Release notes: Citizen Space v5.1

Citizen Space v5.1 was rolled out to customers in the week commencing 12th August 2019. We are continuing to work on our new Kaizen (continuous improvement) milestone process, which brings with it the third round of product improvements in the last 4 months. With Kaizen, the focus is on more frequent releases made up of smaller feature requests, so, as ever, if you have any feature requests or ideas for improving Citizen Space, please do feed it back to your customer success manager.

What's new?

Another NEW Answer component!

Hot on the heels of the 'Number' component released into the Citizen Space wilds in v4.4, we are pleased to bring you a 'Date' answer component.

This new component enables admin users to create a question to which the answer can only be a numeric date. Data submitted will be validated - meaning that only actual dates can be entered. It is also possible to choose the date format from the three available options:

The Date component can also be configured to enable site admins to present a set time frame within which the date in the answer must fit:

Ability to set multiple featured consultations

Previously, it's only been possible to feature one consultation on your Citizen Space homepage and as a Site Admin you would do that from the consultation dashboard. Many of you have asked us if you can have more than one featured consultation, so we've now made this possible and added a simple management tool to do it.

If you're a Site Admin, you now have a new link in the 'Pages' menu on the Manage bar called 'Featured Consultations'.

This will include a list of any consultations you have set to be featured, and gives you the option to add more featured consultations to this list using a simple search tool. You can drag and drop the items around and this will set the order in which they appear, and you can delete them from the list really simply from here, too.

If you'd like to put a featured image on those consultations you've selected, you can still do this on the dashboard of the consultation itself, and we recommend you do add a featured image, as it looks so much better.

Once you save the 'Featured Consultations' list page, the consultations in your list will appear in the featured consultations section on your Citizen Space homepage. 

Additional accessibility options for text and date answer components

Regular users will spot a new WCAG 2.1 flavoured element on the 'Single line text' and 'Date' answer components. These additional accessibility options enable assistive technologies to better understand what information the field is asking for. The additional options appear at the very bottom of the answer component page when you are building an online survey.

These additional labels are only used by assistive technologies, and the label does not control or validate what the user can enter into the answer component. 

A reminder to save your consultation details

A small but hopefully significant change for the every day Citizen Space admin user - we have added a prompt to check if you would like to save your work before leaving the 'Edit consultation details' page.

Unique ID and Published Response URL are now included in the .xlsx export of responses

For those using the Response Publishing feature, there will be two new columns in the .xlsx responses export, enabling admin users to easily see both the Response ID, the Unique ID, and a URL for the published response in question. This will be especially useful when it is necessary to quickly match respondent ID with published response and/or unique ID. These new column headers will only appear if Response Publishing has been enabled for the consultation.

Respondents are now unable to upload an empty file to a file upload answer component

Previously respondents were able to upload an empty file to a file upload answer component, (either in error or on purpose). Now, if this is attempted, Citizen Space will notify the user that the file is empty and display a prompt to try again.

And much more...

In addition, this release contains a small change to the way the 'We Asked, You Said, We Did' heading text is formatted, some improvements to the way cloned consultations are named, all of the usual behind the scenes security and infrastructure work, some bug fixes, and accessibility tweaks.