News & Roadmap

Overview

The News and Roadmap tabs turn your widget into a two-way communication channel. Visitors can read your latest announcements and actively shape your product by voting on feature requests.

Both tabs are optional, and each one needs a paid module. Enable them at Brand → (your brand) → Chat widget → Features — News in the News Feed section, Roadmap in the Roadmap section. Each has a Menu Title and a Show on Navbar switch. News needs the Marketing automation module and Roadmap needs Feedback boards & bug tracker; without them the switch is still on the screen but greyed out, with "Not included in your plan" beside it.

News

A feed of your published news articles with images, rich text, and date stamps.

Roadmap

A public board of feature requests visitors can browse, upvote, and contribute to.

News

The News Feed

When a visitor opens the News tab, they see a scrollable list of article cards. Each card shows:

Image — a featured image if one was uploaded
Title — single-line, truncated if long
Preview — up to two lines of the article body (HTML stripped)

Cards are sorted newest-first. Tapping a card opens the full article inside the widget.

Reading an Article

The detail view displays the full article:

Featured image at the top (full width)
Article title
Publication date
Rich HTML body (with formatted text, images, tables, and more)

A back button in the header returns the visitor to the news list.

Home Screen Integration

News articles can also appear on the widget's Home Screen when you add a NEWS card. Clicking a news card from the home screen switches to the News tab and opens that article directly.

To create and manage news articles, use Marketing → Engagement → News & Releases. That menu group used to be called Outreach; the web addresses did not change. See the News & Releases dashboard article.

Empty & Error States

If no articles are published yet, visitors see a newspaper icon with "No news articles yet" and a prompt to check back later. If something goes wrong loading the feed, a friendly error message is shown instead.

Roadmap

The Board

The Roadmap tab shows a public feature request board. Visitors see one status column at a time, selected from a dropdown at the top. Only columns you've marked as public are visible.

Each column has a colored indicator next to its name, matching the color you've set in the dashboard.

The Roadmap Board picker is the only content picker left on the widget. Everything else the widget used to choose — the knowledge base, the documentation set, the AI agent — now belongs to the brand. Boards are different: they belong to the organisation rather than to any one brand, so the widget still has to say which one it displays.

Feature Request Cards

Each card on the board shows:

Title — a clear, automatically generated summary of the request
Description — a short summary, up to two lines
Upvote button — an arrow icon with the current vote count

Titles and summaries are generated so visitors always see a clean, readable roadmap — never the raw form answers. See Ticket View for how they're set and edited.

Reading a Request

Tapping a card opens the request in a detail view with its full title, summary, submission date, and upvote button. A back button in the header returns the visitor to the list.

Sorting

A dropdown lets visitors switch between two sort orders:

Sort	Behavior
Most Votes	Highest-upvoted requests first (default)
Most Recent	Newest submissions first

Upvoting

Visitors upvote by clicking the arrow icon on a card. The first time they upvote, the widget asks for their email address — this is a one-time requirement stored for the session.

Visitor clicks the upvote arrow

If they haven't provided an email yet, a modal appears asking for one.

They enter their email

Basic format validation ensures the address is valid. The email is saved and linked to the visitor's record.

The vote is recorded

The arrow and count update immediately. Clicking again removes the vote (toggle behavior).

Upvotes are tracked by email address — one vote per email per feature request. The email is also saved as a cookie so returning visitors don't need to enter it again.

Choosing Which Columns Are Public

Open the board itself at Tickets → (board). On a column's menu, choose Make Public — the same menu offers Make Private to take it back off the roadmap. The board's first, default column is the intake column and cannot be made public.

Requesting a Feature

A "Request a Feature" button is pinned at the bottom of the Roadmap tab. Clicking it opens the board's default form, where visitors can submit their own feature requests. Forms live on the board's own Forms tab, at Tickets → (board) → Forms — the old Settings → Boards page no longer exists, and every board is now a row in the sidebar under Tickets.

The Header Logo

The logo at the top of the public roadmap page comes from the brand's logo (Brand settings → Brand images), falling back to the widget's logo when the brand has none.