We have been working really hard for the past quarter juggling between EasyArticles and EasySocial 2.1. As promised from my comments earlier, I took some time off to prepare this blog post and share with you the progress update for EasySocial 2.1. This is just the first part as 2.1 will be a feature beast :)
Reactions
When we first introduced reactions in EasyBlog 5.1, it was widely used on many sites. That in itself was a great success for us in terms of having people adopt reactions for their blogs. Seeing the potential of reacting to activities on a site, we decided to push this into EasySocial. With reactions, it also adds "human emotions" to your activity streams.
Editing Rich Media Stream
In EasySocial 2.0, it was only possible to edit text updates. It was doing fine but we start to realize the annoyance with the inability to edit rich media activity streams. Users will now have a better control of their rich media activity stream, and that includes the ability to edit them.
With the ability to edit rich media activity stream in EasySocial 2.1, users could just hover over on the pencil icon to edit and correct any typo or grammatical errors found in any of their posts. Just like the standard text updates, the edited stream will be logged with a timestamp.
LinkedIn Integrations
In addition to the Twitter sign on in EasySocial 2.0 release, LinkedIn has finally joined the party. This will be pretty handy for job or corporate listing sites to connect, build networks and engage in a more professional manner. Along with this, we will also be introducing the new LinkedIn app that allows your users to auto post on LinkedIn just like Facebook and Twitter.Audio
Overall Improvements
EasySocial 2.1 has been carefully calibrated, optimized and minified in terms of our coding, to ensure that it can be easily maintained throughout its development cycle. One of the very main reason we render our own jQuery library is simply because of the ecosystem of any Joomla sites. Most sites has plugins or modules that may render 3rd party jQuery modules which will conflict with EasySocial and the only way around this is to render our own jQuery library.
With EasySocial 2.1, it will be able to work out of the box with the built in stock jQuery library that is included in Joomla (provided that there isn't any conflict) and because of this, script files would render about 2x times faster than its predecessor, EasySocial 2.0.
Email Templates
We have also redesigned the overall e-mail templates as the previous one is pretty outdated. The new design of our email template resembles the updated e-mail template which could be seen across all of our Joomla extensions.
Horizon Theme
We always emphasize in change and that is primarily because modern web designs are changing on a day to day basis. Adapting to new layouts is not an easy task and modifying our existing themes would certainly not be welcomed by everyone as some prefer not to have changes in their existing designs. Therefore with EasySocial 2.1, we will be introducing a new theme called Horizon.
Other than the change in color, it also has a different representation of the layout and how we would like to move forward in terms of building user friendly interfaces. It also uses an island-ish based design to ensure that the layout looks neat!That is all from me for now, I will be sharing more updates on the next part of the sneak peak of EasySocial 2.1 which includes our new intelligent fields.
Meanwhile, we have super exciting news brewing behind the scenes, which will be revealed on our next post from Sylvie.