I’m finally through much of the boring-but-necessary stuff in the v3 platform, and have spent the last week or so adding some of the highly-requested features:
1. HTML in Comments – I finally got the chance to work on this. Here’s a screenshot from the admin section:
As you can see, it’s similar to the HTML in Profile Fields, in that you specify which HTML tags are allowed. Here is an example on the user side:
Note that Alex is still working on the stylistic aspects of this section, but you can see from the image that I was able to specify HTML in my comment.
2. Those of you who are astute will notice a few other things about the image above. The first is the “Refresh” link under the security image. That will allow you to refresh the image without refreshing the page (and potentially losing your comment, or whatever).
3. Another change you probably noticed is the addition of “edit” and “delete” links. We will be including both in v3 as promised.
4. The last change you’ll notice is the “Wall-to-Wall” link – I’ll display some screenshots from that section a bit later.
5. Another cool thing that we’ve added that I believe I’ve mentioned before is the ability to Add Friends (or Remove/Confirm Friendships), Block/Unblock Users, Report Users, or Send Messages directly from the profile, without leaving the page. Here’s a screenshot of the sample list of links, along with what would pop-up if you clicked “Report this Person”:
6. All the email notifications have been put back on the Account Settings page, as requested.
7. Animated gifs are now supported! You can’t tell above, but the little astronaut that is my avatar actually waves.
8. As Alex mentioned, he’s started working on the stylistic changes. Some of the things we’ll be including are a vertical user menu and tabbed profiles, among other things. We will likely be including public pages for browsing blog entries, albums, etc, in addition to the “My Network” page, as well. I’ll keep you all updated on that as the frontend comes together more.
This week, my plan is to work on finishing up all the smaller user features, and hopefully begin adding the “hooks” (which I think will be a very valuable addition for all of you who are making modifications), as well as begin working on either OpenSocial or FB Platform support. We may initially be releasing FB Platform support and then add OpenSocial support once Shindig is more established.
Also, many of you were wondering if we had forgotten about SEO for SE. We are going to be adding more things like meta tags with descriptions, as well as varied page titles in v3. If you have an idea for how we can improve on the SEO on JUST the platform for now (this means not focusing on blog entries, albums, etc for the moment), please let me know. I know that there was much posted about this in the group and I had a couple messages a while ago, but a reminder from all of you as to what you would like would be helpful.
I should also mention that we’ll be including some of the tutorials that have been made for v2 in v3, such as the auto-growing textareas and the sample profile styles.
Based on the timeline I’ve laid out, I am hoping the entirety of the platform (not including the plugins) will be finished by the end of June. The plugins will likely take me substantially less time to update than the platform. Once the platform is finished (minus the plugins), I may put it up as a public beta so that you can play around with it while I work on the plugins, and suggest improvements or submit bug reports. Thanks again for your patience, let me know if you have any questions!
