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Archive for the ‘Xitti’ Category

New release: Email notifications, member search, Macabre theme, etc…

Monday, July 19th, 2010

Happy to inform you that another software update is complete across all sites in our network. This is the list of things in this release:

Email notifications

We’ve got the first prototype of what much asked activity notification feature would look like. When users interact on your sites it’s always a good idea to let them know by direct email message if there’s anything important going on.

Notifications can be turned on/off and scheduled to be sent immediately upon event, as a daily summary, and as a weekly summary. This plugin is turned on by default for all sites. Users can find preferences page in their dashboards.

Member search

Another much awaited feature and again in its simplest form. In ‘Members’ page there’s another tab called ‘Search’ where you can search other members by their profile questions and names. Administrators can set which profile questions appear on search form by editing them in the admin area.

Macabre theme

We are setting up themes production line. Things are taking off slower than we expected in this direction since we have to “borrow” designers from Skalfa whenever possible and they are getting familiar with the new platform. Nevertheless, the new ‘Macabre’ theme is there and expect many more themes to come.

Text formatting and inserting images in blogs and forums

Ahh, looks like we only develop what users ask. Now you can insert images into the body of your blog and forum posts the easy way, and also apply some rich text formatting. I’m sure your users gonna love this new feature.

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Other from these new features we have fixed numerous long-standing problems so this release should be a relief to a lot of those who’ve been waiting to have some pet peeves killed. Of course we are ready to get new reports and feedback for the new features. Let us know on the support boards! WackWall: http://getsatisfaction.com/wackwall, Xitti: http://getsatisfaction.com/xitti.

Now go log in to your account at WackWall and see the new changes on your networks.

Tags: bugfixes, features, themes, wackwall-newsletter, xitti-newsletter
Posted in Release, WackWall, Xitti | 2 Comments »

Xitti June uptime: 99.62%

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

Uptime: 99.62%

Response time: 694ms average

Tags: uptime
Posted in Infrastructure, Xitti | No Comments »

New release: themes, new admin area, fullsize photos, etc…

Monday, June 7th, 2010

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.

Tags: bugfixes, enhancements, features, themes, wackwall-newsletter, xitti-newsletter
Posted in Release, WackWall, Xitti | 8 Comments »

New release: groups, ad management, file attachments

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Dear Wackwallers,

Here’s our new software update. It introduces bugfixes, UI enhancements and new features. Let’s see what we have for you this time:

Groups

Ability to have groups was one of the most requested features from people in our community. There were technical reasons to implement it early on that’s why it’s pretty underfeatured. Some people rightfully say that for now it’s just a customizable comment wall. We will eventually make it support photos, discussions, videos, so watch news. On all sites this feature is activated by default. To remove it and/or see any other active plugins go to http://yoursite.wackwall.com/admin/plugins

Geo-targeted ad management

As a part of the monetization support we have implemented basic advertisement management tools. You can put your own ads on any page of your site in three spots: top, bottom and sidebar. You can also target specific countries for ads, this will help you maximize the impact of having banner ads on your site if you choose to.

Attention: Ad management is a feature that will be available for premium plans only. Review our planned post-beta pricing (here for Xitti).

Maintenance page

One little thing that you will find handy is a customizable “under maintenance” page that you can show your visitors when you are working hard to build your impressive online presence. We will also turn on your maintenance page for all future updates when rolling out new features. Although each site doesn’t take more than a few seconds during an update, it’s more professional if nobody sees “men at work” and doesn’t accidentally do anything that might break the site.

Activity removal, file attachments in forum, etc…

These are little candies we wanted to let you know about since a lot of people requested that. You can now remove events in activity streams that belong to you and you can attach files in forum posts. Many more enhancements are on the way. Expect us to pay close attention all features on the table.

Static content to cloud

We have separated static content from everything else with this update. This means better response time for both pages and content loading. That also means that URLs for your static content changed and we preferred to do it early on. If you linked directly to photo files on any other sites the old URLs will stop working now. But you didn’t hot-link content from a beta site, did you?

