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Cool new features coming soon to TIWWA!


The Old Man

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Early 2010 will see some great new features, enhancements and improvements to our community software here at This is who we are! The creator of our software has lots of exciting things planned and progress has already been made on a few key features.

Enhanced Status Updates

One of the most popular features at TIWWA is the 'Facebook/Twitter' style Status Updates which have proved to be a lot of fun with our members. Originally intended to be a quick notification of what you are doing, thinking or feeling that you can put in your member profile, once we added the most recent Status Updates onto the main forum index, the Status Updates have often become mini-conversations in their own right.

This has happened to other boards as well, and so it has been taken it to the next logical step and will soon allow archived statuses and status replies. There will be a new tab in a member's profile for recent status updates and recent status actions, as seen in this screen shot below.

Shades-20091223-121326.png

As one would expect, this is all handled via Ajax with normal post operations for those who do not have javascript enabled. Replies appear instantly, comments are deleted instantly and even status updates are removed instantly. See it in action below:

There is also a new page for all status updates:

Shades-20091223-121145.png

You can even receive email notification on any replies to your statuses or any replies to statuses you've replied to:

Shades-20091223-121452.png

This takes a minor feature and gives it a little more focus and should help increase traffic between user profiles and give more of a social feel to TIWWA.

Your status can also be updated automatically from Facebook if you are using Facebook connect (we currently have this disabled).

As always, please keep in mind that these are early preview screenshots and may change between now and the finished version.

As always, we'd love to know what you think.

The forum software isn't the only component to receive some improvements, we'll see some great new functionality and ideas in the Gallery, Blogs and Download sections of TIWWA too.

IP.Gallery

Major new features coming soon include:

  • Friendly Urls
  • Image Notes
  • Improved Slideshow
  • Profile Picture Album
  • Sub Albums
  • Category and Album Covers
  • Friends Only Albums
  • Reputation Support
  • Interface Improvements
  • Download Button for wallpapers and images.
    This update brings many refinements, performance optimizations, and new features, including:

    Friendly URLs
    IP.Gallery now makes full use of the IP.Board FURL system. Categories, albums, images and more now have the friendly URL structure you're familiar with.

    Image notes
    Image owners are now able to add notes to sections of their images, positioning and resizing them to suit. Other members will be able to see the notes when hovering over the image.

    Image rotation
    Images can now be rotated in 90° increments, to compensate for those photos taken in landscape or portrait, but saved in the wrong orientation.

    New slideshow
    A completely rewritten slideshow feature! It is now a unified interface, loading images on demand as necessary. Users can play or pause the slideshow at will, or jump to specific photos using the thumbnail bar.

    Profile picture album
    You can now create a new kind of album, a 'Profile Picture' Album. After this album has been created, any images that you upload to it will be displayed on the change picture page in your User CP, making them easy to select as your profile image.

    Sub albums
    Albums now support unlimited sub albums, which work exactly like gallery sub categories.

    Category & album covers
    It is now possible to specify one of the images in a category or album to be the cover of that category or album. If a cover image is specified, it will always be displayed for that category or album, instead of the last image thumbnail.

    Friends-only albums
    When creating an album, users can now choose to restrict viewing to only those users who are on their friends list.

    Reputation support in comments
    We have added support for IP.Board's reputation feature in comments posted within IP.Gallery.

    Interface tweaks
    We have updated the style of categories so that larger versions of the image are used, to give more impact. The image listing has also been updated, and will now show as many images on a row as the users browser can fit. This should improve the display of IP.Gallery for users who have higher screen resolutions. The image view screen has also been improved, including support for those features mentioned above.




    IP.Blog

    It's a fairly substantial upgrade with many new features and improvements, not least of all an RSS import feature, so you can import content from other sites into your blog, like latest game rviews or release dates, weather or science news updates etc.

    Major new features coming soon to the Blog component include:

    • Efficiency Improvements - Several more caching layers added for commonly requested data from blogs and entries. This, along with significant SQL query work makes this version the most efficient yet. The improvements are obvious even here. Pages load much quicker with much fewer queries.
    • Categories
    • Interface Improvements - The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. They've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use.Shades-20091119-151834.png

      Shades-133-20091119-150346.png

      • List View Returns
      • RSS Imports
      • Banish Entries
      • Admin Improvements

      Group Blogs

      This is a new feature that allows the admin to set up a group-wide blog. This blog is a normal blog in every other way. For example, we could set up a blog for all staff and everyone in the staff group will instantly be able to start writing new blog entries and managing comments, etc. We have something similar now but its been done using a dummy members account. We could set up a blog for a project team for example.

      Blog This!

      Shades-20091119-150646.png

      This is a brand new feature that adds a "Blog This" button to every post. This allows you to use post content in your blog entry. Furthermore, the relationship is remembered and all linked blog entries appear at the bottom of the topic when viewed:

      Shades-20091119-150616.png

      Pre entry Rating

      You can now rate each blog entry rather than just the entire blog itself. The blog rating is still shown on the homepage as an aggregate of all rated entries:

      Shades-20091119-150729.png

      Report Item and Reputation

      You can now report an entire blog entry, or just a single comment. You can now also give someone a reputation increase/decrease in comments:

      Shades-20091119-150814.png

      List View Returns

      A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs.

      There's even a little 'preview the latest entry' icon that shows the entry excerpt in a pop-up so you don't have to leave the page to preview it.

      Shades-20091130-160120.png

      There are also countless other improvements and enhancements.

      Dynamic Sidebar Block

      Some the footer links (Top 10 bloggers, etc) have moved into a dynamic sidebar along with Recent Entries. This makes it easier to locate and saves a bit of space:

      Shades-20091201-054054.png

      RSS Imports

      Another long requested feature was to be able to create entries from an RSS feed. This is now a feature. You can control which member groups have access to this as well as limit the number of items imported on each cycle.

      Shades-20091201-054145.png

      IP.Downloads

      Major new features coming soon include:

      • Friendly Urls - IP.Downloads 2.1 will feature friendly urls for the main index page, category view pages, file view pages, and downloading files.
      • Resume Breakpoints Toggle
      • Per Category Settings
      • Download Sessions
      • Storage Improvements
        • You can now submit multiple files at one time per file record. For instance, you might submit "My Home Movie", and then upload "movie.part1", "movie.part2", and "movie.part3" to break your movie into multiple pieces.
        • You can now submit multiple screenshots per file record
        • When submitting links you can identify a link "type" (i.e. a mirror, for instance). Along with multiple physical files, you will be able to submit multiple urls, providing for built in mirror support by linking to copies of the download hosted elsewhere.
        • Due to the improved file uploading process, a progress bar is now shown for all files uploading. This will allow for multiple simultaneous file uploads, as well as progress-bar support, when uploading files.

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