Affino 5.5.12 Release

This is a major new Affino release, and the most significant since Comrz took over the leadership role for Affino development. Our key focus remains on improving the quality of the Affino experience and there are a further hundred fixes and usability enhancements in this latest release.

What separates this version from the previous releases is that we’ve introduced a great deal more personalisation and made the experience more real-time with the introduction of status messages / micro blogging. The sum of all the new features is the ability to roll out great new My Home pages with personalised content and community recommendations, friends’ status and near-live content feeds of the most recent targeted community updates.

Upgrade Guidance

This is a seamless update from 5.5.11. When upgrading from earlier releases please check the release notes on the previous releases.

It is essential to re-generate Skins with this release as numerous optimisations have taken place in terms of the generated code. It is recommended that you run the System Update option, followed by, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update and Skin Update.

Key Enhancements

Status Updates / Micro Blogging v1 – great new Status Update / Micro Blogging capabilities make for much more interactive communities. All community members can now post updates with ease, and the updates can be displayed throughout, whether it be the users’ public profiles, community highlights, personalised ‘My Home’ pages or even on the homepage. Automated updates and the latest user interface capabilities allow for a simple, stylish way to present status updates.

Recommendations Design Element v1 – the new Recommendations Design Element makes recommendations based on users’ interests and can recommend: products, contacts, seminars, directory entries, content, media, groups and blog entries.

Groups v2 – Groups have had a major overhaul in this release. It is now possible to set up a new automated ‘Leader Group’ which is used by the community leaders to communicate amongst themselves. Groups can also include related content for the first time and numerous enhancements to the message boards means they now work better as a communications platform. Other enhancements include an improved search and formatting. Note that there are numerous new settings for functionality which will be launched in the next release.

Stand Alone Video Player v2 – radical improvements to the new video player which is now far superior for video commerce, key new features include: enhanced commerce presentation, commercial overlay when videos start, end and when there is user activity; buy and checkout immediately following the video; rate the video as soon as it’s completed; browse other videos and video categories; faster response especially in full-screen mode; greatly improved styling and user experience irrespective of browser and screen size; improved performance through CDN distribution of video player

Personal tools Design Element v2 – this release sees a complete reworking of the Personal Tools Design Element which make it a far more effective navigation solution, essentially it is a new Personalised Navigation option which takes the user directly to their latest: messages, groups, events, media items and friends; it also provides direct access to manage the user’s profile and tasks. Every option is flexible in how it is displayed, what order and how many items, so it can be tuned effectively to the community.

Personalisation Filters – there are new filters on all the key content highlights design elements, as well as who’s online, whereby users can be presented with content created by themselves and the community they’re engaging with. These personalised content filters bring a completely new dimension to how content is presented throughout the site so that content can be more focused and relevant go each and every community member.

Other Enhancements

Articles – new option on the Prime Content settings means you can now chose how you want to align the ‘More’ link in article listings

Assign Security Groups – new management screen which allows security managers to bulk assign community members to a group. There are numerous filters which allow the manager to filter the users to be assigned, including a check for users missing specific security rights

Catalogue Export – it is now possible to export the product catalogue (Standard catalogue items only at this stage)

Detailed Media Design Element – new Alt tags on media items

eTests – new improved listing formatting with dividers; it is now possible to search tests by ‘based on’ attribute, e.g. search by the book the tests are associated with; it is now possible to manage how tests are assigned

Forums – ‘show detail’ option on Forum Tread listings and searches now shows the creator of each post, making it easier to follow conversations

Live Editor – new Copy confirmation so that users don’t accidentally create copies by clicking on the wrong links

Media Scroller – great new listings in the media scroller with new ‘Latest | Most Viewed | Most Rated’ options at the top of all media scroller listings

Mini MP3 Player v1 – new Mini MP3 player for embedded articles, allows simple media presentation within article: play / pause and mute, as well as basic audio timeline

Polls Design Element – new spacing option for improved presentation

Public Profile – users can now reply to posts on their wall

Registration Affiliates – you can now apply hundreds of affiliate codes to a single Registration Affiliate, e.g. school codes for teachers. It means you only need a single Affiliate profile to handle similar categories of new users

Security – new IP Address tracking enhancement means that IP Addresses can be tracked even through pre-cachers; Subscriptions now provide users with full system and content security rights, previously only content security rights were enabled

Smart Image and Text – new auto-link option which allows you to link through to a member’s own profile views

Subscription Expiry Notification – great new subscription expiry notification which takes over the screen and informs the user that their membership / subscription has expired and they need to renew, includes the link to the renewal screen

Fixes

Articles – step-by-step issues resolved, no longer errors out when creating multi-step articles

Blogs – now link reliably across multiple sites / domains on the same Affino instance

Browse Bar Design Element – fixed formatting issues

Campaigns – links on Campaign Analytics now work reliably

Cascading Style Sheets – new re-naming and re-location of style sheets for each new release to overcome caching issues with CDNs

Channels – simplified channel setup by ensuring only relevant options are available to each channel type

Comment and Rating – resolved issue with posting comments whereby having required comments was breaking if no title was entered

Comments and Ratings – email notification link fixed

Community Manager – date selection now works reliably for filtering content on user’s analysis screens

Detailed Media Design Element – reliably displays all media even with complex security scenarios

eCommerce – improved catalogue attribute handling which resolves numerous issues; it is now possible to remove users from the store notification list on the store profile

eCommerce Checkout – Enforce Delivery Address now reliably hides the delivery options on the single page checkout; advanced products with identical attributes are now treated as the same item type in the checkout, i.e. quantity goes up to 2 rather than have them listed separately; coupon help now displays reliably in all browsers

eTests – no longer display (share) Guest user test results

Flash – now displays reliably when embedded in articles

Flash Feature Scroller – cross-domain issues resolved

Flex – resolved major cross-site Flex issues which were causing random errors in the Affino Control Centre

Forums – now paging through forum threads effectively

Help – pop-up help boxes are now much better looking and work reliably across all browsers

Image Libraries – no longer display thumbs.db links; deleting a member’s media now frees up the space again, allowing the users to upload further media; Flash items now displaying reliably (again); infinity media scroller now displaying reliably irrespective of how the page is called; resolved workflows leading users to a dead-end so that they now get taken to a login screen for improved continuity

Media Upload – user is now taken to the correct screen when they’ve uploaded their media items; we’ve greatly simplified the security logic on media uploads by removing some legacy security elements

Member Listing – add to friends popup now appears centred on the screen, irrespective of the browser used; member sorting now works reliably for alphabetical and last updated options

Message Boards – fixed link formatting and other linking issues

MP3 Player – now lists media items in the correct sort order selected on the media section; rating now works reliably

Polls Design Element – improved styling and alignment

Public Profile – fixed styling issue where Friends formatting was out of alignment with just one friend

Sections – fixed errors on Item highlights and section navigation listing style

Site Analytics / Who’s Online – now treats server monitors as Bots, i.e. non-users

Smart Item – numerous further enhancements, including: links now applied reliably throughout, vertical alignment of more link improved, date now appears in correct location

Stand Alone Video Player Design Element – numerous fixes and enhancements (see enhancements above)

Step-by-Step Articles – the pop-up image link can now be translated on the calling page using Text Items

Subscriber Export – now works reliably

Updates – global Skin updates (i.e. updating all the skins in one go) are now far more scalable, no longer errors out when more than 600 skins are being generated in one go

User Export – scalability greatly improved, no longer stresses server when exporting hundreds of thousands of users