Custom authentication and easier sharing 😎
Monthly Release for June: v0.3
Plio is an open-source tool that empowers creators to make their videos interactive and gather rich analytics on user engagement. We are now open to all creators! 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 feature requests, come talk to us on our discord server:
We spent the last two weeks improving the user experience based on your feedback and making our systems more robust. We also have great team news at the end!
Read on to learn more :)
A clear post-publishing flow 🔥
Earlier, we used to generate a link on top of the preview screen on the editor after publishing a Plio. But one had to copy this link, open a new tab and paste this link to play the plio. Also, it was not clear to creators that the plio is meant to be shared using the link.
Now, once a Plio is published, the most common actions are made very prominent. We also realized that publishing a Plio calls for some celebration! 🎉
Easier Sharing ⚡️
Sharing is a key part of using Plio. But it still required multiple steps from the creator’s side. We have now added a button to share the plio in the Editor and the home page which the user can click to either copy the link to the plio or to share it through WhatsApp and Twitter. Share away, people!
Custom authentication for your viewers 🔑
Currently, watching a plio requires a viewer to first authenticate using either their email ID or their phone number. However, for many organizations using Plio, this added additional friction for their viewers. Being able to bypass Plio’s authentication was one of the most requested features. And, we heard you :)
Now, we enable organisations to use their API Key for doing precisely that. Following the steps mentioned in our newly released documentation page here, any organization using Plio can enable their viewers to skip the authentication step.
Logging and Monitoring Systems 🚨
Running a software product at scale is not an easy task. A bunch of systems need to talk to each other for the product to run smoothly in an integrated manner. There are lots of potential points of failure. Hence, it is essential to have mechanisms in place to ensure that our team is the first to know as soon as something goes wrong.
So, we have set up monitoring and logging systems to trigger alarms when any of our services break or encounter an error using Sentry, AWS Cloudwatch and Discord.
Higher Coverage for Automated Testing 🧪
We wrote about the importance of testing in our last post. Our team has been working very hard to get the coverage for both our front end and back-end code base to decent levels. And, we are happy to report that our back-end coverage is now up to a whopping 96% and our front-end coverage increased from a meagre 2% to 48%!
Bug Fixes and Enhancements 🐞
Earlier, if a user left the platform while being in the organisational workspace and returned, they were being redirected to the personal workspace. This is now fixed 💁🏽
Earlier, the “Publish” button used to get activated in a published plio upon reloading even when there were no changes. Not anymore! 😄
We often saw multiple markers showing up on the player as questions were answered. We have fixed this now 👻
We removed some useless packages to reduce the deployment package size 👀
We changed the colour of the proceed button that comes after answering a question as it was very similar to the submit button and hence, it was not intuitive that it represented a different action 👾
Now, a spinner is displayed while a new question is being added so that the user receives feedback that their action has been registered ✋🏽
We had recently created a data pipeline from RDS to BigQuery but the API for downloading report was still querying RDS, which we fixed 🤖
A ton of visual bug fixes😇 :
Fixed the option container on the preview screen that was becoming shorter in width when in fullscreen and when height was greater than the width
The image container was taking too much space when in portrait + fullscreen mode, which we fixed
Improved the responsiveness of using images with MCQ and Subjective questions.
A new team member 👩💻
After a long and arduous search process, we finally found the full-stack engineer that we have been looking for. We are super excited to have Sudheshna Donthineni join our team. Prior to this, she studied and worked for a little bit in the US. She returned home during the pandemic and actually built an ERP system for a local school. She comes from a family that works in the education sector and we are very fortunate to have her.
Release Notes
We hope you enjoyed this week’s updates. If you are interested in becoming an early adopter of Plio and still haven’t signed up, what are you waiting for?
Consider subscribing if you haven’t already to get notified of our future posts.
Best Wishes,
Team Plio