Release Notes - 4th November 2010

We're starting to introduce some brand new social networking features to the Insight platform, giving your members the freedom and flexibility to create content and to interact on your site. You'll see plenty of exciting features over the coming months. This time around, we've brought you user and family profile layouts, improved document creation and editing on the user-side, and ratings for documents. As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

User and Family Profile Layouts

You now have full theme and layout control over user and family profile layouts. In the Theme & Layout editor you'll find links to edit the user and family layouts at the bottom of the group tree - along with the System Page layout. This allows you to fully customise the look and feel of your users' profiles.

We've also added a user list component, over which you have full mini-layout control. This enables you to list on the user-side all the members of a particular person's family, displaying as much, or as little, data about them as their user privacy settings allow.

Enhancements to the User-Side Document Editor

We've made a number of improvements to the features and accessibility of the user-side document editor:

You can now enter a summary, tags, article notes and choose a summary image.
You can use existing documents as templates
Admins can now set which groups accept user-side document submissions, and whether these submissions are auto-approved.
A document can be set to replace another document when it is published (either immediately if it is auto-approved, or when the administrator publishes it)

The user-side document editor was previously only accessible from the 'My Documents' page, but can now be accessed via a new component - 'Document Editor Link' - that you will find under 'User Account' in the Layout Editor (or the Components dropdown in the Web Office document editor). In this component, you can configure whether to create a blank document or use a document (e.g. the current article) as a template, which document (if any) to replace when the new document is published, and to which group the new document should be submitted. The link generated by the component will only appear if the visitor to the site has the appropriate permissions to view the template document, and to submit documents to the relevant group.

In the Web Office document editor you change the settings for which document will be replaced on publishing.

In addition, the author of the document now defaults to the name of the person submitting. There is a checkbox allowing you to override with free text if you wish.

You'll find the new document submission security settings on the Summary tab for each group.

Article Ratings

We already have rating stars on shop items; now we have rolled them out to articles so that you can allow visitors to your site to rate the content. To get going, just tick the "Allow ratings on this article" box on the document properties tab (feedback also has to be enabled before you can see this option).

You then need to add a 'Rating' component (find this under 'Content' in the Layout Editor) to your group or article layout. Rating components on group layouts can be set to show an average of all the articles in that group.

User-Side Sub-Group Creation

You'll find another new component under 'User Account' in the Layout Editor which allows your site visitors to create a sub-group on the user side. When the sub-group is created, the site visitor becomes the only member of that group. This would allow you, for example to create blog groups, where all documents submitted to the group are considered as blog posts from the group's creator. With document submission settings (see above) set to auto-approve, the user can publish and edit their own posts at will.

There is a new security setting on the Summary tab of each group, which determines whether the group allows user-side sub-group creation, and where these new groups should get their settings from (by default this is the parent group).

New Filtering Options for Article Lists

There are two new ways to filter article lists:

Filter by a specific user. You can now display all of the articles that were created by a specific person.
Tag-list filtering can be set from a note. Article lists could previously be filtered by a list of tags - and the list of tags could come from a tag-list note type. Now, the tag-list for filtering can be defined from the selections made in multiselect list boxes, radiobutton lists and dropdown lists. This means that users can be made to chose from a fixed list of tags, rather than being able to enter arbitrary tags.

You could now create a note listing different interest groups or topics e.g.a list of business sectors, and display it on user's profile pages so they can select the sectors they are interested in. The articles listed on the site could then be set to display only articles of the sectors the current user is interested in - creating a personalised view of the site based on the person's interests.

Default Article Settings

In the 'General' area on the 'Settings' tab, you'll find a new page 'Default Document Settings' where you can set defaults for all new articles for settings such as when the articles expires and whether to allow feedback and ratings.

Other enhancements and bug fixes

In the media player, where you have more than one file per recording, the file with the highest bitrate - i.e. your highest quality version - will be selected by default.
In the site search results, the links to the second and subsequent pages of media items didn't work. This is now fixed.
On the main audio/video page, and in media search results, those of you who have hundreds of uploaded media files were seeing the numbered links to pages spreading over multiple lines. We've reduced this so that it just shows a few pages either side of the page that you're currently on.
Shop items with a dash in the product code weren't returned when searching using the product code. We've fixed this.
When creating new organisations, the group notes were not saved. This is fixed.

Let us know what you think!

We'd love to hear your thoughts on our latest release, so leave a comment below and let us know what you think (you'll need to login with your Insight web site password first).

Insight Support, 09/11/2010

Feedback:

	Rob Waller (www.networkleeds.com)	04/11/2010 21:21
what about star ratings for organisations as well as articles. we have a large list of links and want to do a sort of ranking of them. thanks, r
	David Wallace (www.wharfedale-vineyard.org)	06/11/2010 19:46
Oh how exciting. We've been wanting to display a list of housegroup people to logged-in users for quite a few years now. But I can't work out how to get it working. Tried adding a user component in Layouts and on a sample article. Couldn't see how to make it show a list of users in the group. So please could we have an explanation of how to achieve this, as it sounds like exactly what we want, especially if it is able to include people's thumbnail photos: "We've also added a user list component, over which you have full mini-layout control. This enables you to list on the user-side all the members of a particular group, displaying as much, or as little, data about them as their user privacy settings allow."
	Justin Ruffell-Ward - Insight Support (shareinsight.co.uk)	09/11/2010 10:38
The user-list component doesn't yet allow you to display the members of a particular group, sorry, that was a mistake in the release notes. We will be extending it over the coming months however so you will be able to display all the members of a particular group soon.
	Mark Searle (www.stmarymagdalene.org.uk)	23/11/2010 09:31
Do you have a time scale for when facebook integration will come and what it will include?
	Justin Ruffell-Ward - Insight Support (shareinsight.co.uk)	24/11/2010 15:05
Mark, more integration with facebook isn't on the current development schedule. I can't therefore give any specifics on content or timescale. The 'social networking' features in this and the next release won't be integrating with sites like Facebook. They are designed to allow a site to add more options for people in your community to contribute to the content on your site e.g.the ability for users to submit articles to a specified area and have them immediately published, article voting,user-side group creation etc. These could be combined for example to allow user's to create their own blog for example, without the administrators help.
	Mark Searle (www.stmarymagdalene.org.uk)	24/11/2010 19:09
Thanks - anyway we can get the facebook like buttons to work instead> http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like when I paste the code in it comes up with errors and fails to link back correctly.
	Justin Ruffell-Ward - Insight Support (shareinsight.co.uk)	25/11/2010 10:16
We do have a social bookmarking component that does the same as this i.e.allows users to add an article from your website to their facebook news feed. It also allows users to add it to other social networking sites. There's a video on the component here:http://shareinsight.co.uk/Articles/189102/Link_with_social_networking_sites.aspx