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Release Notes - 17th December 2010
This release extends the new social networking features, enabling your members to send private messages to each other, and to establish connections with other members - an additional level of trust that gives them more flexibility over what information they display.
As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.
Private Messaging
Users can now send private messages to other individuals on your site. The message will display to the user just like a current post in a forum. However, of course, the message can be viewed only by the 2 individuals the private message is between. The user will also receive an email notification of a new message thread by default, so they're aware there's a new message waiting for them to view. Note that the address book must be enabled on your website in order to make use of this new feature.
A new My Messages system page now displays under your websites My Area section and displays all the user's private message threads.
Users can sort the list by:
- Last Message Date (default)
- Conversation Start Date
- Unread Status
- Who the conversation is with
Under My Messages the user can specify who can send them private messages from the following options:
- Site members
- My Connections (see below)
- No-one
This defaults to 'Site Members', though a site can change this default to one of those above using a new comment security setting located under Settings->General->Comment Security. The user's own setting will override this global setting.
Starting a message
A ‘create new private message' link under “My Messages” will prompt the user to select a single recipient of their private message. In addition an image link now appears alongside the user’s name on forum posts to allow other users to send private messages to them, providing they meet the criteria the user has set, mentioned above.
Connections
Insight now makes it possible for users to form "connections" with other users. This relationship enables them to show additional information to their connections and to limit their private discussions to just their connections, if they wish. This new functionality is only accessible if the site address book is enabled.
My Connections
A new My Connections system page has been added under Insight’s My Area section. This page lists all those users with whom this individual is connected or with whom a connection is pending, whether awaiting their approval or awaiting a response to their request to another user.
Creating Connections
On the "My Connections" page there's a link to “create a new connection”. Clicking it will present the user with a user picker showing all site members who are visible within the address book. For each user selected, a connection request will then be sent as a private message. This message includes a link to allow the recipient to accept or ignore the connection request, as well as optionally a personal comment from the requester. Upon clicking the accept or ignore link, the connection status will be updated.
In addition, links will be available on the user's "My Connections" page, where they can accept/ignore the requested connection.
In addition to being able to ignore connection requests, a user can later remove a connection.
New "Connections" Privacy settings
Two additional "Privacy Levels" have been added to the user's profile to allow them to manage the visibility of information to their connections. These appear alongside the current “Site members can see” and “The public can see” privacy settings on the user's "My Profile" page.
The “Connections can see” setting enables the user to control what contact information their connected user's can see on their address book profile. They can select the current standard options of: “All my contact details”, “Email and phone only”, “Email Only” and “None of my details”. This enables a user to display more information to those they have a connection with.
As mentioned earlier, the user-list component can now be set to display who a specified user is connected to. A new "Connections visible to" privacy setting enables users to have additional control over what group of people can see who they are connected to. They can select from "Everyone", "Site Members", "My Connections" or "No one".
Layout Component changes
“Connections Only” Component Visibility Setting
Previously layout components can be made visible to “Everybody”, “Logged-in account holders only” or “non-logged-in visitors only”.
Insight has now been extended to add extra visibility levels of “Logged-in Connections Only” and "Non-logged in Connections Only", thus allowing certain information to be made visible to a person's connected users only - e.g. their published articles.
Combined with the new “Connections can see” privacy setting, this gives administrators the flexibility to choose what fields are helpful for display while retaining the user’s control over what data is actually displayed.
Forums component changes
The forums layout component has been adapted to allow the display of the current user's private messages. It has also been renamed to "comments" in the layout editor, to reflect this wider usage. This component can still be set to not include private messages if desired.
The comments component previously had a 'new messages since you last logged in option'. This displayed the number of new messages posted since you last logged in, even though you may have already viewed these messages if they were posted when you were last logged in. This optional number count now displays the number of unread messages instead - i.e. those that genuinely haven't been viewed.
User-List component extended
In the previous release we added a user-list component so you could display links to other family members as part of the newly configurable address book user profile layout.
