Jetpack 8.7: making it easier to reach your customers

This month’s release features new functionality for Jetpack Search, as well as enhancing three ways you communicate with your customers — through images, words, and direct contact.

More customization options for Jetpack Search

Since we released Jetpack Search a few months ago, we’ve continuously striven to improve its flexibility so it better fits your site.

This month, we focused on adding options for the look of the Search overlay.

• Choose between minimal and expanded results
• Change the default sorting to options — like chronological
• Hide the sort option to reduce the size of the interface

Easily import photos from Google Photos or a stock library

The block editor now gives you quick access to your Google Photos library, as well as thousands of free, high-quality stock images through Pexels Free Photos. Finding the perfect image for your post has never been easier.

Help your visitors contact you on WhatsApp

Want an easy way for your customers to ask for support, or questions about your products? The WhatsApp Button block will allow your site’s visitors to contact you via WhatsApp with the tap of a button.

Gather Twitter threads

Twitter can be a great place to publish your thoughts in a stream, but there are drawbacks, too. Expressing complex thoughts can be challenging, you can’t go back and edit what you’ve written, and it can be difficult for your readers to follow along.

You can now import your Twitter threads directly into your site, and edit them there: just paste a link to the first tweet, like you usually would to embed it, then tap the new “Unroll” button to bring it all in — ready for you to edit, and publish!

And more

As always, we’ve also made a lot of other improvements and bug fixes.

• We’ve added customization options to the Calendly, Mailchimp, Eventbrite, and Payment blocks.
• If you use our Ads feature, you’ll now have a new set of options in accordance with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
• We’ve made changes across a number of our embed solutions to be more compatible with the AMP plugin.

Note
After 8.7 was released, we released a maintenance version on July 14 to fix notices appearing in some environments.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to this release:

Aaron Robertshaw, Alex Kirk, Andy Peatling, Anne Mirasol, Ash White, Bernie Reiter, Biser Perchinkov, Brandon Kraft, Carlos Alvarez, Chris R, Christopher Finke, Collyn Philleo, Damián Suárez, Daniel Rey López, Daniel Walmsley, Derek Smart, Echo, Elio Rivero, Eoin Gallagher, Eric Binnion, Foteini Giannaropoulou, Gary Pendergast, Glen Davies, Greg Ichneumon Brown, Harris Papazolgou, Jacopo Tomasone, James Grierson, Jaroslav Polakovič, Jason Moon, Jeremy Herve, Jonny Harris, Kim Brown, Kirk Wight, Konstantin Obenland, Leo Germani, Marcus Kazmierczak, Marek Hrabe, Matt Gawarecki, Matt Geri, Matthew Denton, Michael P. Pfeiffer, Miguel Torres, Peter Westwood, Robert Franklin, Scott Evans, Sergey Mitroshin, Waclaw Jacek, Weston Ruter, Yaroslav Kukharuk.

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