What's New in jekcms — July 2026

This cycle was a big one. Stories landed on the front end, the customer panel learned to handle licenses and upgrades on its own, we went over the whole product with an SEO fine-tooth comb, and the setup wizard was rebuilt around one goal: moving a large WordPress site to jekcms without drama. Here's the tour.

Stories: the Instagram format, on your own site

The new Stories plugin brings the tap-through story format to your front page. Readers see the familiar ring of avatars, tap one, and get full-screen slides with progress bars, swipe navigation and auto-advance — on mobile it feels exactly like the apps they already use.

• Auto-stories: when you publish a post, a story slide can be generated from it automatically. Your story ring stays fresh without extra work.
• Polls and reactions: slides can carry a two-option poll or an emoji bar. Reactions from other readers float up the screen while you watch, so a popular slide visibly feels popular.
• Links that work: a slide can carry a button or in-text link to any URL — a product page, a post, a signup form.
• Placement per theme: you decide where the ring appears for each theme from the plugin settings, no template editing.
• A real statistics page: views, completions, poll results and reaction counts per story.

Comparable story plugins for other platforms sell for around $49 per year for a single site. In jekcms it ships with the core, works on every bundled theme, and is included in your license.

Social publishing grew up

The social publishing module now covers Instagram Stories and Discord alongside the existing networks, and it learned two useful habits. Evergreen re-sharing picks your older high-value posts and cycles them back into your queue on a schedule you set. And the queue itself became strictly one-at-a-time under the hood, so the same post can no longer go out twice when two runs overlap.

A site-wide SEO hardening pass

We audited every template the product ships with, on four axes: titles, canonical/OG signals, heading structure and media loading. The result went into a single release:

• Archive pages (categories, tags, authors) now generate unique, descriptive titles from one central place — no more theme-by-theme drift.
• og:url and canonical now always agree, including on paginated archives.
• The above-the-fold featured image is promoted for LCP: correct fetchpriority and no lazy-loading where it hurts.
• Tag archives can now be switched off entirely from Settings → SEO if your strategy calls for it, with correct 404/robots behavior.

Your license, in your hands

The customer panel can now do the things you used to need a support ticket for:

• Move a license between sites. See every domain bound to your license, remove one to free the seat, add the new domain, activate there. Takes about a minute.
• Upgrade your plan. Going from 3 sites to 10, or to unlimited? You pay only the difference, your license key stays the same, and the new limit is live the moment payment completes.
• Better support. Tickets now send you a confirmation email, accept file attachments, and Professional and Agency customers can open urgent-priority tickets.

Theme and plugin updates also joined the update channel: everything is signed, hash-verified and one click in the admin panel, and core update notes now show the actual release changelog instead of a generic label.

Setup Wizard 2.0: WordPress migration at scale

The installer was rebuilt end to end, because first impressions are made there. The headline change is what happens when you migrate a big WordPress site:

• Built for tens of thousands of posts. The import runs in short server-friendly batches, so shared-hosting time limits are never hit. Comments are imported in batches too.
• It survives interruptions. Progress is saved on the server after every batch. Close the browser mid-migration, reopen the wizard, and it offers to continue exactly where it left off.
• Same-server fast path. If WordPress lives on the same hosting account, images are copied straight from disk instead of downloaded over HTTP.
• Everything comes across. Pending, private and scheduled posts keep their status; comment reply threads are preserved; authors arrive with bios, avatars and social links; your logo is localized automatically; old internal links are rewritten to the new address.
• Plain-language pre-checks, in English and Turkish. Disk space, memory, upload limits and image-format support are verified up front, and anything that needs attention comes with an instruction you can actually follow.

The wizard also got stricter about safety: every action is protected with a session token, your old .htaccess is backed up before it is replaced, and the old WordPress files and database are only removed after your explicit confirmation — with a clear warning first.

Where to follow releases

Every version now lands in three places: the changelog on this site and, for the bigger cycles, a round-up post like this one. If you run jekcms, updates arrive in your admin panel with one click, as always.