Management Matt Posted January 11, 2010 Management Posted January 11, 2010 As we near the release of IP.Blog 2.1.0 final, I wanted to run through some of the new features you can expect to see after upgrading. This is a very substantial upgrade that gives your blog a major facelift as well as drastically improving functionality.User Interface The user interface has had a complete facelift to bring it up to standard. The new look feels more 'bloggish' and enhances the experience. I've added drop down menus at the top so that you can quickly access common areas and start new entries where you have permission to. The post screen has been overhauled to add functionality. You should find the new version much easier to navigate and easier to use.Group Blogs This is a new feature that allows you, the admin, to set up a group-wide blog. This blog is a normal blog in every other way. For example, you could set up a blog for your staff and everyone in the staff group will instantly be able to start writing new blog entries and managing comments, etc.Blog This! This is a brand new feature that adds a "Blog This" button to every post. This allows you to use post content in your blog entry. Furthermore, the relationship is remembered and all linked blog entries appear at the bottom of the topic when viewed.Per-Entry Rating You can now rate each blog entry rather than just the entire blog itself. The blog rating is still shown on the homepage as an aggregate of all rated entries.Report Item and Reputation You can now report an entire blog entry, or just a single comment. You can now also give someone a reputation increase/decrease in comments.List View A common request was the return of a fully sortable and filterable list view for blogs that emulated a forum view. I have added this in. You'll notice you can click the table headers to sort on that column and click again to reverse the sort. There is also a "List Blogs" sidebar block to quickly filter and list the blogs. There's even a little 'preview the latest entry' icon that shows the entry excerpt in a pop-up so you don't have to leave the page to preview it.Dynamic Sidebar I've moved some the footer links (Top 10 bloggers, etc) into a dynamic sidebar along with Recent Entries. This makes it easier to locate and saves a bit of space.RSS Imports Another long requested feature was to be able to create entries from an RSS feed. This is now a feature. You can control which member groups have access to this as well as limit the number of items imported on each cycle.Banish Entries You can now banish entries from the front page to remove any 'clutter' such as 'testing' blogs or other unsuitable content.ACP Clean-up I've gone through and cleaned up some of the Admin CP pages to make them a little easier to understand and navigate. I've added explanations to the 'Headers' / 'Dynamic Headers' pages so it's clear what they do.Efficiency I've removed several slow queries and introduced several more caching layers to substantially reduce SQL overhead when dealing with large numbers of blogs. We hope you find the updates useful, and we look forward to your feedback to continue improving the product. View full blog entry
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