Ending the year with a big bang!
It is the time of the year where we wrap things up for 2016. It has been a very challenging year for the team and I throughout this year but it is definitely an awesome experience for us as we had to overcome most of our worst nightmares. The following week marks a new year and a new chapter for StackIdeas and for most of you. Before we wrap this up, I would also like to share with you some progress and updates:
Mobile Web Package
When we initially developed the mobile web app for EasySocial, we were under the impression that it would be suitable for most sites. The mobile web app would automatically switch the layout to a mobile layout when you are on EasySocial pages giving your users a richer mobile experience while browsing your site. This idea worked great when tested on our local devices and machines.
Then we started challenging ourselves by putting it on a remote server with a pretty slow connection and that is when all hell broke loose. Not only is the experience bad, the whole ecosystem would fail miserably when you navigate between different extensions as the layout looks different on EasySocial pages (with apps) and non EasySocial Pages.
Hence, there was a delay in releasing this app because we have rewritten everything (yes, before we even release it out) from scratch and took a different approach. Instead of it being an EasySocial app, we have packaged it so that the package contains a Joomla plugin and a Mobile template. With this approach, the whole experience is extremely smooth and the best of them all, it's blazing fast! Almost like a native app.
The entire mobile template package will be available at $59 for this week only.
Stream Anywhere Module
I have to extend my personal gratitude to Sabih. Early this month, he posted a request for a module which allows people to render a story form and a stream anywhere on the site and I definitely love the concept and idea. Not only does it add a lot of interactivity on your site, one can also consider it the "Tree of life" for your social network.
Why? A social network is all about interactivity and activity generation. Activities is the heart of your social network operation and without any activities, your site would not be as cheerful as it should. With this module, one can publish the module anywhere on your site as long as your template supports module positions (Which almost 99.9% template does).
The module will then render the status update form and activities. Here's the beauty of it, the generated status updates from the module will be fed into your dashboard / profile and the activity stream that appears on the page is dedicated to the page itself. In other words, your page would contain unique activity stream based on the page that you are viewing.
This module will be available to early adopters for $49 this week only.
Article Stream Plugin
This awesome plugin allows you to add a story form and a stream that is associated with the tags from Joomla Articles, K2 and EasyBlog. The tags used on the post on any of these extensions will appear as hashtags on the story form allowing your users to quickly post some updates related to the article that they are viewing.
This plugin will be available to early adopters for $39 this week only.
Echo Template
When we initially previewed Echo template a couple of months ago, we actually built most of the layouts on EasySocial 1.4.x thinking that it would also work with EasySocial 2.x (We have not decided to update the themes structure yet during that time) . Before we got to release this awesome template, we took a huge move forward with EasySocial 2.0 by restructuring and revamping EasySocial theme files so that your site would be blazing fast. Because of that, the template needs to be updated to be able to support the new themes structure in EasySocial 2.0. It's not an easy task but it's definitely worth while.
Pre-order for Echo Template starts now at $49 until it is released. We are expecting the release of Echo on January 2017.
Conversekit
This is one of the most challenging plugin that we have ever created and it has definitely not been in our way as there are a lot of other implications since the plugin should work on any page. Conversekit is not just another chat system for your Joomla site. Conversekit is powered by the conversations engine from EasySocial and it requires EasySocial to be installed (As of now, until we move it out from EasySocial later)
The most difficult areas when dealing with Conversekit is to reduce the load on the client's end and of course, for this to be hosted on any shared host, it needs to utilize as minimal CPU as possible or your web hosters would not like it. In Conversekit, we have created an algorithm to spread the loading times based on an "affinity" system where the polling only happens when a user becomes more active and goes into an almost idle state when the page isn't being used.
Pre-order for Conversekit starts now at $59 with 12 months worth of updates and support. We are expecting the birth of Conversekit on January 2017.
Wrapping Things Up
Now that most of these tasks are off our shoulders, we are going to embrace 2017 with an almost empty arm with tons of new stuffs that will be introduced in 2017. Before I end this lengthy post, on behalf of the team, I would like to extend our gratitude and we are extremely thankful to have your support throughout these years. Without your support, we would not have achieved so much.
Happy New Year & Happy Holidays Everyone! Thank you for your continuous support!