This release extends this functionality so the user-list component can now be used to display:
- users from a specified group
- users who are connections of the given user
This means the user-list component could now be added to a page to display all the staff associated with a particular group/activity/project on your website, or all the members of the current group; essentially an address book of just the members of that particular group. You can then use the user-list component mini-layout editor to choose exactly how you want it to look, including the ability to add a thumbnail image of the person, or a link to send them a "private message".
New "User Picker" and "My Connections" mini-layouts
A new "User Picker" layout, under the "User" layout area that we added in a recent release, enables sites to define the information displayed for people in the user picker that is used when selecting other users on the website - e.g. when selecting someone to connect to, or send a private message to.
The "My Connections" mini-layout allows the new "My Connections" page to be customised.
Other enhancements and bug fixes
- The "person" and "organisation" fields have been separated on the QuickFind search. We've also added a fix to the suggested matches displayed when adding a term with more than 2 words.
- Setting the registration form on the site to ask for a "Custom set of group notes" without selecting any notes was causing the registration page to error. This has now been fixed.
- Attachments can now be correctly added to Payment Group confirmation emails.
- Fix to selecting child groups correctly in the mailing group selection wizard that occurred in rare situations.
- Links to the organisation record from the email history in the Web Office now opens the details correctly in the organisation record.
We welcome your feedback so, as always, please let us know what you think about the new updates!
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Justin Ruffell-Ward - Insight Support, 17/12/2010 |
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| | | Lee Hopper (www.chcc.org.uk) | 19/12/2010 14:31 | The "User-List" component is just what I wanted!!!
However, there are a couple of changes that would be great to enhance this feature:
- User Profile Photos should be stretched to fit the chosen pixel resolution. At the moment, if the image is smaller than the chosen size, it is show as smaller. This makes the page look scruffy and unprofessional (maybe the user should upload a better quality image, but you know what some people are like! lol)
- There should be a way to enter the users bio and custom fields into the template, or at least some way of editing the Text field per person.
Other than that I think it is great, and if those suggestions are agreed, it will save me loads of time creating and maintaining pages!
Thanks
| | | | Geoff Hawke (www.kerith.co.uk) | 31/12/2010 21:19 | This messages feature looks very interesting but I am saddened that it is only useable for people who are in the Address Book. We currently limit our Address Book to people who are church members, so this automatically excludes a lot of people who are involved with us but not yet members.
We thought that this feature might be useful for our youth (11-14s) since they are not officially allowed to use FaceBook and it would provide them with a means to communicate with other youth.
Would it be possible to extend it to anyone who is a member of any of the groups that the person is also a member of? That way all of the youth group would be able to talk to each other.
| | | | Insight Support | 06/01/2011 17:36 | Lee, glad you like the user list feature. I'll pass on your request to development.
| | | | Insight Support | 06/01/2011 18:14 | Geoff, I can understand your request for allowing private messages to be sent between those not in the address book but I'm not sure how it would work. If we allowed private messages between anyone in the same groups as the current user then anyone could send the youth a message because they would all be part of the main database group. I think some sites would be concerned about privacy if people not in the address book were allowed to be contacted by other site members. Also wouldn't a forum in the group be a better way of allowing people to chat amongst a group. What do people think?
| | | | Geoff Hawke (www.kerith.co.uk) | 17/01/2011 23:32 | Justin, Only just seen your response since I didn't get any sort of notification about it. I see your problem with using groups and actually realised it soon after adding my comment but would like a means of marking specific groups as being suitable rather than all groups someone is a member of, which would obviously be very insecure.
If we use forums, all of the youngsters within a group would be able to join in but their conversations would be visible to all other members. Once someone has posted on the forum, would other group members be able to send them a message, even though they are not in the Members list? If so, then that might be satisfactory.
| | | | Justin Ruffell-Ward - Insight Support (shareinsight.co.uk) | 18/01/2011 12:46 | Forums can be set to be read and writeable by group members only. You can therefore restrict a discussion forum just to your youth group.
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