Major Release Notes

Version 5.17.0

Date: Oct 5, 2025

Content Reference

• Summary
  • Purpose:
• Restrict Banner to Virtual Theme - for Advisor Selection (Bedrock)
  • Key Highlights
  • Important Notes
  • Benefits
    • Banner Management under your pages
• Video widget for base theme (Bedrock)
  • Video Widget
    • Key Capabilities
    • Flexible Display Options
      • Or in a smaller layout location
  • Marketing Hub Video
  • Adding a Video to the Marketing Hub:
  • Styling Guidance
  • Benefits
• Banner Carousel Enhancement (Bedrock)
  • Part 1: Update widget update
    • Key Highlights
    • Notes
  • Part 2: Make the Update Widget the Banner as a carousel
    • Key Highlights
    • Carousel Banner Display:
    • Notes
• Powerup Connector Upgrade: Head & Body Content Integration
  • Common Use Cases
• Dashboard 2.0 additional details
  • Feature Overview
    • 1. Top Performing Blogs Table
    • 2. Underperforming Blogs Table
    • 3. Performance Chart
    • With these insights our goal is to help you:Reduce Noise and Clutter
    • Prevent Misleading Metrics
    • Enhance Performance Analysis
    • Encourage Smart Content Strategy
    • Why removing low-performing content can boost SEO
    • But don’t just delete pages randomly
• WCAG Enhancements
• Pentest Improvement
  • Key Highlights
  • Affected Fields
    • Blog Widgets:
    • Event Widget:
    •  Notes
• DashLoad: Supercharged Website Load and Performance (Bedrock)
  • Why the change?
  • What is changing?
  • Timing of changes?
  • User Experience?
  • Impact of Dashload?
  • DashLoad: Advisor Experience Change
  • DashLoad: Client Admin Experience Change

Summary

Release notes are essential documents that provide clients with detailed insights into the changes, enhancements, and updates applied to the Digital Agent platform. They serve as a crucial communication tool, informing clients about new functionalities, improvements, and other modifications that may be available to them.

Purpose:

The primary purpose of release notes is to ensure transparency and keep clients informed about the continuous development and enhancement of the Digital Agent platform. They help clients understand the value of the updates and how they might benefit from new features and improvements.

Restrict Banner to Virtual Theme - for Advisor Selection (Bedrock)

We are introducing enhanced controls for managing which banners are available to websites when assigned to a Virtual Theme, simplifying banner selection and improving content consistency across your site.

Key Highlights

• Streamlined Banner Selection:
  Marketing users can now easily manage which banners are available for a Virtual Theme, avoiding the need to navigate through banners that do not match the theme’s style.

• Controlled Access per Theme:
  Only banners explicitly assigned to a Virtual Theme will be available for selection by websites using that theme, ensuring a consistent visual experience.

• Implementation:

  • Banner selection is managed within the Virtual Theme editor in AdminHQ.

  • Two new areas allow users to select the banners that apply to the theme.

  • Once saved, only the selected banners are available for sites assigned to that Virtual Theme.

Important Notes

• By default, “No Video Selected” and “No Banner Selected” are applied to a theme. It is critical that the Marketing Team selects appropriate banners for each theme upon launch. Existing banner selections chosen at the website level would not be impacted.

• The assignment of Virtual Themes to sites remains unchanged, following existing permissions and workflows.

• This enhancement does not modify user experience when assigning themes; it only impacts which banners are available for selection.

Benefits

• Ensures banner content is aligned with theme styling.

• Reduces confusion by filtering out banners that do not align to a theme’s intended design.

• Improves efficiency for Marketing Teams and website users managing multiple sites and themes.

Banner Management under your pages

Note: If a site is not assigned to a virtual theme the existing experience of all available banners will continue to be the expected behavior.

Video widget for base theme (Bedrock)

Video Widget

A new Video Widget in Digital Agent, enabling richer multimedia experiences while maintaining accessibility and compliance standards.

Key Capabilities

• Add Video to Pages

  • The widget can be added anywhere in the body of a page.

  • Requires configuration upon placement to select a video from the Marketing Hub.

