EasySocial 2.0 Stable Release
It is here! The team and I are proud to announce one of the biggest ever release for EasySocial. Approximately 2 weeks since the release of RC1, our team has successfully built the best ever social network tool for Joomla!
Our designers did an amazing job in EasySocial 2.0 as there has been tremendous work done on the entire design and user experience.
To those who weren't following our previous blog posts, here are some of the key highlights of EasySocial 2.0 that you should look out for:
Pages Pro
Pages are somewhat like professional, business directories or some would even use it to the extend of a fan club. Pages is a 'must-have' for any entrepreneurs or public figures as it serve as an avenue to communicate with the fans, clients or even potential leads out there with the similar social interest.
EasySocial 2.0 pages will serve its purpose to fulfill that with a personal touch added to it. You can now get more businesses or attract site owners to board your site which allows an increase in your user-base.
Conversations 2.0
The entire conversations in EasySocial 2.0 has been redesigned ground up and rather than it being treated as a "mailbox", it is now looking more elegant than ever. The entire user experience on mobile devices have also been tweaked heavily so that your users would love the new interface be it on a desktop, tablet or more commonly used mobile devices.
Better Administration Tools
Throughout the life cycle of EasySocial, we realize that we paid the least attention to the back-end but that is where most of you would spend time on. With EasySocial 2.0, the user experience at the administration area has been improvised tremendously. In fact, we have also added an info-graphics tool on your Joomla dashboard to allow you to get a bird's-eye view of your site status.
Twitter Sign-on and Auto-posting
EasySocial already has a built-in integration with Facebook Single Sign on and it has proven an increase of sign-ups on sites in comparison with normal sites with standard registrations. With EasySocial 2.0, you now have the option to integrate with Twitter as well.
This integration would further increase conversion rates for sign-ups on your social site. A recent study shows that Twitter is used by approximately 5% of the internet while Facebook on the other hand has 45% market share. You would now have 50% of internet users gaining easy access to your site just by a click of a button!
Apart from the single sign-on for Twitter, EasySocial 2.0 has an external app that makes use of the single sign on for Twitter to automagically push your status updates to your Twitter account, nifty eh? ;)
New and Improvised Application Store
With EasySocial 2.0 built-in Application Store, download or installing EasySocial apps would be a breeze. Be it paid or free, as long as the app is supported you can install it directly from EasySocial back-end. This addition would simplify your tasks of updating your apps as now it also allows you to update your apps just a click of a button.
Photo Improvements
To our surprise, this this feature was frequently request by our users therefore we thought of implementing some photo improvements to EasySocial 2.0 release. With the photo improvement added in, users are able to upload some of the most trendious GIF files, take Pen Pineapple Apple Pen for instance ;) all over the activity streams without needing to upload a short video clip to compensate it.
On top on that, navigating through multiple photos are made a whole lot easier with the newly added arrow keys. Besides that, EasySocial 2.0 photo tagging layout and album layout were improved significantly as well. :)
35 Redesigned modules
As Mark has shared about modules previously, till this date we have a total of 30 modules and our team has added additional 5 new modules in EasySocial 2. All of these 35 modules have been redesigned, refactored and it looks simply amazing with the new UI.
The 5 new modules are:
- Recent Pages (Listing of pages on the site)
- Pages Menu (To allow quick access when one views a particular page)
- Pages Categories (Listing of categories for pages)
- User Statistics Module (Users can view their limits and usage)
- User Goals Module (Nice little goal tracker to motivate your users to perform more actions on the site)
User Experience
Since the release of EasySocial 1.4x version, we already have plans to consolidate all our toolbars to be uniform across all extensions. This will give users the experience that they are not browsing a different site altogether when there's proper standardization.
Performance Enhancements
Save the best for the last they say! Yes, I am saving this for the last as this is one of the key areas which the team has improvised on EasySocial 2.0. We are seeing at least 35% speed improvements in comparison to prior versions. While adding a ton of features, the team managed to reduce the footprint of our javascript files by almost 400kb and reduced the concurrent http requests to just a single request on most frequently used pages. Your web host will definitely love this new improvement!
Thank you to your lending hand and continuous support !
For those who has been with us since the launch of EasySocial back in the day, we are so grateful for your continuous support till this day; let's not forget our awesome bug squad who has contributed into this project in one way or another. Without you, EasySocial might not have 'evolved' to this very version. :)
We sincerely hope you guys will love EasySocial 2.0, and for the benefit of those who did not managed to follow through our blog posts about the progression of EasySocial 2.0, you may click on the links below and access the downloads on your dashboard as well :)