Hello! We’ve been burning the midnight oil getting things together for our exciting 4.9 release! As the pieces start to fall into their final places, we’d like to provide you with this Sneak Peek! Are you ready? We’ve got some great improvements and new features to bring your social networking community to a new level!
Below are just a few of the awesome new features and improvements coming. Some of these features had been planned for our 4.10 release but our wonderful development team was able to include the UI improvements in this 4.9 release!
New Insignia – Responsive Theme
Our new default responsive theme, Insignia, enables your users to easily browse content across multiple devices with varied screen sizes. This will be the default theme when you’ve installed a fresh copy of SocialEngine.
Awesome UI Improvements
We’ve improved the User Interface (UI) for a smoother, more refined experience. The numbered items below correspond to the numbers on the screenshot above.
- New header layout with the member’s photo in the mini menu.
- New footer layout with social share options.
- “Banner” feature. Admin will be able to add photos and text for each banner. These can be placed on any page and will show the image, text and a CTA button. Above, we show it on the Browse Photo Albums page.. You can see the text centered in the banner and the CTA button “Upload Photos” in the lower right corner.
- Enhanced UI for all of the browse pages of core modules. The above screenshot shows the Browse Albums page. We’ve implemented this for all of the other core modules including: Members, Videos, Classifieds, Blogs, Music, Events, and Groups.
- Added a Search button in search widgets for better UX.
- Added a categories widget for all of the core modules for better UX and navigation. Our screenshot above shows it for the Photo Albums.
New Toggle Between Vertical and Horizontal Menus
We’ve added a setting for Admin to allow toggling between either vertical or horizontal menus. This gives you greater flexibility in website customization. Here’s how the vertical menus look, in both the “open” and “closed” views.
Upload Multiple Photos in Activity Feed
This new feature allows your members to upload multiple photos with their Activity Feed “Post something.” When your member wants to post a status, they can now choose to include multiple images with it. This can help to create more activity on your site as members do love to share their photos!
reCAPTCHA Updated to Google’s No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA
Spammers beware! You’re SocialEngine 4.9 website comes with an update to the reCAPTCHA anti-spam protection. Very easy for you to use, much harder for spammers to infiltrate.
Zend Framework Updated to latest ZF1
We’ve updated our Zend Framework to the latest ZF1 which allows us to support PHP 7 and PHP 7.1! This is great for everyone that wants to use PHP 7 for their communities.
SEO friendly content URLs with Slugs
Improving your SEO experience can help you place better in the search engines. We’ve added SEO friendly content URLs with Slugs for Albums, Groups, and Events. This will change your URLs from this, http://xyz.com/group/1 , to be like this, http://xyz.com/group/test-group , where “test-group” is the name of the group that was created.
Be sure to stay tuned for further announcements so you can grab version 4.9 when it releases! Don’t have a license yet? No need to wait to get started as upgrading to new releases is easy peasy, point and click simple. You can start your community today with our 4.8.13 and then upgrade later on without concern. Questions? We would love to hear from you! Please feel free to contact us.
