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As many of you know we have been working hard on a major update for the Spruz Social Platform that has been in the works for the past year. This update revolves around new levels of social interaction and brings our platform to a point where we can grow it to new levels of social website interaction. This update was designed to aid you in building a better social experience for your users. After months of research, design and development the day is almost here.
This update will be released in 2 phases. The first phase and the largest will be published to the Spruz Platform on Tuesday and will include the new member system. Phase 2 will be the addition of member or admin created member groups with group profiles. The Groups will have very similar capabilities as the member profiles. Phase 2 will be published anywhere from 7 to 10 days after Phase 1 and we will have more details announced later in the week.
To begin we want to highlight all new features and changes of Phase 1 part of this new update.
Website users will be able to enjoy;
- New Member Navigation Bar in the member profile area.
- The member bar will allow the site member to quickly post status updates, view the profile, photos, friends pages with ease and allow for quick access to get back to their home page (Revamp of the account page).
- All member options will be accessible from any page in the profile areas. Users can easily change profile options, display name, passwords and more.
- Complete revamp of the member account page.
- Users will enjoy a full friend activity feed to keep them in tune with their friends on your website. The activity feed displays information directly related to member profiles. With the activity feed users will see new comments posted, status updates, photos added to the member photo gallery and more.
- New Account summary where users can view friends, manage invites, groups and more.
- Member status updates. Just like other networks you users can make quick 140 character posts about what they are doing right now. We have plans to also add functionality so that status updates can also be sent to their twitter page with links back to your website.
- Improved profile options!
- We have added several major improvements to the security options for profiles.
- Users can now set information about them that you can customize!
- Profile Page Improvements.
- The profile page has been given a much cleaner look, improved drag and drop for elements and a quick add button for adding elements and widgets.
- All profile elements have been revamped to go along with the changes to the way member images, commenting, blogging, and so on are handled.
- New Widget Access, this really opens things up! Your users select from 1000's of widgets and with a click of a button easily added them to their profile page.
- New Photos Page, we have done away with the old way users would add image galleries to their profiles, it was slow and inefficient. The new photos page really opens things up to make it much easier to add photos and share them.
- Now users can upload up to 10 images at a time and update the captions all at once.
- We have carried over our commenting box to the photos page to allow feedback on images added by users.
- We did not add ratings to images because we want to further promote your users to add more personal photos to your website without fear of rejection. The more things your users contribute the longer they will stay with you and bring their friends.
- Dedicated friends page to make it easier to manage and view all of your friends. As part of this member profile pic formatting with new quick access options.
Screen shot of the new member account page (Your Home)
Screen shot of the new member profile page
"Please over look the theme we used on our test website. It should look great on your website!"
On the administration side of things we have made the following improvements;
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Profiles are no longer global so you have full control over members on your network!!
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Full administration control over profiles. This means you can delete, and edit profiles allowing you to better moderate your community. You can also set a separate access level so that you don't have to give out full administration to moderate the profile pages.
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Customization of what your members do with their profile pages. You can chose what elements you want to allow, change the naming for friends, status (Relationship status or whatever you want to use it for), customize the questions the user answers about themselves and more.
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Choose what basic profile information choices, such as gender, location and status options your members have access to.
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Create your own custom widget gallery for use with your website. This if for those site owners that want to tailor the widget selection towards the type of site you operate.
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Set your own default member profile pic. Since pics are a big part of any network, giving you control to create and add your own should be enjoyed.
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New styling over elements on the profile pages. We have added a new feature called accents that allow you to create your own custom styles for your users to use when they add or edit an element box on their profile pages.
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Create and modify the default profile setup that is generated when a member sets up their profile for the first time.
Screen shot of the administration settings over profiles. (Example Only) Not all options present
We have included a number of additional big improvements in this update.
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You will have a new text editor on forums, the blog and for the private messaging (Inbox).
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The inbox has been improved so that messages send much faster then before.
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Many bug fixes throughout the platform to reduce errors, improve interaction and make things easier to use.
Moving beyond this update we have want to give you a glimpse of other improvements you will see shortly after Phase 2 is published.
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All new member inviting system. This will have features for importing contacts from CSV, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. with fully customizable invite templates you can optionally customize.
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Member profile event system.
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Weekly website status update emails. So you know what has been happening on your website.
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We will be revamping the website blog, event calendar and knowledge base/content system with improved features and more member interaction.
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Member subscription module. This will allow you to automatically set access based on the subscription your user pays for. This will be an included feature with our upgraded packages that allows you to collect payments directly with PayPal.
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Member point/ranking system (Winter 09). This will be an optional feature where you can setup points for member participation on your website.
There are so many things we have packed into this update that everything just could not be listed, but with great change will come some sacrifice for what you may have grown used too. We know this may be a major change for some and we want you to know that this is only the start of many additional updates coming to the platform and the member profile system. The member profile system was important step for us to take what we have learned over the past several years and improve upon it to move forward.
Make sure you subscribe to our rss feed http://spruz.com/s/53188/rss.xml so you are informed as soon as we update the platform with this update and when we post about Phase 2 and the member group system.
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