EasyDiscuss 4 Alpha

EasyDiscuss 4 Alpha is available now!

The entire team has been working really hard on EasyDiscuss for the past months. I believe most of you guys have already read EasyDiscuss 4.0 progress report. In case some of you missed it, here's a recap on some of the highlights posted previously:

New Wireframe Theme

EasyDiscuss 4 is now built on top of Bootstrap 3.0, the all new Wireframe Theme will now be the default theme for EasyDiscuss 4.0. It was our intention to name all our default themes as Wireframe in order to achieve the same framework and theme style throughout all our extensions.

The All New Forums View

With the all new forums view, it has a more modern touch to what a traditional forum would look like. The layout is well organized and has massive usability improvements and we believe your users are going to love this new layout!

The all new forums view is pretty similar to what we are currently using for our forums. 

Improved Administration

We have also revamped the back-end because prior to EasyDiscuss 4.0, the layout was old and dull-looking. We had to retire the old layout as it is no longer practical.

With the new back-end of EasyDiscuss, it now shares the same DNA and looks identical across all of our extensions. It also improves overall functionality and usability too!

Conversations

Conversations in EasyDiscuss 4.0 just got better. We took some prototypes from EasySocial's conversation and converted the existing conversations in EasyDiscuss to be more engaging and interactive among users.

In fact, you can now define which user groups are allowed to access the conversations in EasyDiscuss 4.0 via ACL.

User Moderation Tool

As this was one of the most requested feature in EasyDiscuss, we have now added the ability to ban users in EasyDiscuss 4.0 on the front end. As a moderator of the forum, they can decide to ban users permanently or for a period of time.

Priorities

Getting your priorities right is an essential in any support desk. EasyDiscuss 4.0 now includes priorities for posts. When a question is created, user's can now select the priority of the post. This allow moderators to view posts that are on a high priority in a queue. 

Email Digest

There are times when users would only like to receive emails for a specific range of time rather than getting a new notification for every action that is performed on the site.

With EasyDiscuss 4.0, your site users have the option to subscribe to an email digest. What it basically does is sending those who subscribed a summary of new posts created in EasyDiscuss on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Company Workflow

Impression of your support responses are extremely important in any organization and it makes it even more challenging when you are working with multiple timezone and countries as different region has different holidays.

With company workflows in EasyDiscuss 4.0, you can now inform your users the operation hours of your team and also create holiday schedules where users would be able to see if the team is currently available or not.

This feature will reduce customer's expectation when they are on a different timezone and it definitely helps! We have been a lab rat for this.

Email Customizations

With EasyDiscuss 4.0, you can now tweak your e-mail templates easily without having to connect to FTP. With this addition, it also saves the template files in your template override folder. This will prevent your changes to get overwritten when you upgrade EasyDiscuss in the future.

More Integrations

We have also added integrations Telegram, Slack, LinkedIn and Wunderlist. These integration would allow new posts to be notified via the respective clients that you use without having to manually copy the URL of your post.

Not forgetting, our long time integration with JFBConnect in which has the major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more. 

Ratings Engine

With EasyDiscuss 4.0, your users are able to rate on posts to allow others to view the rating for each votes. This comes in handy when you want to retrieve the highest rated posts on the site

Amazon S3 Integration

Prior to EasyDiscuss 4.0, site owners were having issues with full disk space on their hosting space. The main cause of this is because of the attachments that are stored on the server.

With EasyDiscuss 4.0, it now allows storing of attachments on a remote storage like Amazon S3. Gone are the days where you have to worry about a full disk space!

Moderation Workflow

With EasyDiscuss 4.0, moderators can now view a list of posts that are assigned to them on the Assignments page. Delegation of tasks never felt easier with EasyDiscuss 4.0.

Other Improvements

Apart from all these cool features mentioned above, there are alot tons of improvements that are not visible. EasyDiscuss 4.0 is now almost 150% faster than the previous versions. It also has smaller footprints for the javascript framework that is used in EasyDiscuss 4.0. There are some other handy tools that might come convenient for site users: 

• Mark all discussion as read
• Shows the most visited post
• @Mentions which is widely used on Facebook and Instagram is also now available
• Likes and Favorites count

What's an Alpha release?

In software development, we have a number of releases prior to the stable version. Alpha version is the first release; though the software is usable, it is still in its testing phase and is NOT advisable to be installed on live site. This is due to the fact that Alpha version contains bugs in which might be minor or major.