We are scheduled to perform a hot fix on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 in the early morning hours.

We are scheduled to perform a hot fix on Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at around 5AM ET (10AM GMT).  The release will last approximately one hour during which your KickApps community will operate normally. 

We are scheduled to perform a hot fix on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at around 3AM ET (8AM GMT).  The release will last approximately one hour during which your KickApps community will operate normally. 

KickApps 5.0 (formerly known as 4.6) includes three brand new apps, a number of new features, and a slew of enhancements and fixes to existing functionality.  Read on for full details!

New Apps 

Custom Pages

Most KickApps Apps come with one or more hosted web pages.  Many of you have asked for the ability to add your own pages and have them live within your KickApps site template.  The Custom Pages app lets you do just that!  With the Custom Pages application you can create an unlimited number of individual pages for your site, populated with whatever content you choose (text, images, flash widgets, javascript code, etc.). Each custom page retains your site’s global styling and navigation (including your header, background and footer), and the page’s contents are indexed by your site’s global search engine which makes all of your site’s content findable by your users.  

Creating a custom page is easy with our full rich text editor.  Learn more in the Custom Pages help doc. 

Sets

The Sets application enables you and your site’s members to organize your site’s media into collections for easy viewing and sharing. Sets can contain up to 1,000 items each, and can be composed of photos, videos, audio tracks and blog posts (organized in any order).

When members upload media items to your site, they can add those items to one of their existing sets, or they can create a new one from scratch. Sets can be searched for, viewed, and interacted with just like any other piece of media in your site. Members can leave comments on sets, rate them, share them with friends, add them to their favorites, etc. Each set retains your site’s global styling and navigation (including your header, main navigation, background and footer), and the set’s contents are indexed by your site’s global search engine for easy retrieval.  

Learn how to enable, configure, and access reporting about your site's Sets in the Sets help doc.

Pro Video

The Pro Video App builds on the Video Sharing App to provide a feature-rich video ingestion, encoding, and publishing solution with integrated support for advertising, analytics, and geo-blocking, along with the power and flexibility of the App Studio's video player customization capabilities.  Try out a free 30-day trial of the Pro Video app today!  Learn all about Pro Video in the Pro Video help doc.

More Features

KickApps widgets now available on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod

We are now offering support for KickApps widgets and video players on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod.  These devices don't support Flash, so we've set up new forms of embed code that identify these devices and serve them HTML5 versions of your widgets and video players.  You can design once in the App Studio and publish embed code as usual, but now you'll be able to give iDevice users the same experience they have from the desktop.  The first wave of iDevice functionality is now in beta; we encourage you to try it out with your custom video players.  Stay tuned for more updates on this front in the coming days and weeks. Learn more in the iDevice help doc.

iPhone, iPad, and iPod - compatible Video Play Pages

Your video play pages are now instrumented to play back videos on iPhones, iPads, and iPods!  Stay tuned for additional updates on how to publish custom, skinned video players to your video play page. 

New View, Widget. and Feed Reports

You can now access cumulative view counts across all your videos, widgets, and feeds in the AC under the Reporting > Traffic..  

New Admin Role

 We've added a new user role, called Admin.  Admins have almost all of the same permissions as Webmasters do, with the major exception that cannot upgrade members to Admin status and they cannot edit Webmasters' information or content.  Learn more about Roles & Permissions.

Redesigned Affiliate Center Homepage

We've redesigned the affiliate center homepage with task shortcuts to make it a more useful dashboard utility.

New Relevance Sort Option 

The new “relevance” algorithm emphasizes the density of keyword matches in media titles and descriptions, in addition to “recency.”

Activity Feeds in Feed Builder

You can now create RSS feeds for all types of community activity feeds (Profile, Community, Group, User, etc) in the feed builder. 

Get Notified When Someone Comments After Your Comment

Members can opt to be updated by email when someone leaves a comment after their comment on a profile page, media page or group page.

Preview Broadcast Emails 

API Updates

The following new API calls are now available:

• Remove Media from Set
• Edit Set
• Delete Set
• Retrieve User by Facebook Id
• Retrieve Set
• Retrieve Site Settings
• Retrieve Related Media
• Assign Member Profile Photo
• Remove Member Profile Photo

For all API updates, please see the API Change Log.

Important Change in Video Delivery

In this release we've changed the way we deliver video.  Our video resource call (http://api.kickapps.com/rest/resource/VIDEO/#{videoId}/#{asId}) formerly returned progressively downloaded videos.  Now it returns SMIL files containing one or more paths to the video.  If you're not using a KickApps video player, but you are running videos hosted by KickApps in another video player, you will need to update that player to parse the SMIL files.