Starting at 12:01AM ET/4:01AM GMT on Monday, March 30, we will be performing a feature upgrade to the KickApps platform. This upgrade will last approximately 3 hours, during which time your KickApps-powered websites and applications will operate in read only mode. Once the upgrade is complete your websites and applications will return to normal and will include many new features and enhancements.
Below are some highlights of this upcoming release.
Community Privacy
When you enable this new feature, authentication will be required for access to any of your KickApps-hosted community pages. Anyone who tries to access one of your pages will be prompted to either log in or register. This feature can be enabled on the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Site Settings page.
Points and Levels
When you enable this new feature, members of your community can earn points and achieve status levels within the community by interacting with your KickApps-powered applications. For instance you can reward a member 200 points for uploading a video, 50 points for commenting on someone’s media, etc. You have total control over which interactions are rewarded, and how many points are awarded for each. This feature can be enabled in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Add/Remove Apps page.
You can specify which interactions earn points, and how many points are required to achieve each status level in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Points & Levels page.
In the Affiliate Center, on the Member Details page, you can manually adjust a member’s point total and/or level.
In the Affiliate Center in the Manage > Media > Members page, you will be able to sort and filter your member list based on their points.
And you will be able to sort and filter Member RSS feeds based on points. (More information on new features of our RSS API are included below.)
Your members’ total points and their status level are updated in real-time, and appear in various places on our hosted pages.
MyHome Page
List Page
Member Profile Page
Member Info Balloons
Play Pages
Member Update Emails
When you enable this new feature, all members of your community can receive daily or weekly emails (their choice) which summarize what is going on inside the community. These emails will be filled with hyperlinks pointing back into your community, and will include a summary of each member’s activity in the community, their friends’ activities, and the community as a whole. You can enable this feature in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Site Settings page.
A sample email might look like this:
Subject: KickPeople Updates For Mike
Hello Mike,
Here is what has happened in KickPeople in the past week:
Unread messages: 5
Profile page views: 100
New comments on your profile page:
20
New fans: 20
New friends: 30
Number of your videos
approved: 25
Number of your photos
approved: 20
Number of your audio tracks
approved: 15
Number of your blog posts
approved: 5
Total media views: 300
Total message board discussion
views: 60
Your Friends’ Recent Activity:
Muzzy left a comment for you 11 hours ago.
Josh left a comment for you 11 hours ago.
Eric added My Boston Trip (a video)
to the Traveller’s group. (3 days
ago)
Josh commented on View from Empire State (a photo). (3 days ago)
Josh left a comment on Chris's profile page. (3 days ago)
Muzzy commented on My First live Video Blog (a blog post) 4 days
ago.
Eric commented on pienet_pennut.JPG (a photo) 4 days ago.
David commented on 14-Don't Say It's Too Late.mp3 (an audio
track) 4 days ago.
Chris updated their profile page 3
days ago.
Eric added My Boston Trip (a video)
to the Traveller’s group 4 days ago.
Josh commented on View from Empire State (a photo) 5 days ago.
Josh left a comment on Chris's profile page 5 days ago.
Bryan became a fan of Alex5 days ago.
Josh became friends with Mark 5 days ago.
John started I love KickPeople community (a discussion) on
the message board 5 days ago.
Community Highlights:
New members joined: 100
Total community members: 10,000
New videos added: 200
New photos added: 500
New audio tracks added: 100
New blog posts added: 95
New message board discussions added: 234
Your account is currently configured to receive these updates weekly. Click here to change your KickPeople update settings.
Thanks!
The people at KickPeople
Public RSS feeds for Member Activity and Group Activity
The "Latest Activity Feed" on the Member Profile Page now has a public RSS feed, giving your members another easy method for syndicating their activity in your community to other places like Facebook, their blogs, etc.
There is also a public RSS feed for activities that happen in each of your community’s groups.
Auto-Approve Content From Specific Members
You can identify certain "trusted members" of your community. Any content contributed by these members will be automatically approved, even if you are pre-moderating other members’ contributions. This feature can be enabled on each Member Details page in the Affiliate Center.
Enable user registration and login with 3rd party credentials
We have integrated the RPX Web Service from JanRain. When you enable this feature, users will be able to join and log into your community using their credentials from Facebook, MySpace, OpenID, Yahoo!, Google and AOL. Users who join via this method will automatically "import" their username from Facebook, AOL, Google, etc. and will need to log via this same method on all subsequent visits.
You can enable this feature in the Affiliate Center in the Configure > Settings > Add/Remove Apps page.
