Phew, it’s been an exhausting couple of weeks. The activity in the community has been a bit chaotic, to say the least! In an effort to keep you all safe from pirates and scammers, I’ve added a new feature to the community. There are now 4 different user levels here:
SocialEngine Dev Team (This consists of Alex, Brett, John, and me)
SocialEngine Clients (These are people who have legally purchased SocialEngine and have current access to the client area)
SocialEngine Approved Developers (These are people who may not have purchased SocialEngine, but who are developers who have worked with SocialEngine and have created templates, mods, etc that they would like to share)
Default (Everyone that doesn’t fit into one of the above categories)
Only the first three user levels will be allowed to post listings in the Marketplace. “Default” users will still be able to view the Marketplace (as well as post comments, blogs, etc), however they will not be allowed to list anything there. To become a member of the SocialEngine Clients user level, click “Settings” in the user menu, then click “Client Information”. Enter your license key and client password – if they are verified, your user level will be changed. You can see which user level someone belongs to by visiting their profile. I’ve made some temporary images (they show up under the user’s photo) – Alex will be making them look pretty later today. To become a member of the SocialEngine Approved Developers network, you will need to speak with me directly. I’ll need to verify that you are providing valuable services to our clients – if you post a pirated mod or attempt to scam our clients, you will be removed from that user level and possibly banned from the community altogether. Hope this all makes sense! If you have any questions about this new system, don’t hesitate to ask!
Onto v3 news…
Progress on v3 has been going well. I should remind you that I have been doing all the “boring but necessary” things on the platform first – all of the “fun” features will be done afterwards. But, the good news is that I’m finally almost done with the “boring” items in the platform. There are only a few more pages I need to go over and then I’ll be able to start working on things like:
– Who viewed my profile?
– My Network page
– Allowing users to decide what they want to see on their recent activity feed
– Viewing friends’ birthdays on the user home page (like facebook!)
I am still considering adding a “Points” system – I need to discuss it with the team to figure out the best way to implement it. In the meantime, you should check out radcodes’ points plugin – from what I can tell, it is quite good!
I have been working on the message area. I’ve made some big improvements to it. For example, conversations are now threaded properly (much in the same way that Facebook does it):
You can reply at the bottom of the thread and each conversation can be between multiple users at once. Though you can message multiple users at once now, the system is more like a “BCC” than a “To” since each user can’t tell who else was messaged. In v3, however, you will be able to see who a message was sent to, and reply to everyone. Additionally, composing a message is much sleeker:
When you click “Message” from a user’s profile, or from a friend list, or on your message page, a nice javascript box pops up so that you never leave the page you were originally viewing just to send a message. From there, I have added a much nicer suggest script that displays the users’ photo and username (as you can see above). If the admin has allowed it, you can specify multiple recipients separated by semicolons (the autosuggest feature works for this as well!). When you click “Send Message”, the contents of the javascript box change to say “Your message has been sent” and then the box disappears, leaving you on the page you were originally viewing. Please note that adding a friend will work in the same way – you will be able to request friendship with someone without ever leaving the page you were viewing.
Again, please keep in mind that much of what I’m doing right now is “behind-the-scenes”. I’m cleaning up a lot of code and making it work more efficiently. Unfortunately, I can’t take screenshots of cleaner code, so I know many of you are getting impatient with what you believe to be a lack of progress. I promise I will be working on some more interesting features in the very near future.
In other news, Brett is working on an audio plugin! Please, please, please do not bug him about it, as he will not be answering feature requests or requests for support or questions about when it will be completed. My estimate is that it will be finished within a couple weeks, but that isn’t guaranteed. The plugin will allow your users to upload mp3s to their own personal playlist, which will then play in a nice flash player on their profile.
That’s all for now, please feel free to post your questions here and I’ll do my best to respond to them! Thanks, as always, for your patience!
EDIT: Oh! I forgot to mention – we are looking for skilled developers who want to do freelance work for SocialEngine clients! If you would like to be included on our Integration Partners page, please send me an email (either directly or through the contact form) with your references, your website, etc. We will also be adding a section of the Integration Partners page for approved mod-sellers. If you believe you should be included in that section, again, send me an email! Thanks!!
