2018-10-31 Happy Halloween Summer End Update

date: 2018-10-31 11:28:36+00:00

The spring and summer of 2018 were the two busiest seasons at Kiva Logic in history. We celebrated our 8th birthday in July, 2018, and during the past two seasons we have launched more new businesses and helped migrate more companies to the Kiva Logic software then in any other two seasons in our history. It's been busy.

You might have noticed that the number of changelog updates we've released has been pretty darn low. In fact though, since our last blog post back in May, we've pushed out over 1000 commits to the Kiva Logic master code base.

That's great, but you might be asking yourself as a customer or potential customer of Kiva Logic, what else has been going on? Well, in a nutshell- lots of little things!

We've been building tons of small features that aren't necessarily worth an update. Features that in our opinion 'should just be there'. For example, on our Drip Campaign page, we added a way for you to export your drip email list so that if you want to use the emails that have subscribed to a campaign for a remarketing or retargeting campaign, you can do that! This feature, in our opinion, should 'just be there'.

Lot's of things like that.

A Few Feature Updates

NEW: Vendors/farmers page now have 'read more links'. This builds dynamic new pages of content based of the information that you have entered in for your farmers and/or vendors.

NEW: send an SMS message to customers by scanning a QR code when their order is delivered!

NEW: on the driver sheets, TO and FROM messages on Gift Boxes are now printed in the special instructions

System Updates

We've also been making some system, hardware, and infrastructure updates that you may or not be interested in (mostly technical stuff here, you can skip this section if you want):

Some minor updates to improve on-page SEO, remove chance of duplicate content flag in the shop for products in multiple categories.
fixed some indexes on the system log to make looking at a customer's log much, much faster. This issue mostly affected companies who joined before 2015.
Auto address completion using the google maps API is live. You can enable this on the settings page on v2.
deployed more shop user interface updates so it just looks better, and better on more screen sizes!
...and also updated 'touch' areas around shopping buttons to make them easier to use on mobile & in the apps.
sign up and contact page forms updated so that when entering in a number, the number pad will show up on a smartphone instead of a full keyboard. Also built in 'autofill' to every input, and google claims that can help boost conversions by 30%! We'll see!
built a completely new acceptance test for our build process for 'a la carte' companies (like water delivery, dog food, diaper delivery, etc.) This helps add more stability and catches bugs before they escape into production.
daily live database snapshots for debugging! One of the hardest things is trying to debug something that happened a week ago. Now, we've always had nightly backups that are stored locally and in another offsite location, so don't worry about your backups. This daily snapshot only saves the most current data, so if you had a problem last Tuesday, we can load that snapshot into our debugging servers and instantly time travel to where the bug happened!

Infrastrucure Updates

We've also been slowly updating our database and app servers. Before we migrate your system to our updated infrastructure, we'll contact you to let you know if there's going to be a minute or two of downtime. We'll also work with you to schedule the minute or two downtime for a window when you have the least amount of traffic, on a day where you have the least going on system-wide.

These updates are being done to improve stability, and also to improve speed.

What's in the pipeline?

Progressive web apps feature :) No ETA yet, but we're hoping to start building this feature by the end of the year. Yep, it's happening!