the participant area now auto scrolls to whichever session is currently live
• Added the ability to set an external live captioning link
• Participants can now mute one another
• The invite email now contains an .ics calendar file
• Redesigned the public page (example)
• Reorganized organizer admin navigation
• Added a metrics and graph for seeing number of views during a livestream
• Timezone improvements
• Performance improvements to the participant area
• Fix non-retina avatars and logos
• The usual flurry of bug fixes and design tweaks
• Ran our second Admission Online event on Vito

22th April 2020

The first customer event ran on Vito this week with ~2,300 participants! Paul's also been running his own events, plus we've delivered a host of improvements. Time to start keeping a public log…

Improvements

• Added paid registration for participants and screens in the admin UI to manage orders
• Improved how participant invites sent from the Vito admin UI
• Automated reminder emails can now be sent 30 minutes before an event starts
• Added the ability to shut off community posting
• Added some basic moderation for posts
• Shipped the ability to generate one-off discount codes
• Performance monitoring
• A whole load of bug fixes and design tweaks