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

We have just released an update to add Message Broadcasting ability (Sending Emails to all site members at one time). This allows you to send a mass email to your website members.

The new email broadcasting is located in the Member Management in your website management/administration area in that is displayed when you hit the green community tab and is the button called Email Broadcast above your member list.

This new feature is currently limited to our members that have our Pro upgrade plan, and allows you to send 1 email broadcast every 7 days.

As with anything new, we will continue to make improvements to it. Right now we want to carefully manage how email campaigns are sent so that we can stay clear of blacklists so that your emails are delivered to your website members when you send to them. Make sure you add this and all email broadcasts to your trusted lists in your favorite mail client this but one small part that helps us build a better email reputation.

This new feature has been added thanks to our a new mail server we brought online. We want to work hard to build our mail server reputation so that we can have good mail deliverability for everyone. Click here for more info on how mail reputation works. Giving the ability to mass mail is no easy task and for us will have a bit of overhead so that is why we do not offer this feature to everyone, and we have waited until now to release this type of feature.

We know this was a highly requested feature for sometime and now it is here, so enjoy!

The new owner/support community is http://my.spruz.com the new place to go when seeking help, advise, or just to meet other people that create websites like yours. This change will allow us to provide a common website for everyone from new site owners to expert users/designers to exchange ideas, participate in discussions, access the knowledge base and so on.

This change will phase out the current help forums that were part of your websites administration area, as well as allow us to make better use of the site administration welcome area for new help and resources to assist you in growing your website/communities.

The reasons for this change is many;

• We wanted to create a common community space for website creators to meet each other, get tips and access information about taking advantage of allot of the really advanced things you can do with your site powered by the Spruz Platform.
• By implementing an active community space of our own (A Company Social Website) allows our development team to work with the social features that we develop on a regular basis for you to use and to see first hand ways we can improve functionality, features, and show you different ways to use these features.
• The forums in the welcome area lacked features that allowed us to effectively moderate or even assign moderators to help us out. We are a very small team working night and day to not only support you, but develop the greatest website platform with social features on the net. Thus we are always looking for ways to free up our support time so we can spend our time planning and developing for you.
• The new community allows us to directly link new users to information quicker and more effectively.
• On the new community site we want to take advantage of our new member profile features so everyone can build new friendships that share interests about building and working on their own websites.
• The new owner/support community is built from our Developer Website and never really seemed to get the activity we wanted because of the welcome page forum area. Thus we felt while the welcome area forums were great, it took away from being able to explore development features.
• With our own community we can now and we will be assigning special moderator and admin status to select people in our community that want to help out, have great common sense when dealing with problems, etc.

You will notice that we have added and updated links on your site administration welcome page to quickly link you to the discussions on the new website and show you information on how many new posts since you last visited the support website. In addition the knowledge base information now directly links to the new community website. We will be adding more features to the welcome page that directly tie into the new support community website.

As for the old forums on the site administration welcome area, they will be completely phased out in a few days. We will have them archived for our own personal reference. So do not worry you old posts still have value to us.

When joining http://my.spruz.com make sure you do not register a new account, because you already have one. Just login with your current account and click the Join button to become part of the network.

We hope our new community website we be a very friendly and welcoming space for new and old users alike. I look forward to seeing you next on my.spruz.com

We know that many of your enjoy helping others in the forums and comments, and with the launch of our new Support and Help Community we have some cool features that you can take advantage of to better assist people coming here looking for help.

We have a new code you can use in the forums here. The code is $owner_domain this code is used to output the person viewing a thread or post the domain name of their website.

For example: Lets say a person is asking for help about where to edit access levels, well instead of me having to type our the whole navigation process to get that person to the page needed to edit access levels. I can just post http://$owner_domain/admin?page=site_members

Thus I can copy the URL from my address bar of the page they need to go to, and replace the domain name portion with $owner_domain. When this gets displayed in a post to the end user the $owner_domain will be replaced with the domain name to their website. Thus allowing the user to quickly access that page and saves everyone sometime.

You can also use the new code value to turn off the SPI value replace functions so that you can demo examples without the SPI function returning a value, like I have done in this example post.

This is just one of several new things we have cooked up to better help support the community on the Spruz Social Website Platform.

