Exciting news! SocialEngine Self-Hosted 6.5.0 is now available! This update brings in several new features, enhancements, and bug fixes, all thanks to the valuable input from our community and dedicated staff.
Your patience has been greatly appreciated, and we’re thrilled to announce the arrival of this long-awaited release. As a token of our appreciation, we’re offering a generous 30% discount on all SocialEngine products.
Coupon Code: BLACKFRIDAY2023
Click here to explore further details about this enticing offer.
Explore the latest version and take advantage of this limited-time offer to enhance your SocialEngine experience!
New Features:
New – User Verification Badge Icon to enable admins to verify users and choose badge icons for the same for each member level. Members can be verified based on below criterias for each member level:
- Auto verified
- Via verification request
- On payment basis
Admins can also verify / un-verify individual members in the admin panel member manager.
Members can configure their verification settings from Settings >> Verification section in the user panel.
New – New theme updated for Install and Manage Packages section for better user experience
New – Admin Panel Theme with improved UI and new features.
- Improved Plugins section, to enable admins to enable / disable plugins from the admin panel. Now, admins do not have to go to the Manage Packages section to enable / disable plugins.
- With this implementation, SE Managed clients can now enable / disable plugins as per their requirements.
- With this implementation, SE Managed clients can now enable / disable plugins as per their requirements.
- New widgets on Dashboard for more statistics:
- Manage Recent Activity Feeds
- Manage Comments
- Admin Notes – to provide a section for admins to share quick notes among each other at one place.
- Reports Graph
- Manage Comments section under Manage Settings
- Manage Feeds section under Activity Feeds Settings in Settings
- Dark Mode and Light Mode
- Moved Mode Switcher in Header for easy accessibility and allow mode switching from anywhere in the admin panel.
- Language switcher in admin panel.
- New image option for Languages which can be uploaded from Appearance >> Language Manager section. This image will display with language in both user panel and admin panel.
New – Added a setting “Allow username changes” to allow admin to show the Profile Address (Username) for the member throughout the site instead of First Name/ Last Name.
- This setting can be configured from Member Level Settings in the admin panel.
New – The last login date and time of a member will show in the admin panel member manager. This can help admin to see if members are active, or perhaps help control spam if members have never logged in.
New – Add a feature to allow the user who sends an invite code to view the code and copy the link.
New – Show transaction history to users for membership payments.
New – Add Alphabetical option to search and sort options
New – Provided tab id in tab container so that when a user clicks on a tab, they land on individual tabs. This will help users in sharing link of particular tabs and
New – Now Activity feeds will be displayed via AJAX with Shimmer Effect.
New – Provided a new widgetized page “Activity Feed View Page” for Activity Feeds. Users can now share a particular feed page. Upon sharing the link on external sites, now, the photo associated with the feed will be displayed.
Improvements:
TinyMCE Improvements & Bug Fixes:
- Improved – Upgrade TinyMCE’s WYSIWYG Editor v6.7.0 .
- New – Implemented TinyMCE Editor’s inbuilt unicode emojis.
- New – TinyMCE Editor Settings to allow admins to configure TinyMCE controls / options for each member level.
- New – Provided more options in TinyMCE editor to improve content editing.
- Fixed – Bold is not showing bold enough in some browsers for the editor.
- Fixed – Link as text in TinyMCE is not working.
- Fixed – Tables in blog not working.
- Fixed – Quoting in a forum with html or BBcode disabled is showing code tags.
- Fixed – Group discussion editor formatting.
Improved – Updated some text in admin for accessibility as it was too light. More improvements will be coming in this area.
Improved – Added placeholder text for Age Min/Max on member browse page.
Improved – Remove the Delete option from the English language pack and provide a disable option for all packs.
Improved – Networks and Profile Questions list was not intuitive. We’ve made an improvement to show the member level next to the questions when editing or creating a network and choosing a related Profile Question.
Improved – Added unique identifier for cached data which will allow memcached to work better with multi-site setup.
Improved – Improved ordering in signup process by fixing the position of Create Account step.
Improved – Improved code for emoji’s to make compatibility with unicode emojis.
Improved – Remove 3rd option (Yes, I want to host API on my own server using the opensource version) from Iframely settings.
Improved – Improve the process to add a profile photo to business, classified, travel if none added during creation
Improved – Deleted one task ‘Statistics’ from Task Scheduler.
