We are rolling out a new update to the KickApps platform on December 3. This will happen in the early hours of the morning (3AM EST, 0800GMT) and while that upgrade is happening, your community websites will remain online and operating in read only mode. This means that the site will be accessible, however the ability to upload new media or create comments will be disabled. Once this process is complete, your communities will return to normal.
There are a host of tweaks to existing features, as well as a long list of new things for you to enjoy.
Major Features
Dramatically Better Image Quality
Now all of your hosted images, including member profile pictures, will look dramatically better than before. No need to re-upload them! We've turned to the time-tested ImageMagick library for image conversion, with dramatically better results:
Improved Search Engine Optimization
We've made a bunch of changes to improve the search engine friendliness of your KickApps-powered pages. Most notably, we removed the word "kickapps" from all URLs. Don't worry, any links to the old URLs will still work. As well we've added a robots <META> tag entry for community pages, and we've also added geographic information to <title> tags.
New Video & Audio Players
We've updated the video and audio players on your KickApps-powered pages with ones you can customize down to the pixel to match your site and your brand. All of the original, stock players are now widgets, which you can then modify and tweak in the WIdget Studio:
By turning our standard players into widgets, you can skin them, customize them, tweak them to your heart's content. And if you were perfectly happy with them, they will continue to look and work as they did before.
Member Activity
We've added additional feeds for groups, communities and members. Now every member profile page shows a feed of their latest activity. We've also added similar feeds for group pages, as well as a feed of all activity for a community on login/logout pages.
When browsing a community's users, you will now see an online now menu link that lets you show only the members that are currently online and using the site.
Expanded Support for 3rd Party Videos
In addition to YouTube, you and your members can now embed videos from Clipblast and Pixsy in blog & message board posts, comments, messages, etc. If you haven't already turned this feature on, you can do it in the Affiliate Center under Configure > Site Settings > Add / Remove Features > 3rd Party Video Embeds:
Minor Features
Although we've introduced many great new features, there are some nifty little tweaks we have made that are notable:
- We've added some updates and feeds to the login/logout page, keeping you up to date with important announcements and new content on KickDeveloper.com.
- New most commented tab on user navigation under members, media and groups
- From within the Affiliate Center you can now see comments and comment approval settings for extermal media types.
- Profile comments no longer have titles, and are part of the existing thread. Existing comments with titles will still have them, we've just moved them to the body of the comment.
- We've moved the controls for pre- and post-roll advertising from the Advertising section of the Affiliate Center to the Widget Studio.
- New KickApps Community themes (KickFamily)
- "Flag as inappropriate" functionality added for member profiles
API Features
We've added a slew of new calls for the savvy social coder, as well as making some tweaks to existing calls:
- Categories: We've added CRUD (Create, retrieve, update, and delete) calls for categories
- Added support for isRatedByUser flagging on blog play page
- User admin tags are now returned on user profile api calls
- Comment Id is now included in the get comment response payload
- New parameters added to allow get comment to return pre-moderated comments
- On comment add newCommentId will always return the comment id of the newly added comment
- Fixed issue with adding fans as friends
- Updated activity feeds to show member names when uploading through api
- Fixed blog images on text blogs showing black on api add blog
- Added the user admin tags to the API user profile payload
We've also updated our API reference documentation and will be distributing it shortly. There are a lot of cool new things in this release, and we hope you enjoy them.