We are delighted to release the latest version of Kanka which includes the new timelines feature, as voted for by our subscribers and patrons during our latest Community Vote.

New Features

Timelines

The long awaited timelines module has been added to the application as an early access feature for Boosted Campaigns, and the keyword for this new module is flexibility. A timeline can be split into several eras, and each era can have multiple “elements” that can be linked to entities.

Each entity linked to a timeline element has a new subpage called “Timelines” to quickly find where the entity is included.

Text Editor

We are also introducing a new opt-in text editor to Kanka. You can activate it for your account by going into your Layout Settings in your profile. The new editor has a few advantages, the biggest are that is it a lot faster, less buggy, extendable, and supports mentions on mobile browsers. A few features aren’t available from the new editor, notably support for advanced table formatting, but we believe the benefits massively outweigh the problems with the old editor.

Since the editor is such an important feature of Kanka, we hope that by making it opt-in, we can take it slow, detect any missing features and try to address them. You can switch back to the old editor at any time if the new one isn’t working for you.

Birth/Death of characters

Reminders on characters have a new “type” field that can be Birth or Death. This automatically calculates their age if still alive, the amount of years they were alive if they are dead, or years since death if only the death field is provided.

In order to input a birth or death dates, navigate to a character’s page, and then to the Reminders tab. From there, add a new Reminder and select the new “Type” dropdown.

These new values are only displayed on the character page. A character’s age is no longer displayed on character lists, as calculating this value is server intensive. Filtering by the age of a character still works on the old value.

Improvements

Added the tooltip on tags when viewing an entity.

Pinned relations with the same “relation” text are now grouped together.

Added new fields on Maps to control the initial, min and max zoom values.

The name field on Map Markers is no longer required if an entity is provided. The marker will use the entity’s name instead.

Accounts created with Facebook, Twitter or Google can now be deleted without having to switch to a Kanka login first.

The Quick Creator interface has a new “Back” button in case you selected the wrong entity type.

Added a new Relations API to quickly get all the relations of a campaign.

The gender field on characters (both the form and filter) will now suggest previously used values in the campaign.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue with large maps not loading in the maps module.

SVG files are supported in the Map but this information was missing from the image helper text.

Map Markers of polygon shapes with no coordinates will now display a standard Pin instead of being invisible.

The Maps nested view didn’t display properly.

The location families subpage linked to characters instead of families.

One last thing

We had our first livestream Q&A yesterday which we had a lot of fun doing! If you missed it and want to hear us talk about Kanka for nearly two hours, you can watch it over on our Youtube channel.