I know you guys are all eagerly awaiting our updates, so without further ado, here ‘goes! I’m going to start with the mundane and work up to the exciting.
First, let’s start with what we’ve released. Those of you who are interested can now download the updated music and polls plugin from the client area. I believe John also released a patch for his chat plugin. Thanks, John!
Next, I know many of you are wondering what we’re busy adding to the group and blog plugins. Here is a short list of some of the key features we’re adding to each:
Blog Plugin
1. Sidebar – We are adding a side bar/gutter area to the users’ blog pages. Why, you might ask? To house the following:
2. Archive – We’ll be providing easier navigation through previous entries via year/months in the sidebar!
3. User-Defined Categories – Users will now be allowed to create their own entry categories. The admin-created categories will still be an option, however this will allow users to categorize their own blog entries. The categories will show up in the sidebar as well.
4. Subscriptions – This is a bit similar to a “BlogRoll”. Basically, you can subscribe to a user’s blog and it will show up in your gutter as one of the blogs you follow.
5. Social Bookmarking
6. Trackbacks
7. SEO
Group Plugin
1. Member Invitations – Group owners will be allowed to grant their members permission to invite their friends to a group. Additionally, inviting users to join a group will be much easier, both for the owner/officers and users.
2. Member Uploads – Group owners can grant their members permission to upload photos to a group. Huzzah!
3. PM Group Members – We’ll be adding a way for the group owner/officers to easily PM all the users in their group.
4. Group Activity Feed – Each group will have its own minifeed summary.
5. Group Discussion Actions – Discussion topics will be included in the main “What’s New” feed, and due to the new action feed privacy, only people who are allowed to view the discussion will see it in the feed.
6. Better handling of Group Categories/Fields
As mentioned, this is just a short list of the additions. These plugins will likely be released within the next two weeks, along with an upgrade to the platform.
And lastly, the most exciting news! Thanks to Matthias (brilliant coder that he is), we will now be offering a video plugin for SE! NOTE: We are still tweaking the front-end, reorganizing the user interface, and fixing up bugs, but we want to give you a sneak preview of the new plugin! Before you all get excitied, I should note that there will be more strict server requirements for the video plugin than for SocialEngine and our other plugins. You will need to have ffmpeg installed, among other things, and this is NOT a service we will be offering. When the plugin is released, we will have a complete list of requirements, but I want to make it clear now that we will NOT support any issues related to incorrect server configuration or a lack of ffmpeg. Okay, without further ado, go check it out!
Please report all bugs in the comments (no feature requests at the moment, please). I will not necessarily respond to all the comments here, but I will read all of them and ensure that the bugs get fixed.
