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 auto-publish 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. In our test runs, a site with 1,200 posts, 600 comments and a full media set migrated in under twenty seconds.
• 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, the GitHub releases page, 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.