Happy new year everyone! We’re proud to announce Altis v10 is now available for immediate download.
Altis v10 brings our second Experience Block, the A/B Testing Block. For the first time, you can now experiment at the atomic block level to find your best performing content. Plus, we’ve revamped and upgraded our experimentation tools with the new Optimization Framework.
This release is a massive milestone for us, marking our tenth release since we launched. Every release since we launched has delivered significant improvements in both marketing and developer workflows, and this release is no different.
Marketing Experience
A/B Testing Blocks
Say hi to our second Experience Block (XB), the A/B Testing Block. 👋
This block opens up a world of possibilities, allowing you to test multiple variants of a single piece of content at the atomic block level. Create as many variants of your content as you want, and tweak your conversion goals to measure what matters.
Monitor your experiments’ performance from the insights page, and keep an eye on the conversion rate and aggregate lift. Plus, dive into each variant’s data to see precise user behaviour.
Just like Personalized Content XBs, A/B Testing XBs work everywhere blocks do: in blog posts, static pages, and even in widget content.
Featured Image Testing
Alongside A/B Testing XBs, we’ve also added another out-of-the-box post-level test for Featured Images. Combined with the ability to test your post titles, it’s now easier than ever to experiment with driving traffic to your key content.
Insights Dashboard is now the default
First released as a preview in v9, the Insights Dashboard has graduated to become our default dashboard experience. Plus, we’ve now fully integrated the Analytics view, allowing you to get a quick view of your sites’ traffic.
Developer Experience
Acceptance Testing Framework
Altis v10 introduces our Acceptance Testing Framework, allowing you to mimic user interaction for full end-to-end testing. We’ve bundled Codeception and integrated it with our zero-config continuous integration tooling, allowing you to get started in only a few minutes.
Fun fact: We use Codeception to test Altis itself.
Optimization Framework
Alongside our user-facing improvements to Experiments and A/B Testing XBs, we’ve revamped our existing Experiments framework into the new Optimization Framework. The Optimization Framework brings together all of the developer tools and APIs for experimentation and personalization, making it even easier to extend Altis functionality or build your own custom feature set.
These improvements are based on our own experience building the new Featured Image tests, with streamlined APIs making it that much simpler to optimize any aspect of your content.
ElasticPress 3.6
We’ve integrated the latest version of ElasticPress, bringing better tools and integration into your workflow.
EP 3.6 introduces the ability to index comments, providing new capabilities for community-driven sites and business-to-employee (B2E) use cases. New CLI commands assist with managing and debugging your indexes, while better integration with WP_Query means better results in more cases.
This upgrade will require reindexing to take full advantage of the new capabilities.
Note on WordPress 5.9
Please note that WordPress 5.9 is not included with Altis v10, which continues to bundle WordPress 5.8. This is due to the late release date of WordPress 5.9 in our release cycle.
WordPress 5.9 will be included with Altis v11, and we’ll additionally look to backport it to Altis v10 through a CMS module preview release.
Product Improvement
Public Roadmap
Our customers and partners are a key part of our journey, and we’re excited to make our roadmap publicly available within the Altis Dashboard; look for the new “Roadmap” link in the sidebar.
Interested in a potential feature? Leave feedback and let us know how you could make use of it. If you’ve got a brilliant idea, you can even suggest new features for our roadmap. This feedback is directly integrated into our roadmapping, and is one of the key factors in how we decide what to include in each release.
Telemetry
With Altis v10, we’re including more advanced telemetry tools within the core software to allow us to better understand feature adoption and user behaviour. This helps us to build better functionality for everyone on the platform.
Data is collected only about backend (WordPress admin) users for product development purposes, and users can change their preferences at any time through their user profile. Altis does not centrally collect data about visitors to your site, and visitor data as part of Altis Analytics is stored only within your data silo.
Altis v11 in April
As always, development on Altis never stands still, and we’re already preparing for Altis v11.
We expect to release the first beta of Altis v11 in the last week of March (2022 W13), with the final release in mid-April (2022 W15).
Plus, for the first time, you can check out a preview of our headline features in our public roadmap. If you’re interested in testing any of the features early, let us know!