Release Notes - 3rd November 2010

We're starting to introduce some brand new social networking features to the Insight platform, giving your members the freedom and flexibility to create content and to interact on your site. You'll see plenty of exciting features over the coming months. This time around, we've brought you user and family profile layouts, improved document creation and editing on the user-side, and ratings for documents. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

User and Family Profile Layouts

You now have full theme and layout control over user and family profile layouts. In the Theme & Layout editor you'll find links to edit the user and family layouts at the bottom of the group tree - along with the System Page layout. This allows you to fully customize the look and feel of your users' profiles.

We've also added a user list component, over which you have full mini-layout control. This enables you to list on the user-side all the members of a particular person's family, displaying as much, or as little, data about them as their user privacy settings allow.

Enhancements to the User-Side Document Editor

We've made a number of improvements to the features and accessibility of the user-side document editor:

You can now enter a summary, tags, article notes and choose a summary image.
You can use existing documents as templates
Admins can now set which groups accept user-side document submissions, and whether these submissions are auto-approved.
A document can be set to replace another document when it is published (either immediately if it is auto-approved, or when the administrator publishes it)

The user-side document editor was previously only accessible from the 'My Documents' page, but can now be accessed via a new component - 'Document Editor Link' - that you will find under 'User Account' in the Layout Editor (or the Components dropdown in the Web Office document editor). In this component, you can configure whether to create a blank document or use a document (e.g. the current article) as a template, which document (if any) to replace when the new document is published, and to which group the new document should be submitted. The link generated by the component will only appear if the visitor to the site has the appropriate permissions to view the template document, and to submit documents to the relevant group.

In the Web Office document editor you change the settings for which document will be replaced on publishing.

In addition, the author of the document now defaults to the name of the person submitting. There is a checkbox allowing you to override with free text if you wish.

You'll find the new document submission security settings on the Summary tab for each group.

Article Ratings

We already have rating stars on shop items; now we have rolled them out to articles so that you can allow visitors to your site to rate the content. To get going, just tick the "Allow ratings on this article" box on the document properties tab (feedback also has to be enabled before you can see this option).

You then need to add a 'Rating' component (find this under 'Content' in the Layout Editor) to your group or article layout. Rating components on group layouts can be set to show an average of all the articles in that group.

User-Side Sub-Group Creation

You'll find another new component under 'User Account' in the Layout Editor which allows your site visitors to create a sub-group on the user side. When the sub-group is created, the site visitor becomes the only member of that group. This would allow you, for example to create blog groups, where all documents submitted to the group are considered as blog posts from the group's creator. With document submission settings (see above) set to auto-approve, the user can publish and edit their own posts at will.

There is a new security setting on the Summary tab of each group, which determines whether the group allows user-side sub-group creation, and where these new groups should get their settings from (by default this is the parent group).

New Filtering Options for Article Lists

There are two new ways to filter article lists:

Filter by a specific user. You can now display all of the articles that were created by a specific person.
Tag-list filtering can be set from a note. Article lists could previously be filtered by a list of tags - and the list of tags could come from a tag-list note type. Now, the tag-list for filtering can be defined from the selections made in multiselect list boxes, radiobutton lists and dropdown lists. This means that users can be made to chose from a fixed list of tags, rather than being able to enter arbitrary tags.

Default Article Settings

In the 'General' area on the 'Settings' tab, you'll find a new page 'Default Document Settings' where you can set defaults for all new articles for settings such as when the articles expires and whether to allow feedback and ratings.

Other enhancements and bug fixes

In the media player, where you have more than one file per recording, the file with the highest bitrate - i.e. your highest quality version - will be selected by default.
In the site search results, the links to the second and subsequent pages of media items didn't work. This is now fixed.
On the main audio/video page, and in media search results, those of you who have hundreds of uploaded media files were seeing the numbered links to pages spreading over multiple lines. We've reduced this so that it just shows a few pages either side of the page that you're currently on.
Shop items with a dash in the product code weren't returned when searching using the product code. We've fixed this.
When creating new organizations, the group notes were not saved. This is fixed.

Let us know what you think!

We'd love to hear your thoughts on our latest release, so leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

Endis Insight Support, 11/3/2010

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