Today, we released Matador Jobs 3.5.6. Many of our users were distributed an early version, however, so to lots of you, this isn’t news! This release held back because it was something we were very, very cautious to release, due to it necessarily containing a backward-incompatible change. Overall, this release has three notable bug fixes and a few others.

When the “Get Description” function does too much

Matador Jobs has a number of “public” functions. They are like tools in a toolbox for theme developers to use create rich, custom experiences. While lots of users never dive into those, choosing to instead use the default layouts provided by the Matador shortcodes, these functions are a key part of the promise we make to you when we say that Matador is fully customizable.

One of these public functions, however, behaved oddly since the day 1 release of Matador. Its name, description, and purpose implies that its job was fetch or display the job description, but instead it could also get the job information block and/or the job navigation block.

There were a number of work arounds, and whenever someone pointed out the confusing behavior that was, frankly, contrary to what our users expected, we’d give them the work-arounds.

Matador is still young, and while there are lots of you, there are lots more coming. We had a conversation with a developer building a Matador site and he convinced us that we needed to fix this, even if it would be a little painful.

This release contains a backward-incompatible change to fix this problem. This is our first of what should be few, if any, ever. Backwards-incompatible changes are changes that “break” something. Its possible this release will “break” the look and feel of your site.

Have no fear! For the next six months or more, you will be able to delay this update. There is an “Upgrade” option added to your Matador menu and give the opportunity to choose when this change is applied. It’s not complicated to prepare your site for the upgrade. Check out our upgrade guide.

More Changes In Response to Bullhorn December Update

If you’ll recall from the 3.5.5 release announcement, prior to 3.5.5 Matador stopped working due to changes made to Bullhorn’s API a few days earlier. The 3.5.5 release restored service, but the 3.5.6 release fully addresses all the changes made in December to the Bullhorn API so that we keep up with their similarly frenzied development cycles!

Shortcode Pagination on Front Page Works

The way WordPress treats the front page is different than the rest of the site, so we found that when our users deployed Matador on the front page of their site that sometimes pagination and search would not work. This hotfix includes a fix for that issue.

Other Updates

Typically, we collect a small number of bugfixes and hold them for release when prudent. Included in this update were the following bugfixes that made came about during the development:

  • Fixed issue with the “backfill” argument on the shortcode and function to list jobs.
  • Fixed issue where a public function was requiring an arguments array even though it wasn’t necessary and documentation declared it optional.