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

In this update we have greatly improved the way you can use and organize information on your site. The update applies changes to many of the most commonly used features on the platform. Here are the changes and additions:

We have added category support to the Videos, Groups and Link Directory systems and the category structure has been re-done to allow for unlimited nesting. This way you can better organize any of these systems that have a lot of content, by adding as many sub-categories as you need. When adding a blog category, for instance, you will now have a drop down tree menu for the category you wish to place it in, or it can be placed in the root to function as a top level category. Also we have made categories optional, so if you do not wish to setup categories you may have all the content placed in the root and not in a category.

Setting up categories is easy, go to your Add Elements in management mode and locate the categories element. From that element you can pick the Feature you want that element to control categories for.

We have expanded tagging to work on blog posts. When creating a blog post you have a field to type in optional tags to associate with the post. Categories and tags can be used together or independently now.

The final piece of this update is to expand how your site content can be used. We have added RSS feeds to the Site Activity and for Forums on your site. This allows your members to subscribe to the feeds to get updates, and also allows you to pull in the information to other sites if needed. You can see the RSS feed button at the bottom of your forum threads and activity feed element on your site; it looks like this:

As with any newly released update, there may be bugs that you encounter. The Support Ticket area is the place to report any that you encounter.

In our latest round of updates we wanted to focus on a few requests we have seen post in our forums, including being able to compose messages and send messages to more then one friend at a time, able to add embed codes from other Video websites other then YouTube and advanced search options for the Members page.

New Inbox Message Features

Next time you visit your inbox you will notice a new option to compose a New Message. Creating a new message to a friend is very easy, the send message box features real time friend searching, as you type out a name you will be given a list of friends to select from, then enter your subject, message body and click send.

When you send a message to more then one person, all replies will appear in one message thread. This makes it easy to keep track of the conversation.

Timestamps are also a thing of the past, we have replaced the Timestamps with a more localized friendly time since the message was posted.

Due to these changes, your inbox will now only display messages for the website you are on. We no longer display messages from other websites.

New Video Page Features

Previously the video page only supported adding videos from YouTube using a video page URL or uploading videos if you had an upgrade. In our latest changes we have opened up full support for embed codes. This should allow you to place a video from any video source, enjoy!

Advanced Member Search

When you visit your member search page and click on edit feature settings you have a new feature setting called Advanced Search, when checked your users will have the option to enter advanced search. Advanced Search allows people to search by age, status, and gender, with expanded support coming soon for custom member questions.

Major Features In Development

We want to give you a preview of things to come that are currently in development;

•  Ning Data Importing - Due to the recent release of the Ning Archiving Tool we are using this information to build a way to import members, blogs, events, discussions and pages. We estimate this feature should be ready in the next 2-3 weeks for you to use.
• Wiki - This is the replacement to the current Knowledge base feature. As many of you know it has been a long time coming and one of those items that just had to be pushed back a few times. The Wiki is a complex feature that should have a range of uses. Estimated release date 3-4 weeks
• SPL (Spruz Platform Language)  and API (Application Programming Interface) release - Opening up the platform for 3rd party developers has always been in our plan, and I am happy to report that we are closer then ever with the full release of our SPI documentation, new API interface and App Library. Estimated Release date for full SPI Documentation 2-4 weeks and our API 5-7 weeks.
• Content Settings - Content settings is a new section that will be added to the Site Settings area to give you more detailed control over your website features. Content settings will allow you to control comment box features, ability to customize the sharing and rating features on Videos, Photos Etc., member file space limit settings, and more. Estimated release date 2-3 weeks.
• Content Templates - This a progression update that is in progress now. Content templates in time will allow you to control all system text within your website. This system can also be used to change the language of system text. Part of this update also includes a new setting that is soon to be added to your site settings that will allow you to control the character set your website uses to display content.

Note: The editor has been updated with several fixes in this update. If you do not see the editor showing for you, that means you have a cached version of the editor in your browser that is causing this to happen, please hold the CTRL key on your keyboard and press the F5 key when on a page that should have the editor to get the latest version for you and display it correctly.

Like with any of our updates, if you notice an issue please open a support ticket to report the problem. Commenting on issues will not help us solve problems.

We've applied an update to the Rich Text Editor that includes many fixes and other improvements. The main update you will notice is that we have enabled the inline spell check by default in all editors on your site, making it much easier for users to see and fix spelling errors as they enter text on your site.

Some other improvements include:

• List Properties Dialog; now you can right click on a list and choose the List Properties option to edit the style.
• It's now possible to indent/outdent lists when selecting the first list item.
• Double click images to bring up their properties.

In our lastest update we have rolled out a new and improved usage statistics area to your site management. The announcements area has been expanded and renamed to "Information and Updates". It now includes a full breakdown of your current usage limits and progress bars that show how close you are to reaching them.

Additionally, we have made several tweaks to the styling and functionality of the site management to make it even easier to manage your site. One of the bigger changes is the Page Tools pane. The vertical view of the page tools has been changed so that it docks next to your site preview to stay out of your way. It also now remembers its viewing toggle state.

Many other usability tweaks and bug fixes were included in this update as well.

It has been a very busy week for us at Spruz, today we rolled out the final stage of a string up updates this week that work to address site slow down issues and adds some additional functionality.

As most of your know we preformed a major change to how the platform handles user information, this in general has really helped the speed up the load time of pages. We are happy to report there have been very few issues reported related to that update.

Now for the goodies that this change offers up!

New Display Name Control

• You can now finally set a different display name for each website you are a member on.
• New Display Name Settings
  • Change if members can select a name already in use by someone else
  • Setup a restrictions list to control what members can use as their display name.
• On the Manage Members page Administrator can now change display names of members on the site.

Other improvements

Set the Event Pictures - When adding events you can now upload your own event photo thanks to our new anywhere upload component.

 New Default Photos Set - We have replaced the old Shadow style default photos with a new more simplistic look after one to many complaints about the old ones and we added a new generic no image photo as well that will be used on systems that ask for a photo but one is not inserted.

New View My Posts Forum option - Ever wanted to see everything a person has posted in the forums? Well now you can with our new My Posts option that has been added directly under the member photo of a topic reply in your forums.

As most of you know we are moving into a holiday weekend as Memorial Day is Monday. Our offices will be closed on Monday, but just like normal outside our office hours of 9am til 9pm M-F we still have staff on hand to respond to issues reported via support tickets.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.  ~Joseph Campbell

Enjoy the holiday weekend!