• Supports Accessibility (WCAG Compliant)

  • Video transcripts can be uploaded and displayed to meet accessibility requirements.

  • Optional audio descriptions can also be provided.

Flexible Display Options

• Includes default styling out of the box.

• Supports standard and compact layout options.

• Can be customized to match branding with CSS styling at the site level or Virtual Theme

Or in a smaller layout location

It will be critical for Marketing teams to style the video widget to the standards required for their virtual themes.  Supporting material will be added to the Digital Agent Knowledge base on CSS libraries to be utilized.

Marketing Hub Video

A new Video content type has been added to the Marketing Hub, allowing marketing teams to centrally manage and distribute approved video content.

After selecting the Video content the following information will be required.

Adding a Video to the Marketing Hub:

After selecting the Video content the following information is required:

Styling Guidance

• Out-of-the-box styles are provided.

• Marketing Teams must style the widget to align with brand guidelines and Virtual Themes for a successful user experience.

Benefits

• Enhances site engagement with multimedia content

• Ensures accessibility compliance (WCAG)

• Simplifies video management and reuse via the Marketing Hub

• Consistent video presentation across advisor websites

Banner Carousel Enhancement (Bedrock)

Part 1: Update widget update

We are excited to introduce a carousel option for the Update Widget, providing a dynamic new way to showcase your content. 

Note: No change to the selection of the content selection.  

This feature allows content to be displayed on a WCAG compliance carousel and can be placed anywhere on a page.  This feature allows for more content to be displayed on a page while keeping the page less cluttered.

Key Highlights

• New Carousel Presentation: Content can now be displayed in a carousel format, enabling a visually appealing, interactive experience for your website visitors.

• Flexible Placement: No change to placement of the update widget .

• Accessibility Compliant: Fully WCAG-compliant, ensuring content remains accessible to all users.

• Page Optimization: Allows more content to be displayed while reducing page clutter, creating a cleaner and more organized layout.

Notes

• No Changes to Content Selection: The process for selecting content remains unchanged. This enhancement only affects how the content is presented.

This feature is designed to improve user engagement, enhance content visibility, and maintain a clean, accessible page layout.

Part 2: Make the Update Widget the Banner as a carousel

Key Highlights

• No Banner Option:
  Users can now select a “No Banner” option. When selected, no banner will be displayed on the page, allowing for a cleaner layout or alternative content placement.

Carousel Banner Display:

Placing a carousel at the top of the page will now display the banner content in a carousel format, enabling multiple messages or visuals to rotate dynamically.

Notes

• Banner selection behavior is enhanced, but content selection remains unchanged.

• This feature provides flexibility in page design while maintaining accessibility and visual appeal.

Powerup Connector Upgrade: Head & Body Content Integration

The Powerup Connector provides greater flexibility for integrating third-party tools and custom scripts.

<head><body> of the all web pages, enabling significantly more integration scenarios and customization options.

Common Use Cases

This enhancement makes it easier to deploy advanced customizations without requiring code changes to website templates—delivering more power and control to users and site administrators.

This feature is available at both the Site Level and Organizational level

Dashboard 2.0 additional details

A new tab has been added to the Dashboard 2.0 navigation:

• Tab Name:

  • English: Content Reach

  • French: Portée du contenu

• Placement: Appears between Engagement and Conversion tabs

• Access: Available to all users with existing access to Dashboard 2.0 (no permission changes required)
  
  

This feature surfaces performance analytics for blog content based on analytics collected.   insights. Only blog posts that received traffic within the selected date range will appear, since analytics does not store records for pages with zero visits.

Feature Overview

The new Content Reach tab includes:

1. Top Performing Blogs Table

• Displays up to 50 blog posts ranked by total visits.

• Clicking the visit count opens a performance chart for that specific blog.

• Initially displays without a chart until a blog is selected.

• The Logic mirrors the existing "Top 5" engagement logic, expanded to 50 records.
  
  

2. Underperforming Blogs Table

• Displays the bottom 50 blog posts based on visits.

• Mirrors existing engagement table labels and formatting.

• Content with no visits during the selected timeframe will not appear.
  
  

3. Performance Chart

• Line chart displays visit trends over time for a selected blog.

