May 2016 | New languages and better social media component – BEE support

On May 31, 2016 we'll release a new version of the BEE editor and its embeddable plugin. The software will be updated by 11am CET and will be automatically applied, including to all BEE Plugin users. No action on your part is required.

Here's a quick review of what's new.

Four new languages

BEE now supports 4 new languages:

Danish
German
Polish
Swedish

I guess we're showing our European roots here, uh? Actually, this is all community driven. Developers that have decided to use BEE inside their applications contacted us and offered to translate the editor in their language. If you want to do the same, just contact us (it's only a couple hundred text strings).

See a full list of languages supported by BEE.

And, yes, you're right, we are currently NOT taking advantage of multi-language support on BEE Free and BEE Pro. We hope to remedy that very very soon!

Improved social media component

Nothing earth-shattering here, but we worked on the user interface a bit to make things easier.

Fewer clicks

First, the URL associated with a social media icon that you have activated is now always shown. No more clicking on "Edit" to make it visible. It'll save you a few clicks!

Title and alternate text

Secondly, Title (or Name) and Alternate text (previously, incorrectly labeled "Description"), are accessible by click on "More options", and laid out more clearly so you know which one is which :-)

BTW: the Title/Name is the text that is shown when you mouse over the icon. Alternate text theoretically is the text shown when images are off in the email. Unfortunately, many email clients are silly and don't show it when its length exceeds that of the image width: social media icons are really small... so the Alternate text is often hidden. However, it's still important for accessibility reasons.

Sharing vs. following

Finally, we tried to better clarify the social share vs. social follow thing. As you know, you can add a social media icon to an email for two reasons:

To ask people to follow you on that social network
To ask readers to share the message using that social network

So... we now made it easier to identify what you are using your icons for. If you are adding a social sharing icon, the editor now adds a big "Share" tag to it.

For example, compare this Facebook "follow" icon...

... with this Facebook "share" icon:

Also, one clarification on social sharing. You can use it in two ways:

You enter the URL to be shared, like in the example above.
You enter a merge tag that will be replaced by whatever application will send the message... typically with the Web version of the email.

Since this second scenario is very popular, BEE adds a placeholder merge tag to the Url input field by default. The merge tag is called "ShareOn". Change it with whatever your merge tag your email service provider uses (or replace it programmatically yourself if you are embedding BEE into your application).

Spell check added

We've updated the text block to allow for browser-based spellchecking. You'll now be able to spot misspelled words, shown as underlined as we see below:

Other changes

We actually did a lot of work in this release, but much of it is "behind the scene" stuff that just makes things work better. A few more things worth mentioning:

Performance & maintenance improvements to the text editor
Fixed an issue with uploading files where the name contained non-Latin characters
Fixed an issue with the manual insertion of placeholders as text links
Fixed an issue when deleting files with a % symbol in the name
Fixed a Firefox incompatibility issue that resulted in not being able to sort social icons in the Social content panel
Fixed a button width issue when the message width is modified

If you have any questions, please post in the comments below!