Here’s what the interface looks like for users
JavaScript Event API
When users interact with KickApps hosted applications, our pages fire off "messages" (JavaScript events) that can be captured by any application that you specify. The data that is transmitted in these messages can be leveraged for a variety of purposes. For example when a user logs in, or uploads a photo, or adds a comment to someone else’s photo, (typical things that people do in online communities) your analytics system can be notified, your publishing system can be notified, your CRM can be notified. In fact any 3rd party application that is capable of receiving these transmissions can receive the data (the text of the comment, the title of the photo) and leverage it for their purposes, as long as you allow it to.
Since these events act as hooks that allow your JavaScript to plug into our own code at specific times (temporarily passing execution to your code), you may use this API to prevent our default actions from occurring while providing your own logic and behavior on the pages.
This page on KickDeveloper documents the JavaScript API hooks and events that are available in KickApps 4.0+ and how to use them. It contains all of the supported event methods and how to put them to use in your own applications, so that you may record and act on activities that are happening on pages hosted by KickApps.
More Data Is Available via the Ka.Info JavaScript Object
With this release we are including a bunch of new fields in the Ka.Info JavaScript object. New variables include country, state, city and postal code for the logged in user visiting the page, as well as the user’s current point total and status level. We also include the group name in the Ka.Info object on group pages. Click here to learn more about the Ka.Info JavaScript object, and how to leverage the valuable data contained therein.
Comprehensive Facebook Connect Integration
Building on the JavaScript Event API framework, we offer sample code for syndicating your community members’ activity to their Facebook profile pages, and step by step instructions for creating a very simple Facebook application that allows you to configure how messages about your members’ activity on KickApps-hosted pages is syndicated to their Facebook Profile pages, like in the example below.
This is a video play page on the New York Rangers community.
This is what the news feeds story looks like on the member’s Facebook profile page.
Members Can Integrate External RSS Feeds Into Their Profile Pages
Members can integrate any external RSS feed into their profile pages by entering a valid RSS feed URL in the Edit My Profile > My RSS Feeds page.
And here is how the RSS feeds will appear on the Member Profile page.
New Sorting and Filtering Options for Custom RSS Feeds
You can use RSS feeds to power your KickApps Widgets or as a simple API to search your KickApps community database. We’ve added several new parameters to the RSS feeds so you can further customize it.
The "query" filtering option
We’ve heard from some advanced developers that although the keywords parameter provides a useful search tool, they’d like the option to perform exact match searches. We added the query parameter as a new option for RSS feeds.
Like the keywords parameter, query searches media, blog posts, members, groups, and message board post titles, descriptions, categories, tags, admin tags, and other metadata. By default, it performs an exact match search (if you include query=app in your RSS feed, the results would include a photo titled "app," but not one titled "apps" or "kickapp").
To top things off, you can query for multiple strings separated by commas, so query=app,orange would return results that included app or orange. This all adds up to a new search parameter that gives you more control while leaving the keywords parameter intact.
The "maxPoints", "minPoints" and "level" filtering parameters
We’ve included 3 RSS parameters in support of our new Points and Levels functionality:
- maxPoints can be set to an integer and will limit the result to include members with a maximum number of points.
- minPoints is maxPoints’ counterpart: it also accepts an integer to limit results to include members with a minimum number of points. Use them together to set a range (for example "?mediaType=user&minPoints=100&maxPoints=200" will return all members who have between 100 and 200 points).
- Level searches for all members with a specified text-based level. (for example "?mediaType=user&level=ninja")
Using the "sortType=points" option, you can order the results in order of members with the most points. So, combining these new features into one query might look something like this "?mediaType=user&minPoints=100&maxPoints=200&sortType=points"
Syndicate Your Content via iTunes
Want to feed create a podcast for iTunes? Add the new includeiTunes=true parameter to your RSS feed and we’ll include the nodes necessary for iTunes indexing.
You can learn more about creating your own custom RSS feeds on KickDeveloper http://www.kickdeveloper.com/resources/apis-feeds/customize-your-rss-feeds-for-hypersyndication-and-mashups.
Enhancements To The "Broadcast a Message" Feature for Webmasters
With this release webmasters will be able to specify that only members of specific groups receive email broadcast messages. You can also broadcast messages to your members by inserting items in the community activity feed, or your members’ "My Friends and My News" feed.
These new broadcast features can be accessed by clicking the "Broadcast a Message" link on the Affiliate Center home page. From there you can either broadcast via email, or via Activity Feed.
