I am happy to announce the release of version 5.0 of FixMyStreet.

Mobile use and the Progressive Web App (PWA)

Mobile reporting now uses a crosshairs mechanism for locating the report rather than tapping, matching the old native app and providing an easier experience. We have added offline report drafting, where even if you do not have signal you should be able to start the basics of a report to carry on when back online.

The site is installable as a Progressive Web App (PWA) on Android and iOS, to be installed to your home screen via your browser, and both the UK and Sweden have successfully packaged the code as a native app using pwabuilder and submitted it to the app stores.

Accessibility

Early last year, we added keyboard navigation of the map for those who may be unable to use a pointing device. An accessibility audit was then performed on one installation of the site later in the year, and that has led to a number of other improvements, including some improved visual contrast, a couple of missing labels and fieldsets, and better focus states.

Admin improvements

You can now set a message in the admin per-body that will be shown on the reporting page, as well as one on the front page. We’ve paginated alerts on the user edit page for cases where a user has a lot of alerts, and now display photos in report moderation updates rather than just the image hashes.

If you are using response templates, you can now have a different template displayed as an update to the report to the text emailed to the user.

Development improvements

As our own installation of FixMyStreet spans multiple front end servers, and to help with stability of URLs for the PWA service worker, we have switched our static asset cache-busting from using last modified times to using a digest of the file contents. There is also an option to use the hash in the filename itself, rather than a query parameter, which again may be useful if you deploy on multiple servers.

Upgrading

A full list of changes can be seen in the v5.0 changelog as usual.

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If you have any questions, or problems installing the code, please do get in touch, or post on our mailing list.