What's New is a custom Experience Builder 1.20 widget that adds the familiar bell-and-red-dot notification pattern to public-facing map applications. It drops into any spot of an Experience (header, body, or footer) and displays a small red dot whenever there's a new announcement. Users click the bell, see what changed in a popover or centered modal, and the dot disappears for them across browser sessions. When the next update goes out, bumping the Announcement ID (a "New ID" button in the settings panel drops in a timestamp) brings the dot back for everyone on their next visit. Content is either Rich HTML pasted directly into the settings or an external URL, and the widget is pure client-side with no backend. Seen-state lives in each user's localStorage, so there's nothing to maintain. The widget solves a recurring problem: every time improvements are pushed to an Experience, users have no idea anything changed because they tend to bookmark the map and use it the same way for months. What's New gives them a quiet, dismissible signal built right into the app.
Changelog:
06/08/26:
Update thanks to community contributions from @SunshineLuke90 , who reworked the widget around the Calcite Design System. The bell is now a calcite-action with built-in indicator support, the popover and modal use calcite-popover and calcite-dialog respectively, and all the manual positioning math the original widget needed for footer placement is gone since Calcite handles it natively (runtime dropped from around 300 lines to 160). New configurable options came along too: pick any icon from the Calcite UI Icons set, set the popover content width in pixels, choose from 21 logical placement values, and adjust the icon size via Calcite's built-in scale property (small, medium, large). A follow-up round of revisions from SunshineLuke90 also fixed a TextArea overflow when the HTML content area is dragged and resized, and added helptext under the ColorPicker components clarifying that leaving them blank preserves the EB theme defaults.