Whenbroadcasting via Activity Feed, you can insert your HTML-enriched messages in the general Community Activity Feed or the Friends and News Activity Feed (which appears on each member’s MyHome page), or both!
Members Can Add Custom Thumbnail Images To Accompany Blog Posts
When your members are composing new blog posts (or editing existing ones) they will be able to upload a thumbnail image to represent their post.
Easier Sharing With an "Add This" Button on Play Pages
We have integrated the "AddThis" sharing service into our play pages, so now it’s even easier for your members to share cool stuff happening in your community with other people on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Declicious, etc.
Updates to Group Pages
On each Groups page, we have added displays for group descriptions, tags, and admin tags (which are only visible to the logged in Webmasters and Editors).
In the Affiliate Center, we added the appropriate fields to edit these values. These fields are also searchable via our platform search as well as our RSS feeds. Access this at the Manage > Groups page.
More Flexibility To Display Descriptions on Search Results and Media Lists Pages
We are now including the description meta data for each item on Search Results and Media List pages in hidden <div>’s on the page. This allows affiliates to get more creative when displaying search results or lists of media, as in the example below. In order to unhide this div (and display the media description), put this snippet of CSS in your Global Page Template (in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Pages > Global Page Template page).
.ka_listDesc {
display:block;
font-style:italic;
}
Improved Display of Search Results
We are now including the specific number of search results per page out of the total result set on Search Results and Media List pages.
In an effort to allow affiliates complete flexibility to position the pagination module we have added new mark-up and CSS. Below is an outline of the of the div structure:
.pagination_info {
float:left;
line-height:30px;
}
.pagination {
float:right;
font-size:0.82em;
margin: 0.2em 0;
padding: 0.5em 0;
}
"Pending Friend Requests" Notifications on MyHome
In addition to receiving an email notification, members who have pending friend requests will see a notification in the "Since You Last Logged In" section of their MyHome page.
Upgraded Rich Text Editor
TinyMCE (the open source rich text editor that we use throughout the KickApps platform) is now available on media and group comments. Members who want to leave comments on media items or group pages will now be able to stylize the text of those comments (e.g. make the text bold, insert images, include hyperlinks, etc). In addition, we are now using a newer version of TinyMCE (version 3.2.0.1) which has more features and is more cross-browser compatible than previous versions.
Single Sign On Enhancements
Affiliates who are using our Single Sign On API (SSO) can now allow users to easily opt in and out of receiving system generated emails. We also now support secure WSDL for clients who want to use SSO via an https connection.
Video Play Counts Now Include Plays That Happen In Widgets
In the past, the "play counts" that accompany each video in our system only included "plays" that occurred on our hosted pages. Going forward, the play counts associated with each video will also include video plays that happen in video player widgets as well.
New $39 Ad Buyout Offer for Small Businesses
Small businesses who generate less than3,000 page views per month can now control all of the ad inventory on their KickApps-hosted pages and videos for $39 each month. Access this offer in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Services page.
App Studio Updates
Button Icons & Truncation for Button Labels
Now you can add icons to buttons, in addition to background images. Button icons are anchored to the left of button labels and centered vertically. We’ve also added automatic truncation to button labels, which comes in handy when the button label is bound to another component and is being populated dynamically with strings of different lengths.
Call JavaScript functions from within widgets
You can now call JavaScript functions that are on the same page as your widget via the Update Property action in the Widget Studio. Just prefix your JS with javascript:. For instance, if you're using an image/.swf component as an advertising unit, and want to populate it dynamically via a JavaScript function on the same page, you could update its Content URL property like this:
Set widget properties using the values of other widget properties
Say you had a slideshow component and you wanted to show the number of items in its feed, and the position of the current item within that feed, like this:
To make that little 1/6 counter, add a couple text components to your widget, then set Update Property Actions on your slideshow component to update the Text properties of the text components. You can populate the text components by accessing the slideshow's selectedIndex and length values using syntax like this: #{Slide Show.selectedIndex}. You can access the value of any property with this new #{componentName.propertyName} syntax. In the case of the slideshow counter, the trick is that the items in the slideshow are zero-indexed, so you need to add 1 to the index of any item. Learn how in this mini-tutorial.
Other Additions & Enhancements
- The Scrubber and Volume Control components now offer a vertical orientation.
- List components now support up to 50 rows and 50 columns.
- If you activate the new Points & Levels feature, your Feed Builder will include filters for minimum Points, maximum Points, and Level.
That's it! We hope you enjoy these new features and we look forward to hearing from you. Please leave feedback on the KickDeveloper Message Board!