WackWall Blog

You won’t believe but we have just finished rolling out another software update with new toys for you to play with.

Themes

We’ve been feeding you with promises unforgivably long. People demanded themes and we needed a lot of time to elaborate proper theme support. Now here we are, one month later than estimated, with a couple of new themes. We are only scratching the surface of design potential in our platform. Finally we are sure it will not disappoint you when we bring more wonderfully different themes down the road in the upcoming months.

Now that theme support is fully ready we hope to release up to 1 theme a week to better meet diverse needs and tastes of our creators. Thanks for being patient with us!

New admin area

The new admin area is based on the new “Graphite” theme and introduces easier navigation navigation with dynamic menus and bottom page sitemap. Also it gets rid of sidebar (less clutter) and gives more space for content.

After using the prototype for several days it was clear to us that the new navigation is way more efficient and requires less time to understand and deal with. We hope you will find the same.

Fullsize photos

Remember how you rightfully complained about not having an option to host fullsize versions of uploaded photos? We said you would need to wait. Boy don’t you already hate that word? Looks like we’ve been lying – fullsize photos were secretly stored on our servers without us realizing that. Thanks to the developer (Ben) who did that feature, all of your photos have fullsize versions and the links to them are now present on photo view pages. Good news!

Fullsize option can be turned on/off in photo plugin settings (Admin area -> Plugins -> Photo). By default it’s on. You can turn it off and even remove the existing originals to save space.

Enhanced user administration

We heard your need to have better tools for group actions upon registered users. Now admin interface allows to delete groups of users, suspend, and re-activate them. You can also view recently active, suspended, unverified, and unapproved users separately.

There’s also new search by name. More control = happier customers and better communities. Check out for yourself in Admin area -> Users -> Browse Users.

Flags

Moderators rejoice. We have added flagging to all types of content. No more paranoia about the quality of your site’s content – now users can mark any piece of content on your site with “SPAM”, “Offence”, and “Illegal” flags and those pieces will instantly appear in Moderator panel for moderators in user dashboard. This is a smart and handy feature to allow users to quickly bring your attention to misbehaving individuals. Stay classy.

Routing

One more subtle change that gives more power to administrator is the new routing. Before this moment, when you opened the address yoursite.wackwall.com it loaded index page by default. Now it can be customized in Admin Area -> Pages & Menus.

A page that will be located first in the main menu will load when main URL (yoursite.wackwall.com) is called. For example, you can set “Forum” menu item first and it will load when your site is opened. You can also put “Dashboard” as the first element and users will be redirected to it after sign in on index. This will be by default for new networks.

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This is it for today. Let us get back to work, here’s our plan: http://www.openwack.org/roadmap.php.

Now, sign in to your WackWall account and see for yourself how much goodies we brought to you today.