SocialEngine Self-Hosted 4.9 Release!

It is finally here! Our SocialEngine team is so pleased to announce the release of SocialEngine Self-Hosted 4.9! We have been working so hard for a very long time to bring you some great new features, improvements, bug fixes, and updates. You’ll enjoy a beautiful responsive theme, an improved UI, new social sharing features, Self-Hosted 7 support, and many more features to help manage your site.

We’ve created a short intro video for you to check out the new features, but for those looking for those looking for a deeper dive into the new features, let’s take a more in-depth look.

Core:

Added a new responsive theme “Insignia” along with 6 different color variants. (Fixes #150)
Added compatibility with Self-Hosted 7.0 and 7.1. (Fixes #186 & #472)
Upgraded Zend to to 1.12.20. (Fixes #471)
Upgraded to Google’s new reCaptcha. (Fixes #49, #135 and #153)
Added a new ‘Vertical’ variant of main menu giving a completely new look to your website.
Used font awesome icons everywhere.
Improved Social Login buttons in Login/Signup forms. (Fixes #163)
Added Redis as an additional Backend Cache support and an option for admin to choose it.
Added a new widget “Column Width Modifier” enabling admin to adjust width of any column on a page in layout editor. (Fixes #84 and #160)
Added a new widget “Social Site Links Menu” and placed it in Footer section.
Added a new widget “Social Share” adding ability for users to share content on other social sites. (Fixes #162)
Added a new “Banners” feature using which site admin can place attractive banners with a background image, some catchy headings and a CTA button on any page of website. There is a “Browse Page Banner” available for this.
Added an option for admin to set admin titles for HTML blocks placed on the same page for easy identification. (Fixes #161)
Made “mobile.css” file available for editing via Theme Editor.
Enabled seo friendly content urls with slugs in Albums, Groups and Events plugins. (Fixes #149 and #77)
Added “Color Variants” feature for themes.
Added user’s photo in mini menu making it look better.
Added “Updates” of mini menu to Menu Editor. (Fixes #159, #117 and #97)
Added a separate widget for search and placed it in header giving more flexibility for its placement. (Fixes #117)
Add more Amazon S3 regions and renamed current region names to match Amazon names listed in their docs.
Improved pagination by adding First and Last option in pagination control bar. (Fixes #164)
Sorted plugins alphabetically in plugins dropdown at admin panel. (Fixes #157 and #443)
Improved Zip Code validation. (Fixes #495)
Added “Group Profile Options” widget during installation on Mobile group Profile page.
Added support for creating a skeleton of Language, Library and External type packages from package manager.
Improved user blocking by (Fixes #356, #221 and #253):
- Disallowing the blocked users to view content posted by people who blocked them and vice-versa.
- Not sending notifications to blocked users related to one who blocked them at common places.
- Fixing issue where a user was able to send message to one who had blocked him.
- Enabling two way blocking
Upgraded TinyMCE library to latest version and improved its implementation in our modules by standardizing it at all instances and doing below things (Fixes #278, #508, #260 and #413):
- Added Upload Photo option that was missing at a few instances
- Added browser Spell Checker
- Added Auto Save feature that will work for 300 min
Improvements in the browse pages of these modules: Blogs, Albums, Videos, Classifieds, Music, Events, and Groups.

Added “like_count” and “comment_count” columns in tables of content-based plugins attractively displaying these stats on respective browse pages.
Improved search widget by adding a “Search” button.
Added a new Categories side-column widget in all the core plugins where categories exist.
Enhanced overall interface of Browse pages of these plugins and Browse Members page too.
Added “View All” link in Popular and Recent items widgets of all the core plugins enabling more engagement.
Placed banners with attractive default gradient backgrounds on browse pages of some of these core plugins during installation.

Activity Feed:

Added ability for users to upload multiple photos from activity feed and for admins to control the number that user of a certain member level can upload at a time. (Fixes #142)
Added support for ajax based status posting. (Fixes #145)
Added ability to edit status posts. (Fixes #143)
Added Iframely Integration enabling users share and embed rich content from over 1700 domains on SocialEngine based site. (Fixes #141, #313 and #308)
Made “Activity Feed Item Type Settings” section more organized by adding a `Module` based filter. (Fixes #158, #608 and #68)
Improved “Shareable” feature allowing admin to choose out of different parts of a feed that can be shared by a user.
Added new activity feed items enabling more engagement while (Fixes #319):
- Liking a content on site.
- Commenting on another user’s profile.
- Commenting on another user’s playlist.
Did work of grouping feeds in Activity feed.
Added better synchronization among comments and also created new activity feeds if comment is made on a feed synchronizing comments. (Fixes #144 and #514)
Increased max attachment count for photo upload activity from 8 to 100 fixing inconsistency issue that appeared when more than 8 photos are added to an album. (Fixes #133)
Added separate activity feed items for posts on event and group profiles adding more flexibility for admin to choose separate display settings for these and user profile posts. (Fixes #417)

Albums:

