This might be my most important post I've ever made on this forum. I've spend hours thinking and mentally mapping out how a "news feed manager" could work. Before I state how it would work, I want to mention the benefits. We have seen many specific requests of how users want content to display in their stream. This idea would put a lot of power into exactly what the admin wants to display in the news feed. Not only would this be great for the average admin, but it would in the long run save the stacked team time from getting many requests to display content in a certain way in streams.

Here are some scenarios it can help with, let's say an admin wants to have a feed that displays "followers" but only displays articles, photos from only admins, videos with a certain hashtag, events and feeds but not groups, activity from groups but no comments from the group. Ladies and gentlemen, if we had a feed manager all this would be possible plus more!

I generated a screen shot of my vision of what the stream manager would look like:



Notice that you could change the names, placements, publish/unpublish, and more easily set the default? The great part about this is that the admin doesn't even have to touch this section if EasySocial is fine the way it is. But for those of us who like to go the extra mile, we can make things exactly how we envision them.

Then when one goes to edit the stream list, they have tons of options as seen in this screen shot:



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The admin can change the title, alias, publish/unpublish, default, and ordering. Then the user can set a pre-defined hashtag which would encourage "centralized hashtags" which would more often be used by the community. Lets say you ran a photography site, it could be used as a season theme for #winter, #holidays, or #snow. Below you can see an option called "Posts to Include", this allows the admin to decide who should be included in the list. Friends, followers, own, and everyone. Maybe some day if Family is added, it could allow users to more easily see activity from their family.

Below that you can see an app box that allows you to drag the apps you want to see within the feed. This would allow me to create a feed where I could see articles from only my friends or only status posts from my followers. To make the admins job easy I added at the very bottom a area where they could select "all" or "none" if they have no specific preference for apps.

On the right side I put in user groups to filter by. This would allow you to display activity from specific user groups, so if you wanted to have a feed for admins, you could do that. Below that is where you can select specific easy social stream items to display or not display in the news feed. So if you wanted to hide group activity, not a problem. Want to show profile photos but not cover photos in the stream? Done with a single checkbox click. And finally choose where you want comments to show up from. Some users want activity to show up from items but not the comments. For example if a user comments on a event the admin can choose whether or not it should show up in the stream.

This post is a proposal post which I drew up as carefully as I could using FireBug and very careful thinking. I really hope the Stacked team considers this, the flexibility gained would be absolutely incredible. The need for hacking would be reduced, your average admin could get the results they want, and we can give the community outstanding results. Now that would be a dream come true!