Cameo includes a number of behind-the-scenes updates added in the last month. These should not affect you directly, but like all code changes they may have unexpected side effects, so I’m letting you know about them in case. These modernisations mostly improve security and reliability.

  • TinyMCE, the template editor, has moved from version 5.2 to 5.10. At the same time, adjustments to how it manages tables should prevent accidentally making them fixed width. That could have happened if you inadvertently nudged the edge of a table in the editor. However, you may occasionally notice a side effect where tables with small amounts of text do not occupy the full width available.
  • Forms now include an error handler. If something goes wrong in the browser side of a form when embedded in a web site, Cameo now reports the problem back. This mitigates a recent incident where forms which worked inside Cameo broke for a short while when embedded externally. It should also pick up some less critical programming errors.
  • Cameo applies some security controls more rigidly than before. This further limits the scope of intrusion attempts.
  • Cameo has merged three kinds of geographic boundary information – named areas, political boundaries and delivery rounds – into one internally. This saves a significant amount of memory that the relatively small number of such records use.
  • PHPMailer, the software used to deliver emails, moved from version 5 to 6. The old version is incompatible with the forthcoming PHP version 7.4 that runs the whole system on the server.
  • Two separate controls for ignoring two-factor authentication when logging in on trusted computers (for password and biometric logins) have been merged into one.
  • Backups now only save new and updated records. This means we need multiple backup files to restore a complete system. However, this saves a large amount of disk space. Previously, this technique (known as accumulative and incremental backup) only applied to attachment files. Now, it also applies to the database as well.