We’ve worked to make moving from Publish to Bolt a seamless experience, building out Bolt’s functionality to be equal or better than that of Publish, and automating many of the key steps in the migration to make it swift and error-free.
With that said, we also want to take this opportunity to let you do more than simply mirror the experience from your current app. Bolt has an expanded feature set and is substantially more flexible than Publish, so we’ve written this document to help you understand these options and decide what questions you need to ask.
App Submissions
Your new apps are simply submitted as a new version, just like any other Pugpig upgrade. While we are doing the upgrade, the Publish app will continue to work. In fact, the same content will power both your Publish App and new Bolt app so that users can have time to upgrade to the latest and greatest version.
Content structure
Bolt follows the same tab-based layout as our newer versions of Publish. This means you can have up to 5 tabs on the bottom bar that are any combination of:
- Timelines
- Storefronts
- Settings
- Search
- Saved
- Custom Web View
Customers using the dual publishing configuration of Publish (Both standard editions and a continuous/latest news edition) will want one storefront tab and one timeline tab. Almost all of you will want a settings tab to handle account management, downloads and as a home for any necessary privacy policies etc. Additional content types, such as video, audio or puzzles are a great candidate to break out into their own timeline tab. Both storefront and timeline tabs can be further divided into multiple timelines or filter groups.
Settings tabs are also much more flexible, and can feature any combination of predefined items (i.e. Sign in, subscribe and link accounts, saved timeline, search) and ad hoc links to pages of your choice.
Analytics
The analytics do change between Publish and Bolt, primarily because the analytics need to map to the structure of the app. Rest assured that the newer analytics provide more insight into the behaviour than the older version. You can read more about analytics in Bolt here:
https://pugpig.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4411639348753-Pugpig-Bolt-Analytics-Starter-Guide
App Features
There are also some brand new features you could consider including in your app. These include:
- A much better experience allowing for multiple sets of content timelines, and multiple storefronts. That's the point!
- A metered paywall for anonymous users to allow users to sample content before being asked to buy.
- Far more options for PDFs (see next section)
- A more elegant flow for web based (PKCE) sign in, and receipt linking to your back end system
All of the important features they you are used to in Publish are available in Bolt. There are a few changes worth noting:
- Bolt currently does not provide Single Issue Purchases from the Storefront. We've learned that virtually all our apps that need single issue sales perform better when they allow the user to preview content. So the Single Issue call to action is provided when a user hits the paywall.
- Bolt does not offer Promo Slots on the Storefront. However, we have new and better way to achieve a similar result and we can discuss options with you.
- The Feed Picker that allows users to choose regional feeds (e.g. English or Scottish editions) is being replaced by a new, more generic Timeline Sets concept
- The downloading and offline behaviour has been revamped so it should be fast and use less space on the device. You can read more here
Be sure to check the release notes for information on new features:
PDFs
Bolt supports our full range of PDF capabilities, in short these are
- Enhanced PDF: The ability to have the HTML versions of articles accessible by tapping on the article in the PDF view. Users can read the entire edition in either format, swapping back and forth at their leisure.
- Double page spreads: On larger screens, pages will be rendered side-by-side, as they would be in a physical
- Improved PDF fidelity: Bolt features a greatly improved PDF renderer, meaning that pages are crisper and clearer.
- We've added the ability to provide Full Edition PDFs to download for users that really like printing out entire books.
Your PDF workflow will not need to change. You can continue to use any of:
- Upload PDFs to Pugpig via STFP
- Use the automated XCago integration
- Manually upload your PDFs into the CMS
HTML Content
There should be very little difference between how the HTML content pages are shown in your new Bolt App. It's extremely unlikely you'll need to change any content. Bolt uses WKWebView on iOS, which might be slightly different from the older UIWebView used on earlier versions of publish.
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