What We’re Working On

At Permanent, we work on a quarterly cadence on several big projects. September wraps up the third quarter of the year, and our team has been working on a number of important projects that we hope to wrap up this month. Below are some highlights about the progress we’ve made this quarter on these projects (check out July’s Product Updates blog post for more information about these projects).

Continue Archivematica Integration Work: The Permanent application has previously used multiple sizes of thumbnails across the platform. Archivematica only generates one size. The engineering team decided which size to generate, and added the new thumbnail fields to the appropriate database tables.

Staff Admin Panel: We’ve made great progress on the Staff Admin Panel! Non-engineering staff members can now sign into the panel in a more streamlined way to create new promo codes.

Plan Improvements to the API: Our engineering team read The Design of Web APIs by Arnaud Lauret to learn more about what makes a good API. They applied their learnings to create some guidelines for improving Permanent’s API in the future.

Update Onboarding UI: Experience team staff have been working diligently to review the new screens that the engineers have built for the sign in and sign up pages on the web app. In the next few weeks, you’ll likely see a new layout for these pages.

To learn more about our development plans, please check out our updated Product Roadmap.

Recent Releases, Improvements, and Fixes

New Member Checklist: While most existing members may not see this update, now, when you create a new account on Permanent, you’ll see a New Member Checklist in your first archive. This checklist encourages new members to take a number of steps to finish setting up their account and their first archive. We hope this will help those who are new to the Permanent community learn how to get started on Permanent.org.

Bug Fixes: We are always fixing bugs (that is, small problems) that you report to us. For high priority bugs, our turnaround time is one to two weeks. Recently, we fixed: (1) the deeplinking for reset password links on iOS tablets, and (2) broken links when trying to navigate to the Public Gallery from your archive’s workspaces.

We want to hear from you! If you find a bug or wish to tell us about a feature or improvement you’d like to see, contact us at support@permanent.org and we’ll add it to the list. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

If you have reported a bug or product improvement and wish to see its status, you can view the Member Improvements List here. We try to work on these bug fixes and improvements in order, so check back to see when your reported issue is resolved.

User Testing Opportunities

Interested in future user testing opportunities? You can sign up to be notified about future user testing opportunities at this link.