This week, we finished upgrading all Roadie’s customers to Backstage 1.1.0, updated plantuml, and released quite a few UX improvements.

All Roadie’s tenants have been upgraded to 1.1.0

Upgrading Backstage is one of the most challenging points of adopting Backstage. We’ve heard reports from self-hosted teams spending up to 30% of their efforts managing upgrades.

In this upgrade, our engineers had to deal with breaking changes in core components such as authentication, Kubernetes, and permissions.

Thankfully, as a Roadie customer, you get the upgrades managed for you. All features, no pain!

Updated Plantuml

We updated the plantuml extension for mkdocs. You can now make use of more recent plant uml features in your TechDocs.

UX improvements of the week:

1. Filtering by kind (i.e. component, API, domain, etc.) was confusing for new users because the input had inconsistent styling. We’ve styled the kind filter to be in line with the rest of the filters.
2. Filtering by name used to only filter by metadata.name, but the UI displayed metadata.title, leading to confusing outcomes. Now, the filter consider both fields into account.
3. Sidebars didn’t allow editing, so teams would have to remove and re-add elements if they wanted a change, which could be frustrating. Now, sidebars allow editing their content.
4. The Intercom prompt would sit on top of other UI elements in a few scenarios, obstructing the user from using them. Now, the ‘Talk to us’ button is the last item of the sidebar menu.