Overview
This release focuses on expanding the commercial and storytelling capabilities of Empower. We’ve introduced a complete end-to-end workflow for Paid Tours, enhanced how visitors discover content through search and scanning, and made the Preview publish more flexible.
New Features & Improvements
📍Paid Tours
You can now monetize your tours directly in Empower using Stripe.
Paid Tours let you charge for access to a tour without building or managing your own checkout flow. Once enabled, visitors can unlock a tour via Stripe’s secure checkout and immediately access the content in Empower.
Key features include:
Stripe integration
Paid Tours use Stripe for payments. If you already have a Stripe account, you can connect it to Pladia. If not, you’ll need to create one. Setup requires your API keys, get in touch and we will help set up the integration.
Simple tour setup in the Console
Once your integration is established, you can mark a tour as “payment required”. You’ll set a price, which automatically creates the required “product” in Stripe. You don’t need to create or manage products manually in Stripe.
Supported pricing models
Paid Tours currently support:
A fixed price
Choose what you pay (configured in Stripe)
Hosted checkout
Visitors complete payment via Stripe’s hosted checkout and are automatically returned to Empower, where the tour is unlocked. Redirects and unlock behavior are fully handled by Pladia.
Receipts and payment methods
Stripe sends receipts directly to visitors by email. You can customize receipt content and enable or disable payment methods in your Stripe settings. Pladia does not take any transaction fees, but Stripe has specific fees for different payment methods.
Coupons and promotion codes
Stripe coupons and promo codes are supported. This allows scenarios like free access for members or discounted pricing for specific audiences. These codes can be configured through Stripe and distributed to your visitors as you please.
A step-by-step setup guide is available in the Help Center, including Stripe configuration, pricing options, and common use cases.
Check the Payment required box in your Tour to be taken to your connected Stripe account.
Speak to your Customer Success Manager to connect your Stripe account to Pladia.
🔎 Search & Discovery Enhancements
Finding content should feel natural. We’ve improved how visitors browse and find items.
Intuitive Visual Search: We’ve refreshed the image recognition scanner so it’s easier for visitors to find content: a clearer camera frame and Scan button, a new inline Scan entry point, and smoother navigation in and out of Object detail pages.
Rich Preview Cards: Object and Space preview cards now reliably display locations, subtitles, and attributions, helping visitors decide what to explore next.
Linking to and from Tours: Visitors can already click through from tour stops to the linked Object or Space for a deeper dive into the content, and now any Object or Space included in a Tour will show a Featured In section that links to that Tour.
Tag Map Control: You can now hide maps for specific Tags, giving you finer control over the visitor interface for Themes.
🔤 Flexible Object Metadata & Terminology
We’ve updated the Console to give content authors more control over how information is labeled and displayed.
Attributions: We’ve updated the “Creator” field in the Console to “Attribution”. This makes the field more flexible, so it can represent more than just artists, for example speakers, authors, species, cultures, eras, or regions.
This change only affects the Console. The terminology is not used in the PWA interface.
🛠️ Console Updates
We’ve expanded the flexibility of your Preview bundle and made your PWA URLs easier to find.
Include drafts in Preview: You can now choose to include draft content when releasing to the Preview environment. A new checkbox lets you preview unpublished content without changing its publish status, making it easier to review large volumes of work in progress, collaborate with contractors, or prepare upcoming exhibitions without risking anything going live.
Open your app from your Console: Your app links have been added to your Dashboard. Use these to open your Preview or Public app URLs.
Contact Customer Success if you have any further questions and thank you for being a valued part of the Pladia community!