Some new updates and changes to tell you about that has happened over the last few days. Most of our latest changes have been directly related to improving data elements that are addable to your website.

Improvements

New Member Videos Element - This element will display recently added videos to member profiles or you can chose to display videos with the views. You can select a range of videos to display at one time.

New Member Photos Element - Now you can show recently uploaded photos and photos with the most recent comments. The Members Photos element replaced current member blogs element because with the new member profile system we released, member blogging is now done on the main website. Thus the member blog element was a dead element that we needed to replace. If you had this element still on your website you will find it is now replaced with a members photo element.

Member Box Element Improvement - The member box element that allows you to display members based on different types of activity has got a new activity selection to show top bloggers. This selection will list your most active members that use the blog along with their post counts.

More Member Activity Logged - We are now logging when someone adds a new profile photo and when someone makes a change to their profile page. Profile update activity is still new and will be expanded or modified base on our user feedback.

Coming Soon...

Event/Calendar System overhaul (Slated for release end of next month);

• An improved user-friendly structure for finding, viewing and adding events
• Ability to charge a fee for someone to register for an event that will be paid directly to your PayPal account
• Better RSVP options where a member can select that they will be attending, not attending or might attend.
• When posting an event their will be an option to set if an event is personal or public.
• An area that lists events you or your members have RSVP for.

Wiki/Content System (Slated for release end of next month); (Replacement to the current knowledge base system)

• Completely page based system where you can allow your members to add pages and edit pages.
• Ability to roll back or approve page changes
• Unlimited page depth, meaning new pages can be created within other pages and so on.
• Full tag support, content searching and new elements to show top authors, editors, and so on.

Member Points System (Slated for release around October 1st)

• Customizable points for rewarding member site activity
• An option to name points whatever you would like. Thus points could be EXP, or whatever
• Points will be based on activity recorded by the member activity site features. Thus anything that would normally appear in the member activity feed could have a point value attached to it.
• Points position system so that members can see how they rank against other members on your website.

In addition to the main features mentioned for the above platform improvements/additions there will be number of other features of the above systems that will be announced at a later date. So stay tuned!

Over the next several weeks you will also see added functionality to some of our other areas as we work to bring you the best in over all functionality and features in one platform. Please follow us at http://twitter.com/spruz for up to the minute announcements on smaller but big changes over the next several weeks.

One of these small but big changes, includes the option to change the format of the information displayed in the Member Box element. How would you like to decide how to format the member picture? Chose from list, tile, and full detail format types on the Members Box Element!

Announcements on smaller changes will be done every week to 2 weeks to summarize updates that have taken place since the last announcement, but for the latest updates make sure to follow us on Twitter!

Over the next several months we will be improving the overall quality of themes in the website theme library. This will be accomplished by the removal of themes that do not meet new quality standards and by only approving new theme submissions that meet or exceed our new quality standards.. This is where you come in, we will be opening a new program to pay you on themes you submit to the theme library that get approved by us.

How this new program works is starting on July 20th all theme designers that submit themes that meet our new quality standards will earn cash or credit each time a theme is installed to a website. So if you have some design talent, and you know CSS, this will be a great way to earn additional revenue.

Each time a theme is installed you will earn .25 cents, plus you still have the opportunity to optionally charge for your theme design and earn 70% of the theme price.

Terms and Conditions of theme library submissions:

Upon submitting a theme for review to the theme library you acknowledged you are the owner or copyright holder of any graphical content used in a theme. You do not need to formally enroll into the theme design program until first payment is due. Payments are paid once you have a payment due balance of greater than $100.00 and are issued to you within 30 days of your payment request. Upon your first payment request we will require you to complete and sign additional documentation for tax and accounting purposes. Themes submitted by the designer are subject to review, themes submitted are added to the theme library at the discretion of Spruz Inc and may be pulled at anytime from the library for any reason.

More information about submitting a theme for review can be found at http://my.spruz.com/?page=content&cid=38498

Get your updates from us at twitter! We will no longer put out updates on small improvements, updates or fixes. Instead we will be posting smaller changes and improvements on http://www.twitter.com/spruz

We will hover occasionally do posts that summarize changes, improvements, and new features on more of a monthly basis rather then when those updates or changes occur. To stay more informed please follow us on http://www.twitter.com/spruz