A revamped navigation, easier collaboration and an inspiring story😇
Monthly release for November: v0.5
Plio is an open-source tool that empowers educators to convert videos into interactive lessons and gather rich data on how their students are learning. We are now open to all educators! What are you waiting for?
If you have already signed up and want to talk to us, give your feedback, are facing any issues, or want to make new feature requests, come talk to us on our discord server:
Hey there! 👋🏼
Here are some of the notable updates on Plio from the last month 🚀 :
A single place for all resources 🔥
Now, creators will see a new slick side menu on the home page of Plio. We often struggled with identifying the best way for making it easy for new users to refer to our Product Guides and Documentation along with keeping our regular users updated with all the new features, bug fixes, and enhancements that we keep releasing almost every day.
With this change, our users can now find all the resources along with important platform-level settings (like, selecting the workspace that they are currently in) in a single place. It also gives us a lot of real estate to add any new sections in the future. Plus, it just looks way neater than before :)
How did we ever survive without it?
Collaborating made easier 🌟
We received a lot of feedback from the educators using our organisational plan (read about Plio for Teams here) that it was not super obvious how they could share the plios that they are working on with other team members while collaborating. To make their lives a little easier, we have now added a button on the editor that will enable them to easily share the links of their draft plios with their team members (Read about the draft and publish modes of a plio here)
Be precise with our new time markers 🕖
Although we support setting questions at a precision level of milliseconds, our educators were not able to see the time at which their questions will be placed until they had placed the question. This was an unnecessary extra step we thought we could do away with :)
Now, educators can see the exact timestamp that their question will be placed in the video while they are dragging the time markers themselves.
Plio is now stronger 💪🏼
In every sprint, we make sure to dedicatedly park some time to work on performance enhancements for the platform. Beyond ensuring a smoother user experience, it also helps us ensure that we are being inclusive by being mindful of following the best practices with regard to accessibility. Plus, as developers, it’s a good learning experience for us as well to understand the best practices that we might not be aware of. This was made possible by the Lighthouse developer tool which I’d highly recommend you to check out.
Cypress Integration 🧪
As we’re getting new feature requests continuously, developer productivity becomes a very important factor, specifically with a small team like ours. Often, after we’ve added support for a new feature, we have to spend a lot of time manually testing various user flows. Although we have unit tests in place, they only give us an assurance that different components of our code work well in isolation. But we need to also ensure that all the components work cohesively together as well. This month, we took the first step towards automating this step by adding support for Cypress - an open-source tool that enables integration testing. Here’s a glimpse of how it looks like to see a Cypress test in action. Isn’t it cool?
A new product guide 📜
The last time we released a product guide was 6 months ago. The platform has gone through a number of significant changes since then, and an updated product guide was long due. Our new product guide is now live!
Make sure you check it out!
An inspiring story ❤️
Time and again, stories keep proving how powerful they are as a form of communication. It is stories such as the ones shared by Armaan and Jyoti ma'am in the video below that make it worth doing what we do.
Super excited for everything that we have in mind to make learning more accessible, engaging and meaningful for our students and teachers.
Release Notes
We worked on a bunch of other features, enhancements and bug fixes over the last month. Do check out our release notes if you want to know more about it:
We hope you enjoyed this month’s updates. If you are interested in becoming an early adopter of Plio and still haven’t signed up, what are you waiting for?
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