What is S2?
S2 is what we call the new version of our campaign server. The campaign server interacts with our Builder to show you a preview of your landing pages as you build them and is responsible for displaying your published landing pages. Upgrading the campaign server has allowed our team to make major performance and functionality upgrades, as well as improve processes for adding new features in the future.
Our original campaign server, which we affectionately call S1, was designed a decade ago in 2010. It uses an older architecture that has limited our ability to introduce new features. Going forward, new features will be introduced solely on S2; however, S1 will continue functioning as-is for an indefinite period of time.
What’s new in S2?
A number of new features and improvements big and small have been added to S2.
New: The Upload Field for Forms
One of the biggest features we’re bringing to the table with S2 is what you can upload to a form – multiple images, videos and social media posts.
With the new upload field, your audience can upload multiple images*, directly upload videos* and submit social media posts, none of which is supported in S1. This opens the door to running a number of new promotions, including:
- Before and after contests, where people submit photos of a transformation before and after it happens (e.g. before and after room makeover, before and after haircut);
- Multi-image contests, where participants submit multiple images to enter (e.g. a pet food giveaway where entrants can submit a photo of each of their pets);
- One-step video contests, which allow people to upload their video directly to ShortStack instead of hosting it through another service and then linking to it;
- TikTok contests, where people submit their TikTok posts to display in a gallery for a chance to win;
- And much more!
*Subject to plan limitations
New: The Entry Display Widget
We’ve redesigned the Voting Widget and renamed it the Entry Display Widget. The Entry Display Widget is designed to more seamlessly present entries where multiple media elements have been submitted.
The most notable differences between the S2 Entry Display Widget and the S1 Voting Widget are that the Entry Display Widget has:
- A simpler tiled layout, where the number of columns is set in the Style Panel;
- A new popup view that displays when an entry tile is clicked or tapped;
- Settings that make it easier to configure which custom fields appear within the entries.
New: Code Redemption
Our code redemption feature allows you to reward entrants for submitting a valid code.
New: The NavBar Widget
Our new NavBar Widget allows you to add a responsive navigation bar to your landing page. Navigation bar elements can link to different sections within your landing page, trigger actions on your landing page and send users to external URLs.
New: The Paging Widget
With our new Paging Widget, you can create sub-navigation within your ShortStack campaign. Break your content up between different pages and use URLs to direct visitors to those sub-pages. Paging works well with the NavBar Widget to allow seamless navigation between different sections of your campaign.
New: Email to Vote Restrictions
We’ve added a voting restriction to our arsenal of voting tools. Now you can require people to submit and verify an email address in order to vote. Upon clicking the vote button, the voter will see a popup asking them to enter their email address. After that, they’ll receive an email with a verification code. Then they’ll enter the code into the popup on your landing page so their vote is counted. This is a perfect tool for contest administrators who don’t want to limit voting by IP address.
New: The Categories Field
You can now use a single form to collect all of your entries across multiple categories. Just add a Categories field to your form and enter the categories you want to use. Then use the Entry Display Widget to display your entries by category.
New: The Tracking Widget
Our new Tracking Widget makes adding Google Analytics and Facebook pixels easy. Just add your UA code and pixel IDs, then choose from the tracking options available. After you launch, you can see how many page views and form submissions you receive in real-time.
New: Invite-only Landing Pages
Sometimes you only want to grant access to content to people you specify. In S2, we’ve added the ability to create invite-only landing pages. These landing pages can only be accessed by people on your ShortStack list(s) who have received an invitation link via email.
Further Improvements
- Faster load times: The Builder responds faster when working on S2 landing pages.
- Original file exports: You’ll receive the original image and video files uploaded with the entry (social media posts are not exported). In contrast, S1 resized images to fit inside a 1000×1000 pixel box.
- More complex actions are possible: Action Widgets placed inside hidden Container Widgets are disabled until the Container Widget is visible, permitting more complex actions to be achieved.
Future Improvements
Right now, we have the following improvements in the works:
- Better localization for your landing pages: We’re making it easier to support multiple languages and allow you to reuse translations from landing page to landing page.
What isn’t currently available in S2?
With S2, we’ve streamlined the Builder to offer the features most valuable to our customers.
However, some features didn’t make the cut. The following features are not currently supported in S2:
- The Gallery Widget, Product Widget, and Video Widget, but you can get similar functionality by submitting entries to a list and displaying them in an Entry Widget. Alternatively, with the Video Widget, you can copy the embed code provided by YouTube or Vimeo and place it in a Code Widget on your landing page.
- The Newsletter Widget, Mailchimp Widget, Soundcloud Widget, Google Maps Widget, Comment Widget, Twitter Widget and Like Button Widget, though you can get similar functionality by following the instructions for each provider on embedding and dropping that embed code into a Code Widget on your landing page.
- The Google Analytics Widget, Iframe Widget, and Plain Text Widget, but you can get similar functionality with a Code Widget.
- The Poll Widget, Login Widget, RSS Widget and Instagram Widget. There are no workarounds for these widgets.
- Publishing to a Facebook Page as a Page Tab App.
- Internet Explorer.
S2 Transition Phases
To make your transition to S2 as painless as possible, we’re rolling it out in phases. As a valued ShortStack customer, you will have access to S1 for as long as you need it.
Phase 1
Default for new campaigns is S1, but you can choose S2
Phase 2
Default for new campaigns is S2, but you can choose S1
Phase 3
S2 will be the only choice for new campaigns, but you can still copy an S1 landing page
For Developers
The following changes will mostly interest developers:
- Code Widget content is rendered inside a div, so you don’t want to use Code Widgets to surround other widgets with arbitrary tags, as you may have done in S1. Furthermore, we’ve simplified the markup of Container Widgets in S2 so they only render a single div.
- Date fields are sent in ISO 8601 format in webhooks.
- all_address_fields in webhooks separates each address component with a comma.
- When you include the image field in webhooks, you’ll receive a file_urls parameter with an array of URLs pointing to each file or social media post that was uploaded with the entry.
- jQuery is not included by default, as it was in S1, but can be included with a Code Widget.
- The event system is different in S2 than S1, so be sure any event triggers you add with custom code reflect the appropriate events.