What's new at RefBytes

Open any site and you now land on its Dashboard. Needs attention lists anything worth doing, like a newer version of Omeka, module or theme updates, an old backup, or a missing certificate, each with a button that does it or takes you there. Below that you'll see the site's version, storage, backups, installed modules and themes, and recent Activity.

The site's settings, including your Omeka admin login, are on the Settings page, now last in the list on the left.

The Sites page now shows each site as a card with a picture of its home page, so you can tell your sites apart at a glance. Cards also show each site's address, version, and storage, and flag any update that's waiting. Pictures are refreshed every night, or right away with Refresh picture on the card.

Prefer rows? Click List for a compact view, and to select several sites at once.

Click a site to open it. Public Site, Admin Site, Copy Site, and Backup are at the top of its pages.

Premium Modules and Premium Themes now have a tab for Omeka S and one for Omeka Classic, so you see only the ones made for the platform you're working with. Each tab shows how many there are. Click a tab to switch.

They open on Omeka S, or on Omeka Classic if all your sites use it.

Click Details on any premium module or theme and its screenshots now fill the top of the page as a slideshow. Use the arrows or the small pictures underneath to move between them, and click one to open it full size.

Below the slideshow, About and Release notes are now tabs, so the full description and the history of each version are a click apart.

If your institution needs something other than our standard plans, we can now set up a plan just for you, with the number of sites, people, and file storage you need, and circles and site templates if you want them. Instead of entering a card, you pay by invoice: each one is emailed to your billing contact with a link to pay it.

On a custom plan, Your plan in the menu shows how much of each limit your team is using and what the plan includes. To ask about one, get in touch.

Manage Subscription, in the menu under your team's name, used to show an error on accounts with no paid plan yet, including free accounts and free trials. It now takes you to our plans, where you can choose one and click Subscribe.

Only the person who created your team's account sees this option. Once you've subscribed, it opens the billing portal as usual.

When we have news for you, like planned maintenance or a new feature, it now arrives in the bell at the top of your dashboard and by email. Longer announcements open on a page of their own.

You choose how you get them. Click your initials in the top corner, choose Edit My Settings, and untick Announcements by email or Announcements in the dashboard under Email Preferences. The unsubscribe link in an announcement email turns off announcement emails only.

This page lists every change you'd notice in RefBytes, newest first: new features, improvements, and fixes to problems you may have run into.

Open it any time from What's new in the sidebar of your dashboard. The number beside it shows how many changes have gone live since you last looked.

Many of our premium modules and themes come in an edition for each platform, under one name. They're now listed separately, so you can tell which one fits your site.

In Premium Modules and Premium Themes, cards are grouped under Omeka S and Omeka Classic. Our website's Premium page and the docs are split the same way, and call Classic modules plugins, as Omeka Classic does. Premium themes now appear with a screenshot instead of an icon, including on each site's Themes page.

When you upgrade a site, its Version page now shows which version is installing and when it started. The site's version only changes once the install has finished, so a site no longer shows a version that didn't actually install.

While an upgrade is underway, the install button is greyed out, so a second one can't start on top of it. It comes back when the install finishes, or after 30 minutes if the server hasn't confirmed it by then.

Some guides now include short, silent videos of the whole task from start to finish. The Creating your first site guide opens with one, and the Premium modules and themes guide shows Design Studio trying style presets on a premium theme and publishing the result.

Videos play and loop on their own while they're on screen, and you can pause them any time. If your device is set to reduce motion, they wait until you press play.

We've rewritten every guide to using RefBytes so they match the dashboard as it looks today, and nearly all of them now include captioned screenshots, so you can see exactly where to click. There's a new guide to premium modules and themes, too.

Open the docs from Documentation in the menu, or Read the docs under Quick actions on your dashboard. The screenshots show a fictional college library, never a real customer's sites.

Because custom modules and themes run code on your sites, uploading them is now switched on team by team, and our staff review your team's first upload before it can be installed. After that approval, later uploads are approved automatically.

A team owner can ask for access: open Modules or Themes in the menu and click Request access. Uploading also needs two-factor authentication on your login. Versions you uploaded before stay available to install.

When you sign in, your dashboard now shows how many sites you have, how much file and database storage they use, with a 12-week trend for files, and when the last backup ran, with a warning if it's more than two days old.

Your sites lists your most recently updated sites, flags any with an update available, and opens each public site or Omeka admin in one click. Quick actions has shortcuts to common tasks, and Make the most of RefBytes suggests features your team hasn't tried yet.

We now build our own modules and themes for hosted Omeka sites, and they come with every plan. Anyone can browse them on the Premium page of our website.

Click Premium Modules or Premium Themes in the menu, then Install on site on any card and choose a site and version. Details has the full description and release notes. Premium items also appear on each site's Modules and Themes pages, marked Premium.