New feature: Reconnecting accounts

Introduction

Today we released the ability to reconnect any of your existing linked accounts. This is a small but vital feature which we will explain in more detail below.

Linking accounts

Depending on the type of account you link with Cloudpress, we store information that allows us to connect to that account later in order to publish content to it. In the case of WordPress for example, we store a username and an application password. In the case of Contentful, we store what is called an access token which gives us, as the name suggests, access to your account.

The problem

Sometimes, it can happen that that information can become invalid for whatever reason. An access token may be revoked, or the user may be deleted on WordPress. In such instances, an error will occur when publishing content.

In the screenshot below, you can see an example of this. In this case, the access token that we received when linking a Contentful account was later revoked. When publishing, an error occurred stating that The access token you sent could not be found or is invalid.

Previously this required you to link the account again. But, this not ideal due to the way in which Cloudpress keeps track of published content. Basically, when you publish a document, Cloudpress keeps track of the fact that you published that particular document to that particular linked account. Next time when you publish that same document to that same account, Cloudpress will not create a new document in your CMS, but simply update the existing one.

When you had to link an account again, Cloudpress created an entirely new linked account in its database, This meant that it was not able to keep track of the fact that a document was previously published because, as far as Cloudpress was concerned, that was an entirely different account.

Reconnecting an account

With this update, we now allow you to simply reconnect an existing account - as opposed to linking the account again and creating a new linked account. Next to each of your linked accounts, you will now see a Reconnect account button.

Clicking on this button will take you through the process of reconnecting that account. The exact process will depend on the type of account. For Kentico Cloud, you can specify a new Management API Key. For Contentful, we will redirect you to the Contentful website to authorize Cloudpress so that we can obtain a new access token. And for WordPress we allow you to specify a new username and password.