Building Pika Out LoudModify

Soon after releasing the image lightbox feature in Pika we were asked to add navigation arrows to the lightbox so someone could browse through all of the images in a given blog post without having to click on each one. Guess what? It’s Friday, it’s here, and it’s pretty cool!

Try it for yourself by clicking or tapping an image below and then navigating all of the images on this post with the arrow buttons, your keyboard arrow keys, or a swipe of your finger:

Images courtesy of Public Domain Image Archive.

While services like Spotify and Apple Music dominate the music streaming landscape, there are many players out there. Lots of folks like Tidal for its sound quality and artist support. Many people have access to Amazon Music as part of their Prime accounts.

All of that is to say that it is high time for Pika to support Tidal and Amazon Music embeds!

Enjoy!

If you’ve been following along here, you’ll know we’ve been in tag-land recently. For our tag-loving Pika peeps, we’ve got something else for you: Now you can see a post’s tags right in the dashboard!

You can toggle this display from the new “Show/hide tags” option at the bottom of the tag filter dropdown:

Hot on the heels of Filters Posts by Tag, we’ve now added a dedicated section of the Dashboard to manage all of your tags!

At the bottom of the tag filter dropdown, you’ll see a new link to “Edit tags” which will take you to a place where you can do just that. The only thing about tags you can edit is the name, and doing so will update the tag on all of your posts. Perhaps there will be more functionality here in the future, but only time will tell…

Here at Pika we’re always trying to smooth the corners and help you avoid any small scrapes or bruises as you set about writing blog posts. In particular, we’ve put out a couple of updates that really make the menu system more useful and informative. We’ve also continued improving Pika’s newsletter offering. All that and more!

Writing posts:

• Added a bubble menu to make it quicker to format or link selected text

• Improved which toolbar items are enabled/disabled for given blocks of text

• Updated the editor to show your tags if they exist when editing a post

• Add posts Pika variable option to sort by title rather than date (see manual)

• Added capability to paste simply-formatted text into image captions

• Added ability to hide subscriber list in newsletter section

• Improved pasting capabilities in image captions

• Added a button to dismiss flash informational messages

Viewing your site:

• Added Latvian language support

• Improved layout of image galleries in newsletter emails

• Brought syntax highlight to code sent in newsletter emails

• Improved rendering of the newsletter subscription form

• Fixed a bug where social share summaries could include an image caption

Misc & Maintenance:

• Fixed a bug with horizontal scrolling of the mobile editor’s toolbar

• Fixed a bug with the image zoom cursor

• Improved some translations for built-in navigation items

• Improved lots of HTML markup

• Updated to latest Rhino editor version

• Security updates to supporting code libraries

We have a short-and-simple update for you to start this week! If you use tags in Pika, now you can filter your Posts dashboard by tag: