Enhanced Content Testing and Whatfix Player Extension

Overview

Testing Whatfix content across environments is confusing and time-consuming. Switching between multiple extensions—Preview, Dev, and Production—makes it difficult to know which one to use. You often had to install, enable, disable, and toggle between extensions just to check small changes.

Introduced in 2024, the Preview Extension enables AC-code previewing after the Studio moved to MV3. However, the extension's purpose is unclear.

IT teams deploy multiple extensions across departments, which adds administrative overhead. To avoid these complexities, users use manual testing loops. You publish content for reviewers, ask them to validate it in the Production environment, and then unpublish it.

Overall, this process was time-consuming, complicated, and error-prone.

Introducing Enhanced Content Testing

The introduction of the Whatfix Player Extension and enhanced environment mapping simplifies content testing and extension management. You have greater control over what content you want to preview and in which application environment. By introducing an extension that consolidates multiple previous extensions along with preview functionalities, Whatfix is simplifying the testing landscape.

The content testing is simplified as follows:

• Smarter Environment Configuration: Map the Whatfix Guidance dashboard stages (such as Ready and Production) to specific environments of your application. For example, the Ready stage to a lower environment and the Production stage to a live environment.

• Whatfix Player Extension: Preview content using a single extension that serves both testers and end-users. You can choose which stages to preview content from.

Note:

The enhanced application environment configuration and Whatfix Player Extension are beta features and available only for Browser Extension mode of delivery. To enable these features, contact support@whatfix.com.

Smarter Environment Configuration

To simplify testing and ensure accuracy, Whatfix now provides a unified Environment Configuration framework. Define application environments using URLs and URL patterns, window variables, DOM attributes, CSS selectors, and more. You can also map Dashboard stages to the environments that dictate the content display rules for environments.  

With this method, you no longer need to go through different testing loops.

Read the following sections to learn how to map the Ready and Production stages:

• Configure the Ready stage environment

• Configure the Production stage environment

Configure the Ready stage environment

Whatfix enables you to map content in the Ready stage to load on your application’s lower or User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment. This ensures your reviewers can preview Whatfix content exactly how it would appear for your end users.

Here’s an example configuration that displays the Ready And Production environment mapping based on the URL condition:

Note:

The proceeding conditions display content from both Ready and Production stages on your lower or UAT environment.

Configure the Production stage environment

Whatfix enables you to map content in the Production stage to load on your application’s live environment. This ensures your end users see finalized and published content only.

Here’s an example configuration that displays the Production environment mapping based on the URL condition.

Note:

The proceeding conditions display content from only the Production stage on your live environment.

This mapping ensures the right stage of content appears in the appropriate environment every time.

For more information, refer to How to configure environments and map stages?

Whatfix Player Extension

Instead of juggling multiple extensions, you now have one Player Extension that serves both testers and end-users.

The Whatfix Player Extension reads the application environment configuration data and displays content as per the Dashboard Map Stages. These set configurations meet the needs of both testers (preview non-production content) and end users (view production content).

Whatfix Studio's preview mode experience has changed.

If you do not have a lower environment, Preview mode now provides an option to override the Dashboard stage mapping as defined in the application environment configurations:

The following image displays options to view stage-specific content on Whatfix Studio:

How to use Preview mode to test content?

Once you have installed the Whatfix Player Extension, use Preview mode to review and see how your content and widgets appear on your application or website.

Note:

When you select the content stage that you want to preview on Studio, Whatfix overrides the environment configuration that is setup in the Whatfix Guidance Dashboard.

Use the following steps to use Preview Mode on Whatfix Studio:

1. Log in to your application and then launch Whatfix Studio.
   

2. Click Preview Mode.
   

3. Expand the Select stages dropdown.
   

4. Select the stages option that you want to preview content in.
   

5. Click Continue.
   

6. Refresh your browser to preview content.