This is our most exciting release to date. Here we go: 🎉
You have to try the new toolbar out - you can walk through your own website or app and see where users are clicking. We did it on our own site and immediately found out a lot of things that surprised us, and it gave us a ton of areas to work on our own conversion rates. Go to your /setup page to switch the beta on.
Feature flags have also come out! If you're a developer and thinking of tweaking something a little out there, they give you more control. Like, woah.
On top of that (yep, there is more), we have a better retention view, deployment on platform.sh, new ways to edit our code with Porter, and a whole load of performance improvements as always.
If you're self hosting and desire these features - update your PostHog.
Please also update your posthog-js version to at least 1.2.4 if you have it installed via NPM. If you're using the snippet, you're good to go!
Release notes
Toolbar
It's like inspect element, but for user data.
Easily see the ranking of which parts of the page your users are interacting with the most:
We learned a ton about our product and website within minutes of trying this out.
How to use it:
Step 1 - go to your setup page, and switch it on:
This little buddy will appear over your website, only if you are logged into PostHog (it will NOT appear for your regular visitors…):
Hover over him to get started!
Fair warning! (It's BETA! Really!)
The toolbar is now in public beta! No, not "gmail beta", real BETA! There's still a lot of work to be done (follow along here!). It will feel like a bumpy ride on an unpolished road, especially when you click the mysterious "dock" icon! 👀
However, as we already found so much value in using this toolbar ourselves, we felt it was ready to share with you all!
When you're trying it out, please raise all issues that you find here!
Feature flags
This is the first step in the direction of becoming a product experimentation platform.
Feature flags let you roll out changes to users with a certain property, or to a percentage of users, or some combo of the two.
Why use it? For now, this lets you carefully release big changes to gather early user feedback, or to check that nothing is broken by a new feature.
In the long run, we intend on improving the connection between feature flags and the rest of the stats. If you see a cool use case, let us know about.
Learn more about how to use feature flags, and please give us any feature requests for these that you would like to see in a future edition.
Flutter Integration
You asked for it and now it's here!
Retention page
PostHog already had stickiness, but now there is a table that demonstrates perhaps more clearly how your users are coming back (or not!)
Head to the users menu in the left hand navigation to give it a whirl.
Better onboarding
You may be one of the lucky folks whom we asked to watch setting up the product. That really made obvious to us that are set up process was a little confusing.
We've had a go at redoing how our set up flow works, and will be tracking if it helps more people get through PostHog's own funnel!
Platform.sh deployment
You can now deploy on platform.sh - a very simple, new and trendy way to get up and running.
One click deploy for platform.sh (#1044)
Porter development
We always love it when a community pull request appears.
Porter is what the cool kids are using to do web development in the cloud. Thank you so much to porter-dev for creating this pull request.
Hopefully that'll make life easier for other people to contribute.
Event name filtering
By popular demand, you can now filter the events table by the event name. Happy debugging your implementations!
Bug fixes and performance improvements
- We are now more privacy friendly - you can discard IP address data
- Added the offer of a free pairing session to the contributing guide - ask us!!
- We fixed a bug with the start times for the session view
- We improved the ./bin/test command
- We now let you break down users by their properties (it wasn't working before!)
- We sped up the people page - pro tip: don't load stuff you don't need!
- We disabled batching in the snippet, since this helps prevent data loss
- Fixed a weird bug with moving from sessions to trends
- Fixed person properties being selected, which was causing some issues with the stats.
- We now automatically select hourly if you're looking at data from just today or yesterday - it was weird otherwise!
- We turned today into the last 24 hours - you can now think of yourself as Jack Bauer
- The people modal now has pagination
- We now copy array.js.map as well as everything else to better debug errors
- We now show a warning for old browsers, and feel bad for those in big enterprises that must use them!
- Black now added to post commit hooks, so we don't get crazy all-file reformatting
- Fixed an issue with force refreshes for cache in certain places
- We fixed a failing test problem with team_id
- Improved person properties and pagination
- Solved a Sentry error with overly long text
- We cleaned the configs for release-drafter
Favorite issue
"Host" and "Path name" event properties are not set for some events.
Another thing we fixed in posthog-js this week! It was actually fixed a fortnight ago, yet we forgot to push it out! Oops! 🙈
Weekly round up
Share your feedback
We'd love to hear anything you have to say about PostHog, good or bad. As a thank you, we'll share some awesome PostHog merch.
Want to get involved? Email us to schedule a 30 minute call with one of our teams to help us make PostHog even better!
PostHog news
We are hungry for your feedback this week.
Feature flags and the toolbar (and bringing those together one day) could really propel the product forward - please raise bugs, ask for more features, and let us know what you think!
Open roles
Full stack or growth engineers - we want you!
Ready to find out more?