Enhanced User Interface of Browse Albums and Album View pages.
Added Album preview feature on Album Browse page – hover over an album and get a slideshow of some of the photos contained inside it.
Added a setting for admin to choose if default albums (like Message Photos, Blog Photos, etc) should be searchable and displayed in browse pages and multiple widgets on website.
Added support for GIF images; made both GD and Imagick libraries support this feature. (Fixes #455 and #165)
Add ability to upload files using simple uploader even when Flash is not installed in browser. (Fixes #309 and #128)

Videos:

Added open graph meta tag og:image for video thumbnail enabling image appear for selection while sharing the video view page url on external websites. (Fixes #156)

Events:

Added event’s photo in Upcoming Events widget.
Sorted past events in reverse chronological order adding a new “Recently Ended” Filter in search form. (Fixes #154)

Blogs:

Added ability for users to upload a profile image for blogs during creation and editing.

Classifieds:

Enhanced user interface of Browse Classifieds page.

Music:

Added support for “Add Music” option in mobile.
Enhanced interface of Browse Music page.

Forum:

Added tool-bar containing “Insert/edit link” button missing in TINYMCE Editor.

Bugs Fixed:

Fixed issue with Facebook login that appeared recently after some changes were done by Facebook in their API. (Fixes #626)
Fixed issue with links shared via activity feed appearing broken while viglink is enabled on site. (Fixes #419)
Fixed issue where blog posts were not getting filtered by categories. (Fixes #510)
Fixed issue that was appearing on double clicking “Go Offline” icon in the chat window.
Fixed issue with Chat container rendered at wrong place on Chat Main page. (Fixes #496)
Fixed issue with incorrect email and site notification being sent to user when someone comments on the topic they posted on in forum. (Fixes #499)
Fixed issue with visible <p> tags in forum posts when HTML censor is on.
Fixed issue with creating a new Profile Type that wouldn’t copy over the options.
Fixed issue with “Duplicate Existing Profile-Type” drop-down showing extra fields.
Fixed issue with Paypal getting enabled even without filling the API details and then throwing error.
Fixed issue with multi-select profile questions appearing in iOS devices. (Fixes #536)
Fixed issue with Site Wide Statistics graph getting squished and unreadable at times.
Fixed issue with meta information and image not rendering when sharing a non-english url from activity feed.
Renamed “Member Type” to “Profile Type” on user profile avoiding confusion between member level and profile type. (Fixes #223)
Fixed issue with Host value not getting pre-populated correctly for Memcache after Performance & Caching settings are saved.
Fixed the order of items used to build meta title and description tags for all the pages. (Fixes #148)
Fixed issue with Self-Hosted Arrays not getting created for new language packs when “Translation Performance” setting is enabled.
Moved description to appear below the field for profile questions. (Fixes #461)
Fixed issue with member level getting degraded immediately after a subscription is cancelled without taking into account the amount already paid for current subscription.
Fixed issue with reverse order of menu items being set for mini menu.
Fixed issue with displaying ad campaigns that was not working if targeted to be displayed to a specific member level and network. (Fixes #525)
Fixes some security vulnerabilities.
Fixed an issue with censored words not working when added until clearing the cache
Fixed issue with heading profile field getting displayed on profile page even when set to be hidden from admin panel.
Fixed issue with inability to disable display of heading profile field on Browse Members Page.
Added missing transliteration for cyrillic and other non-western characters in slug. (Fixes #406)
Removed “Delete Page” option for core pages in Layout Editor. (Fixes #485)
Fixed issue with mail templates having placeholder “[recipient_photo]” making sure it displays an image instead of a link.
Fixed issue with deleting the profile photo just after editing thumbnail that was throwing an error. (Fixes #118)
Fixed issue with global search not including custom pages created via Layout Editor. (Fixes #547)
Fixed issue where activity feed items and mail templates of disabled plugins were being displayed on site. (Fixes #60)

We have so many new features that we actually can’t list everything in this blog post. We will, however, include a link to the changelog where you can see the entire list. Tutorials for how to use the new features are already in our knowledgebase, you can check out the new features on our Demo Site, or check out this video tour!

You can download your copy of version 4.9 from your client account. To upgrade, please view our upgrade documentation or, if you’d rather we take care of the hard stuff, you can order an upgrade and we’ll do it for you. Fresh installs should follow this installation tutorial or you can order an installation ticket and our team will get it installed in no time!

NOTE: Please make sure that you do a complete backup of both files and database before performing this upgrade. Please have the backup performed by your host or a developer if you’re not comfortable with performing it yourself.

You can also browse the complete changelog for more details about the changes and fixes implemented in this version.

We are very excited to bring you this release! It comes with more than 280 features and bug fixes, approximately 70 of which were reported by our amazing community through our public bugs and suggestions tracker. We want to take a moment to thank you for this. If you find any issues, please let us know by filing a bug report in our Public Bug Tracker or by Contact Us.

Lastly we’d like to encourage you to stay connected with the SocialEngine community.

From everyone here at the SocialEngine team, thank you for your enduring support and we really hope you love this update as much as we do!

Sincerely,
The SocialEngine Team