Improved – Moving Members to new Profile Type Creates Duplicate Member Entries.
Some more improvements are done for profile types as mentioned below:
- New – Admins can now choose to allow users to charge their profile types from Member Level Settings: “Allow Profile Type Change” . Admins can also choose to allow / disallow mapping of selected profile type with associated member level.
- New – Admins can now change Profile Type of members from Manage Members section and also choose to switch member level associated with the selected profile type.
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed – Removed AddThis service from all places.
- Fixed – Categories description in admin plugins is not worded well and is wrong in groups. Updated the wording to be more clear.
- Fixed – PHP mail function not sending mails in proper format.
- Fixed – Profile question description is showing below input box instead of below title.
- Fixed – New Categories and Subcategories cause issues in search results which show “ITEM_TYPE_ALBUM_CATEGORY”.
- Fixed – Empty phrase created if navigating from page during creation of phrase.
- Fixed – Classified photo not showing when viewing listing, random issue. Sometimes produced by changing the main classified photo.
- Fixed – Blog archive widget is missing English dates and shows an error for other languages.
- Fixed – Content count is missing on profile tabs.
- Fixed – Recurring payment is not working in Paypal with PHP 8.
- Fixed – During testing of 6.5, plugins would not install.
- Fixed – Weird icon on empty social links menus.
- Fixed – Updated Twitter icon in “Social Site Links Menu” widget.
- Fixed – Update link of Facebook Developer page in Facebook Integration Settings.
- Fixed – Video view page responsive layout.
- Fixed – Theme issues for Elpis.
- Fixed – Inspira profile icon misaligned and smaller.
- Fixed – Hamburger menu is not working in Mobile Browser on the member profile page for tab container.
- Fixed – Charity theme landing page UI.
- Fixed – Searching “hand” produces no results when “hands” is a title. Improved searching such keywords. Made search icon clickable to provide better search experience.
- Fixed – Drop down doesn’t open for accessibility.
- Fixed – Update MySQL requirements in install or upgrade screen.
- Fixed – Install page still shows mysql 5.7 even if using mariadb.
- Fixed – Activity Feed breaks after loading more than 5 times.
- Fixed – Hard coded phrases in Member Statistics widget in admin.
- Fixed – Can’t delete serenity theme.
- Fixed – Cache Lifetime setting doesn’t appear to work
- Fixed – Static File Base Url Interferes with FontAwesome Icons.
- Fixed – Redis extension is not working in php8.
- Fixed – Can not create events in Spanish Language due to date error.
- Fixed – Fixed issues in PayPal Recurring Subscription
- Fixed – When editing of posts and topics are not allowed, then do not show Edit option.
- Fixed – Vulnerability issue in chat plugin.
- Fixed – Hard coded phrases in admin panel.
- Fixed – serenity v6 profile info tabs font issue.
- Fixed – serenity v6 Profile Type data is breaking in 2 lines in Member Info widget
- Fixed – Serenity theme fonts are so light.
- Mobile App Issues Fixed:
- Fixed – Videos are downloaded in the app and website when S3 is enabled.
- Fixed – Fixed issues for 2 photos creation in iOS and Android Mobile Apps instead of 4 photos.
- Fixed – On uploading new profile photo, old Profile Photo should be deleted if album plugin is not installed.
A complete changelog is available for more details about the changes and fixes implemented in this 6.5.0 release. Please view our demo and explore 6.5.0!
Clients with v6 access can download version 6.5.0 from our client dashboard. Clients who do not have access will need to purchase v6 access.
As always we highly encourage all users to do a complete backup of both files and database before performing an upgrade. Please have the backup performed by your host or a developer if you’re not comfortable performing it yourself.
Fresh installs should follow our installation tutorial or you can order an installation and our team will get it installed in no time.
To upgrade from a previous version to 6.5.0, please view our upgrade documentation, but if you want our experts to perform an upgrade on your site, then you can purchase our required Upgrade Service.
Important: There are special steps and patches for those upgrading from versions below v6. You will need to follow the special steps in the upgrading documents linked here before upgrading and applying the patches mentioned.
SocialEngine Managed clients please submit a ticket for upgrade so we can schedule it.
If you find any issues with this release, please let us know by filing a bug report in our Bug Tracker.
With Great Appreciation,
The SocialEngine Team