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This has been one of the most difficult update in our short history since it involved moving more than hundred thousand files between servers and deep database structure alterations on more than seven thousand websites. It was held in several stages and took 3 days to complete. All problems seem to be found and solved although we are sure a couple of minor ones are still hiding somewhere. Thanks to our vibrant and vocal customer community we get timely and detailed reports. They allow the pace of development and troubleshooting that everyone is enjoying now. Thank you guys, _you_ and your communities are the driving force of those wonderful things currently happening on WackWall.

With this update we are drawing the line between adding new features and starting to ensure quality, robustness, and responsiveness of everything we have so far on WackWall before the end of beta period. We plan to end beta in June and we fanatically strive to make it well worth hosting your community with us.

Now log in to your account at WackWall and see the new toys.

Thank you,
Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
Skalfa eCommerce

Tags: bugfixes, features, wackwall-newsletter, xitti-newsletter
Posted in Release, WackWall, Xitti | 3 Comments »

New release: Ning import tool + member approval + status updates

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Here we are with the new release across the whole WackWall/Xitti networks system.

* NING IMPORT TOOL *

If you’re following the situation with Ning (read our coverage here and here) you might find it interesting that we now offer automated Ning member import tool!

To import your user data from Ning you need to take your data from your Ning social network (Your site on Ning -> Manage -> Members -> Export All Member Data (.CSV) ) and go to the admin area of your WackWall social network that you intend to import users to and go to Manage Plugins page:

Scroll down to the Inactive Plugins section. There you need to activate Ning member import plugin:

When the plugin is activated go to its Settings page:

*What is DOES*
1) It exports your user data from Ning with profile info. If for some reason import breaks in the middle you can safely process this again – it will not create duplicate members;
2) It retrieves member avatars from Ning;
2) It also automatically creates profile questions that existed on your Ning social network;
3) Imported users should use their email for password when logging in. Tip your members to log in and change passwords as soon as possible.

*What it DOES NOT*
1) It doesn’t import content from your Ning site like discussions, photos, groups, videos, etc. This is impossible since Ning doesn’t give this opportunity. I would dump them for this reason alone.
2) It doesn’t notify your members about the move to the new site. After the import you should close registration on your old Ning site, put a big message on the index page with the link to the new site, and send broadcast message to all members on Ning site that they should now log in to their profiles on the new site on WackWall.

If you have questions or problems with this import tool feel free to browse our support board: http://getsatisfaction.com/wackwall. On this board our customers report best communication experience they’ve ever had with any company. We also have happy customers there enthusiastic about helping others. So far this is our biggest achievement.

We hope you will find a better home for your community on WackWall.

MEMBER APPROVAL

Much awaited feature for those caring about privacy of their communities. There’s a new option to approve all new registered users before they can access the site (by default this feature is off). Go to Admin Area -> Settings -> Privacy & Permissions:

When a moderator logs in to their dashboard they can see the number of users for approval:

When the new member get approved they receive email notification and can access the site since then. Enjoy!

STATUS UPDATES

And one small thing we also got for you today is Twitter-style status updates plugin. It’s activated by default on all social networks.

To use it you need to activate widgets _as admin_ on the index page and in user dashboard. It works best if you put the index widget in the sidebar:

Thus it will be present on any page for registered users and they will be able to update from anywhere on your site.

On new social networks these widgets are activated by default.

This update has gone pretty smooth thanks to our new update release routine. We are now working on even more exciting things, like groups and other features. Stay in touch, we will keep you informed. Thank you!

Tags: competition, features, migration, wackwall-newsletter, weekly, xitti-newsletter
Posted in Misc, News, Release, WackWall, Xitti | 16 Comments »

New release: Contact Importer, privacy features, etc

Friday, April 16th, 2010

Dear WackWallers,

Here’s our new weekly release. Although released one day behind the schedule it contains important new features so it was well worth the wait. We are excited to tell what we’ve got for you this time:

Contact Importer

First of all, congratulations! Your social network with us has just become a thousand times easier to promote. Now your users can import their contacts from three sources: Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo.

Gmail importer will work out of the box. Yahoo and Gmail will need additional configuration, we have instructions for you in the plugin settings page.

You may want to go to “Admin Area” -> “Pages” -> “User Dashboard Settings” and activate “Invite Friends” widget for your users. New social networks will have it activated by default. Enjoy your new marketing team – your users!

Privacy features

We have also released much-awaited privacy features. The following picture tells a thousand words:

Now you can take full control of your community. Go to Admin area -> Settings -> Privacy & Permissions.

