I have shared a preview of EasySocial 2.0 progress about a month ago and we are closing in right now. I would say, it's almost 95% done now and we are left with some other minor improvements and major testing internally for it's final stages before the Alpha release :)

Better Joomla Administration

With our new infographics module, you can now view recent updates from our blog and also get a glimpse of your community statistics.

Apart from that, EasySocial 2.0 will also work with Joomla Updater out of the box. This allows you to get notified just like the rest of the core extensions in Joomla. You could also download the launcher directly from the Joomla Updater panel.

New Application Store

My priority in EasySocial 2.0 is to allow site administrators to easily and quickly update their apps on the back end without checking the version number all the time because let's face it, we have too many custom fields and apps; managing these apps is a nightmare.

In fact, I can't even count the number of custom fields we have built, there are just too many! With the new Application Store, you could now update your installed apps or download new apps from our site directly.

Mobile Web App

The new mobile web app would transform your site with the look and feel of a native app right from the browser. I understand that this is not a native mobile app per se but it's definitely a fresh start for us in terms of mobile user experience. This would be one of our first baby step (As others say, one baby step at a time)

As this is an EasySocial application, it would be entirely up to you if you want to have it installed or not, as some would still want the Joomla template to be visible.

Refreshed Achievement Badges

Our designers felt that the achievement badges used is pretty ancient and it needs to be refreshed. In EasySocial 2.0, we have refreshed these badges to ensure that your community looks more up to date with the design standard these days.

Less Is More; Merging Theme Settings

Theme settings are cool, but it creates a ton of confusion especially when you do not know where are the settings located at. We have scrapped this altogether and most of these settings is now moved to the Settings page. This creates a single location where you could find all these settings. Not only have we merged the settings, we have also scrapped out a ton of least used settings altogether.

Reviews App for Group and Pages

We thought about this and rather than adding this into the core, as some users might not even want this, we have create 2 new reviews app which works on Groups and Pages.

With these new apps, users may post reviews on groups and pages on the site. In each review, they will also be able to set a rating along with their reviews too.

Twitter Autoposting App

Mashups are good and with this app, posting a status update on your story line would immediately post the status update into your own Twitter account. The app also displays a nice little embedded widget from Twitter on the person's profile.

Browser Notifications App

When your user opens multiple tabs on the browser to browse your site, read their e-mails, browse forums, read articles, which eventually lead to the need of a way to notify the user that some activity has happened on your site and this app solves the problem by sending notifications via the browser. The next roadmap for this app would be true "Push notifications" :)

Cleaner & Simplified SEF URLs

Oh, and before I forget we have also simplified and restructured the SEF URLs on EasySocial 2.0 :) The new URL looks much more simplified and simple!

There are more additions to EasySocial 2.0 that I would love to share but if I keep going on, this blog will never be published and I wouldn't have time to work on EasySocial 2.0 :)

Also I would love to know what do you guys think and suggestions or feedbacks are always welcome under the comment form below.