• By default, it will show data for the top performing blog when a date range is applied.

With these insights our goal is to help you:
Reduce Noise and Clutter

Displaying hundreds of zero-visit pages clutters dashboards and slows down the ability to interpret results. Removing them keeps reports clean and efficient, allowing users to quickly identify trends and patterns.

Prevent Misleading Metrics

Including zero-traffic posts can distort averages and skew performance perceptions. By removing them, the metrics better reflect content that users are actually interacting with.

Enhance Performance Analysis

Users can clearly see:

• What content is performing well

• What content is underperforming but still getting some engagement

• Where to focus improvement efforts

• Zero-visit posts do not contribute to this analysis and can be dealt with separately through content strategy reviews.

Encourage Smart Content Strategy

By removing irrelevant zero-traffic noise:

• Marketing teams can focus on optimizing low-performing but discoverable pages.

• Editorial teams can audit and decide whether zero-traffic pages should be updated, archived, or re-promoted separately.

Why removing low-performing content can boost SEO

Google values quality over quantity. When a site has a lot of thin, outdated, or low-quality pages, it can drag down overall SEO performance. This is known as content bloat or index bloat. Cleaning up weak content can improve:

But don’t just delete pages randomly

Blindly deleting blog posts can hurt SEO if:

• They have backlinks

• They target important keywords

• They get seasonal traffic

• They are referenced internally or externally

WCAG Enhancements

This release addresses an accessibility issue where there was no programmatic association between a visible label and its corresponding checkbox fields in custom forms. As a result, screen readers were not able to announce checkbox group context or individual options correctly, leading to a poor experience for users relying on assistive technologies.

This enhancement introduces proper ARIA labelling so checkbox groups are announced accurately by screen readers.

Pentest Improvement

We have enhanced the Digital Agent application to improve security and data integrity by restricting the entry of JavaScript content across key fields.

Key Highlights

• Enhanced Security: Prevents the insertion of potentially harmful scripts (JavaScript) into input fields, reducing the risk of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

• Improved Data Integrity: Ensures that content entered in these fields is safe and behaves as expected across the application.

Affected Fields

This restriction has been applied to the following areas of the application:

Blog Widgets:

• Blog Excerpt

• Page / Blog Meta Description

Event Widget:

• Address Line 2

• City

• State / Province

• Zip / Postal Code

 Notes

• Users will no longer be able to enter JavaScript code in these fields.

• Standard text and formatting can still be used as usual.

DashLoad: Supercharged Website Load and Performance (Bedrock)

The UAT environment for bedrock customers will be enabled for Dashload,  This feature will not be enabled into production during this release.     

For clients on Bedrock post we will be reaching out post release 5.17.0 to schedule the enablement of Dashload in production.

Why the change?

• Improving site page rendering performance

What is changing?

• Digital Agent has been rendering site pages in real time to generate the content when requests are made by a site visitor.  Digital Agent will be moving to a publishing model for website pages.  Most changes will be captured at various points in the application.  Some changes such as moving items around on a page which don’t need to go through compliance again will require to be published.

Timing of changes?

• There will continue to be a delay between the publishing start to the time content appears on the website and will continue to be between 10-20 minutes.
  
  

User Experience?

• The advisor will have the ability to publish a single site page at a time if required.  

• As a client admin a user will have the ability to publish the whole site.

Impact of Dashload?

• Tests have been performed with content against sample production environments comparing it with the same content in UAT with Dashload.  Below is a comparison of the results.  

• Digital Agent has been moving to a publishing model instead of generating content dynamically and, as a result, this translates to a significant performance improvement on page speed.

DashLoad: Advisor Experience Change

In most cases the process for our clients has not changed but there are a few situations where it may be necessary to publish the page.  At the top of the page content there is a “Re-publish” button in order to do so.  In the case of feature changes or content that is approved through compliance the re-publishing is processed automatically without any user intervention.  

This is the sample screen for “Re-publish”

DashLoad: Client Admin Experience Change

There may be instances that Marketing needs to “Re-publish” an entire website and this can be achieved with a new option under the Admin HQ - Hub Manager - in the dropdown for the website there is the option to “Dashload Website” which republish all pages for the entire site.