Member Facing Features:
Member privacy
Community members can now decide to make their profiles private or public. By default everyone's profile will be set to public (Everyone); however each member can choose to make their profile available only to friends, and all others (including fans) will only see limited information for that profile. To enable this feature you can go to Affiliate Center -> Configure -> Site Settings.
Member ratings
Like with all media, now members can rate each other. You will now be able to organize your feeds by a member's popularity (sortType=rating).
Simpler comment management
To make member profile management even easier, we've added a delete button next to each comment on a member's profile page. (We also removed the "comments on my profile" page, as this is no longer necessary).
In addition to these features, we are also removing the "online now" sorting option from the Member list page, and the "online now" presence indicator on the member profile page. We're making a few tweaks to this feature on the backend, and you'll see it return shortly.
The "My Popular media" module on My Home has outlived it's usefulness, as it basically mirrors the My Friends and My News module on the same page. As such we've given it a moment of silence, and have allowed it to fade off into that good night.
Site Management Features:
SEO Improvements
We've added META Description and META Keyword fields to all of your hosted pages to help you get better search rankings with major search engines. They can be found under Affiliate Center -> Pages > Home Page.
Comments can be flagged as inappropriate
We've added some additional community moderation functionality so that members can flag comments left by other members as inappropriate (similar to the way that media and profiles are treated currently). This will help keep conversations flowing but also enable your members to participate to a greater degree in creating a site they all want to be a part of.
Enhanced image support
We now support progressive JPEG images, as well as a host of other image formats thanks to the venerable ImageMagick library, introduced in the previous release.
Widget App Studio Updates:
Apps!
We’ve added two brand-new interactive Apps that you can add to any of your widgets: a slick, customizable chat room App from our friends at Meebo, and a Yahoo! Maps widget that we cooked up ourselves with Yahoo!’s API. You’ll find them under the new Apps tab in the newly dubbed App Studio.
Widget Tracking, powered by Google Analytics
You can now track widgets in your Google Analytics account. To install Google Analytics in your widgets, log in to Google Analytics, add a new website profile for serve.a-widget.com (this is the subdomain from which all of your widgets are served), and note the Web Property ID (looks like UA-xxxxx-yy) of your new website profile. Then, back in the App Studio, paste this ID into the Global panel of any widget that you wish to track.
Design and Preview modes now independent
Have you ever futzed around with a widget in Preview mode and saved, only to find that your widget now loads in the (quite possibly funky) state in which you left it? We have. Well, no more: with this release we've made Design and Preview modes independent: whatever you do to your widget in Preview mode will not be reflected when you switch back to Design mode. This ensures that when you save and embed your widget in the wild, it will appear to others in the same state that it appears to you in in Design mode.
Automatic scaling for embeds
Enhanced embed code automatically scales widgets proportionally on sites (like Facebook) that modify the width and height properties of the embed code.
New Actions panel
Broke out Actions as a separate panel and streamlined UI. You can now SHIFT-Click to select multiple components at the same time (e.g., if you want to hide several components on one Click event).
Render text with local/system fonts
You can now have your widgets render text using fonts installed on the viewer’s device, rather than relying on fonts embedded in the widget. You can have your widgets render text with any font on your system. If the viewer has the same font on their system, the text in your widget will be rendered in that font. If not, the text will be rendered in a similar font. You can use this functionality to render foreign language characters that aren’t supported by the default fonts in the App Studio. Other benefits include the ability to use foreign language characters in widget names, and faster widget load times due to reduced file size.
To use device fonts instead of embedded ones, uncheck the Use Embedded Font checkbox on the Fonts panel. The Font dropdown will be re-populated with fonts installed on your system.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed issue with pre-roll ads causing control bar to be unclickable.
- Fixed issue with audio player throwing an error when auto play is set to false.
- Updated Scanscout ad player logic so that the mediaURL will be used when a mediaID is not available.
- Video player no longer pre-loads video to ensure that video play counts are accurate.
- Added a pop-up to warn user when video players are too small to run ads from Google, ScanScout, or Adap.tv.