Spruz Owners' Community For owners of websites powered by the Spruz Platform

As many of you know we've been hinting at some changes coming to the Community Spotlight article we run every Friday. The Spotlight's purpose is to bring the community closer and hopefully inspire you with ways to improve your site, while at the same time providing the Spruz developers with insight on changes you'd like see. The revised format will consist of three section: Community of the Week, Suggestion of the Week, and Tip of the Week.

Read on for a more thorough description of each, as well as a brand new competition we're starting!

Community of the Week and Competition

The Spruz platform is used by an amazingly wide range of websites, and up until now there hasn't been a way for us to showcase them. We will be highlighting one site a week from our community that we believe represents the Spruz platform well, providing the members of the community with a description of the site and a chance to see what other site owners have done with their website.

Once eight communities have been highlighted we will allow you, the members of this community, to vote on which of the eight you like the most. Voting will last for five days, at which point a winner will be announced. The winner will receive the following from the Spruz team:

• Six month upgrade for their site of up to $20 a month
• A featured spot on the Spruz homepage with a link to their site for two months
• Name announced to all website owners on the Spruz platform with a link to their site
• Spruz t-shirt

In order to be eligible you must create an introduction of your site using the format we've provided in the Introduce Your Website forum category. We will be reviewing each site that posts an introduction, so it's important to make a good first impression!

Suggestion of the Week

The Spruz development team has always taken great interest in what the members of this community want to see improved or added to the Spruz platform, and that's certainly not going to change! We will be featuring one suggestion that we'd like more feedback on, consisting of a short description of the idea, credit to the original poster and a link to the topic in the forum. The more people that support an idea, the more likely it'll be added!

Tip of the Week

As mentioned at the beginning of the news post, we want to do everything we can to help you improve your site. Each week we'll provide you with at least one thing you can do to create a better experience for your users that you might not have known about before. If there's something you think other site owners would find helpful please post it in this topic.

Each tip will be added to a brand new element we'll be adding to the home page this week which will display a random tip. Our goal is that you learn something new each time you visit the community.

In Conclusion

We hope you'll enjoy the changes we've made to the Community Spotlight. Since this is such a big change we'll be keeping a close eye on how it all works out and make adjustments as we feel they are needed. As always we're open to any suggestions you have. This is your community!

Today you will notice some changes when you access your website management mode. After months of collecting information from new users, we have made some enhancements to the management of websites that will make it a litter easier for our new website users. In this update we have added a new feature that allows you to customize the login menus, member settings has been moved and our IM features have been discontinued per our announcement last month.

Site Management Changes

Our business depends on keeping as many new users as possible, we collect a ton of feedback from people that choose to no longer use our solution for a range of reasons. To improve this retention, a key issue we needed to address, we made changes to make customizing the website a little more intuitive.

On the management bar we have removed the "Members" drop down and Changed the name of "Site" to "Your Site". "Your Site" is more centric to managing the most common website features, view and manage your website members, see site activity, control your advertisements, member subscription module and access the file systems. We have also renamed the New Page and Manage Tabs & Pages. New Page is Now "Add Page or Feature" and "Manage Tabs & Pages" is now "Manage Pages & Links".

The "This Page" Menu option has been replaced with a new floating Page Tools box. This box will display on pages that can be customized and give options to add page elements, widgets,  change the page layout, delete the page, and add a new page. The new tool box can be positioned and you can change it's display format.

The "Settings" Menu option still has the options to change your Site Settings, Profile Settings, and Edit Custom Scripting. We have moved Site Intro, Word Filter Management, and Favicon uploading to this section. You will also notice a the IM settings has been removed and a new Skysa Bar option has been added.

On pages that are feature pages (Videos, Blog, Etc) some use a core "Feature" element for the main component for these sections. Many times a user will delete or move the core element then wonder why it does not work correctly and understanding how to edit the settings such as who can post was hard to find because it used the same edit option that is on all elements. To correct these issues now on elements that are critical to a feature, you can not delete the element and we changed edit to Feature Settings on hovering over that element.

Customizable Login Menu and Member Settings Change

Thanks to our new update you can now fully customize the Login Menu. This is the menu that has the Login and Register links, and displays Your Home, Inbox and so on when logged into the website. This is an advanced feature and only recommend for users that understand HTML. To customize your login menus go to the Site Settings Page and click on "Edit Login Menu Templates". View our last Blog Entry that highlights the potential of this update.

You will notice that member settings has been moved from the profile page to the Login Menu. This was done for several reasons, one it was hard for users to find where they can change their email and password.

Removal of the Spruz IM Bar

While the IM bar was a new feature (Launched last October), it came with a great deal of overhead and maintenance. Last month we posted about the removal of the IM bar feature and the day has come for it to be phased out. However you can still have an IM bar for your website using Skysa, as many of you know Skysa is developed by the Founders of Spruz and is a new service offering that can be used with any website or blog. Skysa has additional Apps that carry special integration with Spruz powered websites.

Coming Soon...

We do go through topics in idea room regularly, we have several new improvements and features coming soon that will bring added value to your Spruz powered website.

We hope our website owners will like the changes within this update, we know some of you may not. But change is an important part of growth and while some of you may not understand the reasons behind some of our updates, it is all to help move the platform forward. If these changes cause you inconvenience because of the management area changes, we hope you understand and take a few moments to relearn where things are located.

Because of the changes within this update, I want to remind you to keep comments constructive. If you have an issue or problem please open a bug report ticket.

Another week brings another Community Spotlight! If only more things in life were this predictable.

Before we get started I'd like to inform everyone of a major change we've made to the "Introduce Your Site" forum category. This link will take you to a topic where we've posted a format for any website introductions. We ask that you copy and paste the format into a new thread and fill in all the questions asked. This is a necessary change that paves the way for some exciting things we have planned for the Owner's Community. All future introductions must use the new format; those that do not will not be approved. We encourage those that have already posted an introduction to revise it using the new format.

Making it easier for free and premium members to view the websites created is important. That is why you will notice that on Spruz.com we have a new menu that provides the options you need on the Spruz.com website.

When logged into www.spruz.com you will now see just Account and Support Ticket Links in the login area at the top of the page rather then Your Home, Inbox, Etc. Clicking on Account takes you to a new website information page that list the websites you own, presents options to automatically load your manager, access support tickets or delete the website if needed.

We were able to customize the login menu area thanks to a new customization feature we have added, this new feature will be available on your website soon.

Our new login area customization has templates for Vistor (Login/Register), Invite Only websites and Logged in Member. Remember Spruz.com uses the same platform that you are using for your website, thus we have the same tools to customize our website as you. It has always been our goal to provide the most customizable, and robust, hosted social website solution on the net. When login menu customization is publicly released, you can do all sorts of cool things like make your own member account page. We hope to have this feature open for all in the next month or so.