Development updates for EasyBlog 3.5
Some of you might be wondering why we've actually used the version of EasyBlog 3.5 instead of EasyBlog 4.0 since the previous releases are all incremented by one. When we started off with EasyBlog 3.0 a couple of months back, we have identified quite a number of difficulties that most users are facing. But that wasn't perfected enough as there were still some underlying usability issues which required our immediate attention.
Hence, instead of introducing EasyBlog 4.0, this time it would be EasyBlog 3.5.
Speed, speed and more SPEED!
We have noticed that most of these social buttons are hogging up the speed to load up the pages from your site. In 3.5, we will be introducing bookmarklet to solve this! It does not bring any differences to the appearance of the social buttons but the speed to render these social buttons have been optimized by almost 200%! A big YAY to that :)
Micro Postings
Often, your user only want to post a very short story or updates of their status and instead of using the full version of the blog submission form, we have introduced micro postings. Micro Postings allows your user to quickly share a quick story or photo without the hassle of going through the bells and whistle's of a full fledged blogging environment. In short, blogging is now EVEN easier :)
Multi Language support (Joomla 1.6, 1.7 and 2.5 only)
We had Joomfish support for Joomla 1.5, but it is almost impossible for users to have multi language support on Joomla 1.6, 1.7 and Joomla 2.5. We have now added a new language selector when you publish a new blog post. Users can choose from the list of the supported languages and the post will only appear when they are on specific languages. In other words, your blog is automatically translated to the chosen language that you desire.
Revised Toolbar
Remember the old toolbar? We grew tired of it and decided to adopt the same toolbar that is available on EasyDiscuss 2.0 into EasyBlog 3.5. So far, feedback from users have been encouraging! We have taken a similar approach here for EasyBlog where the toolbar has been reworked to mimic it's little sister.
Intuitive Layouts
We believe that aesthetics also contribute largely in the overall experience of the Joomla tools that we build. EasyBlog will have minor facelifts on most of the design elements in 3.5 and hopefully, blogging will be much sweeter to your eyes.
Crowd Reporting
In the earlier versions of EasyBlog, there's no way for the user to report a blog post if it is offensive. The only way for that is to contact the admin manually. In EasyBlog 3.5, we will be introducing a new feature where members of the site can report against a blog post to the site admin instantly.
Email Templates
Remember the days where you had to customize the template file to alter your language files? Those days are over. The translations are now done in the language file and on top of that, we will also be introducing an attractive new email template layout.
Smart Search Integrations (Joomla 2.5)
I am sure that most of you are already aware of this cool extension that comes with Joomla 2.5. We love it to bits! We've also created a plugin that would work seamlessly with Smart Search a.k.a "The Finder".