New Facebook Connect

One release ago we offered Facebook connect feature for all networks on WackWall/Xitti. Some people have employed this feature and since enjoyed more user signups. However we found out it was a difficult process for most people and not everyone managed to configure Facebook connect. We gave this a hard look and decided we had to do something about it. We rebuilt the whole feature and it is now much simpler. If you already have this plugin activated on your social network you will need to configure it one again. I’m sure you will appreciate the simpler version of it.

Splash Screen

Another little thing for your convenience: a configurable splash screen that can be shown to a visitor before letting them in. You can make it an attention-capturing page with visual media or just a warning. On Xitti this warning is on by default.

Video tutorials

We have also set up new video tutorials page: wackwall.com/video-tutorials.php. For now it only contains user-submitted manuals (thanks, Lee!). If you think you can help others by creating short video tutorials we’ll be more than happy to put your work on this page.

View all video tutorials

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Overall this update was a complex one and it took a little bit longer to deploy and to get straight. Especially when we figured out that people at Facebook were changing API at the moment of our release. That’s what I call reacting quickly. Now it works fine.

Now we are back to fix some long-standing problems and to continue to move along our development plan. We hope to keep the same pace of development and even better speed of reacting to problem reports. Stay tuned, we promise to pop new features every now and then and further enhance user experience.

Thank you,
WackWall team

Tags: bugfixes, features, security, wackwall-newsletter, weekly, xitti-newsletter
Posted in News, Release, WackWall, Xitti | 3 Comments »

Weekly release

Monday, April 5th, 2010

Just a quick note about the new release we’ve just pushed on all WackWall and Xitti servers.

This release doesn’t include any new features we’re working on but fixes some long-standing bugs.

We have decided to make software releases on a weekly basis on Monday (Sunday night in US, morning in Europe, afternoon in Asia). New features coming out of the factory will be pushed within these weekly updates. If we don’t push new features there’s still possibility that you will find micro-enhancements here and there and see annoying bugs go when you open your social networks on Monday.

We will not update more frequently than once a week unless absolutely necessary. Rationale behind scheduled releases is that developers commit all changes and new features into the platform code during weeks but the update process is handled by the responsible team only at a scheduled time. Minimum possible human factor = smooth updates. We’ll send a cobra by mail to everyone who doesn’t agree with this notion.

Urgent bugfixes and security patches are still issued on discovery and without schedule.

Tags: bugfixes, weekly
Posted in Release, WackWall, Xitti | No Comments »

New release: delete members, SMTP, etc

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

We’ve just released the new software update across the whole network.

Prisoners released!

Now a member can finally delete their profile from a WackWall website. Administrators can do that too. Also, administrators can nuke all the content from that user. Especially handy in case of spammers. This feature was long due and we kept feeding you with promises but now it’s there. Thank you for your patience guys! More necessary management tools come soon.

SMTP

Yahoo and Live are currently blocking our servers from sending emails to their mailboxes. Negotiations are underway but sadly there’s no guarantee that new blocks will not happen again. A handful of spammers can do that again.

Here’s a plan B for you: While we are solving this problem you can still send emails if you are ready to make a little workaround.

There’s the new SMTP settings page at yoursite.com/admin/settings/email
You can set your own SMTP server for sending email from your WackWall-powered site. If you don’t know how to use SMTP, just google “How to use SMTP“.

Myriad of small things

We announced the new way of handling technical problems and you can now see the majority of reported bugs fixed. Our attack list still contains several of them cowardly shivering in face of the impending doom.

Together with that we work on micro-enhancements but without being overly sophisticated. This usually relates to fixing obvious user interface shortcomings. With more people on your sites, every feature will receive more attention.

WackWall software platform is in its infancy so please bear with us. There’s still a whole lot of essential features that are still not implemented and we are working on them. WackWall becomes better and bigger every day. We are adding 20+ new websites every day. This can’t be called “a take-off” yet but we hope for a wider audience to come soon.

You can now go check your social networks to find the new goodies.

Thanks and let us get back to work.

Tags: bugfixes, features, UI, wackwall-newsletter, xitti-newsletter
Posted in Release, WackWall, Xitti | 2 Comments »

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