Forthcoming system upgrades

[Barra]

Hi all,

I’ve been working quite hard on the next version of the site. as we are in the early phases of launch such changes will happen quite rapidly. Some of the new features include the following

New home page

Currently the home page is tied to the Site Activity page, you might have have noticed that. This is good for old hands who know what to expect from social sites like ours, but probably confusing for newbies who are not sure about that the site is about. So we are planning to introduce a new home page that is simpler and more explanatory about what the site is about and who it is for. This simply means if you like the activity page then you will need to click on Activity tab/button below the site banner.

Uprated blogging features – Slideshows and enhanced Shortcodes

Imagine being able to create a blog that includes a slideshow? Also, how about the ability to include boxed areas of text and buttons to allow people to click to visit other sites? We think that advanced blogging functions like this will be very handy for those of you that are more graphically minded and we hope we are introducing some simple tools to allow you to do this.

Soliloquy is a simple slideshow application for blogs that we are going to introduce, this allows you to upload your images into your own slideshow and then include that slideshow as part of a blog post. Hopefully this will sound cool to you and you can see that blogging your stuff here is taking on whole new dimensions

We already have some limited support for shortcodes, however this is pretty basic and not so easy to use. Our new Shortcodes application allows you to automatically create the codes you require with a neat tool that includes a preview of what it will look like once installed.

We will be writing help pages for using these new features so hopefully you will be able to create amazing blogs with the minimum of fuss.

Attach files to private messages

We thought it might be useful if you can include file attachments in your private messages to each other, so we are going to add a simple feature to allow this

Additional fonts support

Currently there are a small number of fonts that you can use within blogs and forum posts. We have access to several hundred fonts, but each has to be installed individually so to add them all would be an onerous task. Therefore, once we have installed the base set, you will be able to request for a font to be installed and if we have got it, you can have it.

Group File Library

I’ve already implemented this feature as it was tested earlier, I figured some groups would need a place to store files.

[Barra]

Ok, we have installed the new homepages ad on it there is a couple of new views, including a group activity view, a recent galleries view and also a Forum posts view for recent forum topics. Currently once you login you are directed to the Sitewide Activity page.

I also installed a couple of neat picture applications. One is about how you look at images, if you click on a lot of images from now on, gallery images for example, the image will jump out of the page and dispay itself without you having to move to that page, this should make browsing the site quicker.

We also now have a slideshow creator for blogs. This is called Soliloquy and it allows you to upload images directly into a slideshow, and then gives you a code, called a shortcode that you can insert into your blog in the location where you want the slideshow to appear.

Another updated feature is that groups will now inform members of new topics by email unless they or the group admin chooses to change that setting.

[important]One final upgrade is a new “Insert Shortcode” button, which only works for blogs, not for forum posts, even though the button appears in both. This allows you to insert boxes, buttons and all manner of things in your blogs and is intended to enable you to add the right bells and whistles to make your blog post impactful![/important]

I am able to do that, because for me a few extra buttons appeared which I do not know where they came from or how to enable then for others lol

[Author]

Posts