Blog Entries
Recent Updates, New ways to edit

You may notice some new changes today on your site. We have been working on improvements to increase the retention of new users and these changes add some additional functionality for everyone.

There are new edit options for elements and pages on your website. We have now added the ability for site administrators to edit element options and edit HTML pages from the front end. This was done to make it easier for you to make quick changes and see how those changes look right on your website.

So you will now see an Edit Icon on all elements to change options quickly. On the Static HTML page type you will see an edit option as well to quickly edit the whole page.

The new edit options are only displayed to members that already have access to the sites administration content builder and design editors.

Here is a brief list of features we are working on right now that will be released real soon!

  • Member Subscription Module - Member subscriptions allow you to charge a small fee for higher levels of site access and adding benefits. This module keeps track of all your subscribers and helps automates reoccurring payments, This will allow you to display subscription options when a member visits a page that is set to a level that matches a subscription you setup for them to sign up with. Subscription payments are paid to directly to you via PayPal.
  • Member Profile Style Options - We are bring back member controlled styling to profiles by popular demand. This new styling feature will allow members to set backgrounds and change a few colors.
  • Photo Tagging - This will be a feature on member profiles that will have a selection box that you can place over different targets in an image to tag them as your friend or an name an object.

Please keep your suggestions and feedback coming. We are looking at adding new elements and making improvements to activity. We want to see your suggestions on new elements we can add or small tweaks that can be made to make our social website platform a better place for you to live.

Getting Started and Interactive Help

Obviously, a big piece to our success as a community building platform is in making the first experiences of new users to this platform simple and friendly. To that end we have added a new section to the Help & Information system called "Getting Started".

The Getting Started section walks users through the common tasks that the may want to do after creating a site and it starts to get them familiar with the interface along the way.

Another addition to the Help & Information system is Interactive Help, which is currently available on the Admin Area Tutorial in the Getting Started section of the help. Interactive Help goes further than video, actually showing the user and talking them through specific steps.

You can access the Getting Started section of help directly from your Welcome page by clicking the Help button in the upper right of the page, near the Announcements.

Twitter Integration on profiles

Growth of your community with us is very important. That is why as part of our commitment to the new member profile system we are now adding new improvements. One of these new improvements is the ability for your site members to post their status updates directly to their twitter accounts.

How this helps you is when the status update is posted the status update has a URL back to that members profile on your site that is then displayed to there many followers! We hope this will be traffic magnet for your website, provided you and your members take advantage of this feature.

To post a tweet when posting your status there will be a small TweetIt check box next to the status update box. By checking this and providing your twitter account details enables our platform to directly post your tweet to your twitter page.

We hope you enjoy this small addition.

As for fixes, we have corrected a problem where Group Admins could not remove members.

User Suggestions Implemented

 

We have just released an update based on a couple suggestion posts and interaction in the Suggestion forum.
 
Tainted_Zeal suggested that we change the Preview Site button at the top of the admin area to a Back to Site button that would open in the same window. Due to additional feedback and ratings, and also due to very little in development time to make the change, we were able to get this pushed out and working well.
 
Randya suggested that we change allow pages that users do not have access to, to still show the navigation button. This had a lot of positive feedback from the communality in the form of ratings and replies. We developed out a new option now when you go to edit your page options. Just under the Viewing Access Level there is an option to Always Show the link. If you set this option to Yes, the link will show up to everyone, but if they do not have access when they get to the page it will tell them that they do not have the access to view it. If you set it to No, the navigation link will not display to users that do not have the access to visit the page.
 
Thank you for your great suggestions and participation in helping make this platform better.

 

Group Member Update and Fixes Released!

All websites have been updated on the Spruz Platform with the new Group system that is part of the new Member Profiling system update released last week.

Member groups allow you and/or your site members to create groups on any topic they desire. Here is a brief list of features that the group system includes;

  • Set the permission level required on the group members element to control what member access level is required to create a new group.
  • Group Deletion Options for the site owner.
  • Members can fully moderate the group they create as well as the site administrator.
  • Full group profile page that is designed using the same technology for the member profile system. Thus group profiles can be highly customizable with different elements, and widgets. Groups also have a personalized group image.
  • Groups have several integrated elements that can been added to the group profile.
    • We have a few elements that carry over well from profiles that include; Shout box, Custom Text Box, Member Element.
    • New Topics element that creates a mini-forum with full permission control over who can create topics and who can reply to them.
  • Member assigned group administrators. Group Admins can fully moderate the group, including the ability to delete topics, approve members and so on.
  • Groups can be created as private or public and can decide to manually approve members or allow anyone to join.
  • There are many other great features in this update that you can explore!

To enable groups on your website, go to your Content Builder, Click new page. From the page list select Member Groups.

Like anything new, there maybe bugs, problems, or issues. Please report them using the support ticket system so we can make sure they get addressed quickly.

We will be continuing to add to the Member System and Groups on an ongoing basis, based on suggestion volume and features we are planning to add over the coming months.

In addition to the group system release there are a number of issues that have been reported by our users that we have corrected in this update.

  1. Profiles display a not configured message. This was caused when the site profile settings had been changed to remove both core elements that are created when a profile is generated (Shoutbox or Friends Box). This has been fixed to show the profile box and not relay to the page not configured message.
  2. Sometimes when images are uploaded they do not take or display a broken image. We have located this as an issue with our Image Processor that handles the re-optimization of images uploaded by users. This should be corrected.
  3. Profiles where the Admin or the User had never visited would show a profile not configured message. To make the new profile system we use a new database structure and when the user or admin visits a profile for the first time since the update our backend system transfers profile information and content over, thus if your members had friends on their list and those friends have not been back, then their profile would not be configured. This has been adjusted so that anyone visiting a profile will regenerate their profile content. Thus giving everyone full profiles that have elements in place as they are visited by members.
  4. To make new inbox messages more apparent, we have made two changes. We made the welcome line message count bold, also we only show the count if you have new messages. This should make new messages much more obvious at a glance while not being annoyingly persistent.
  5. We have made a number of other smaller adjustments and fixes. If you have problems, please report them.

We hope everyone enjoys the new grouping and member system. As time moves along you will see many more improvements added to the member system as a whole. We want you to be successful, lets grow together.

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