Latest Updates

KickApps Platform Updates 4.3.10 - Release Notes

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:14:47 +0000

On Friday October 30 at 3am EST, we released version 4.3.10 of our platform. This release contains new features, enhancements to existing features and bug fixes. Below are the new features and enhancements.

Media Privacy

This is an optional feature that you can enable in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Site Settings page. If you enable this feature, when members upload media into your community they will be able to specify that it can only be seen by their friends in the community.

Private media will be visible to their friends (only!) in the “Photos” module on their profile page.
Private media will not be included in general site searches, and it will not be available in the generally-available RSS feeds for your site.
Private media cannot be added to Groups.
Private media will not be viewable if an unauthorized user tries to access it directly by entering the URL of the private item into their web browser.
Members will be able to see their own private media by navigating to the My Home > My Media section of your community.

Updates about private media (including comments left by other people, favorites, tags, etc) will not be included in the Community Activity Feed, Group Activity Feed or Member Activity Feed.
Updates about private media will be included in the My Friends and My News feed for appropriate members. (Members will only see updates about media items that they have permission to see).
Updates about private media are included in the community activity feed in the Affiliate Center.
As the administrator of the community, you will be able to see all private media in the Affiliate Center on the Manage > Media page. (There is a new column in the search results section which identifies any private media in your system.)

As the administrator of the community you will be able to optionally include private media in the RSS feeds that you create in the Feed Builder (in the Advanced Filters section).

Full Member Export

When you search your member database in the Affiliate Center on the Manage > Members page, there is a link at the bottom of the page to export the search results as an Excel file. This exported file now contains the entire list of members returned by your search, rather than just the 25 members that appear on the search results page you are viewing. The export also includes a bunch of new database fields for each user, like the answers to all of their profile questions and the number of points they have accumulated to date.

SPAM Defense

In this release we have included a number of methods to combat SPAM (some of which we can publish, here):

All user-generated hyperlinks will now be passed through a server-side redirector. To SPAMMERS this means that they will no longer get any “SEO juice” from of SPAMMING your site with hyperlinks pointing to their “Free Viagra” sites. (Note: in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Site Settings page there is a Member Privacy section where you also have the option to display a warning message to your users, whenever they click on a user-generated hyperlink which links to a page outside of your community.)

In the Affiliate Center in the Member Blacklist section of the Manage > Members page, you are now able to specify a range of IP addresses (instead of a list of single IP addresses) in order to block unwanted people from joining your community and littering it with SPAM. We also maintain a list of “known bad guys” on KickDeveloper. Check out this URL to see which IP addresses we recommend that you block: http://www.kickdeveloper.com/api/index.php/Disable_a_Member

In the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Pages > Member Profile Options page, you can now disable your members’ ability to add their own RSS feeds and external links to their profiles.

KickApps now has a global “nuke” function which allows us to quickly disable any members (and their contributions) who are suspected of spamming multiple sites on the KickApps platform. We are rolling out more centralized anti-spam tools behind the scenes, so you will start to see SPAMMY accounts and media being disabled without any action required on your part. At the same time, you should encourage your users to flag inappropriate content (and members) because our centralized intelligence uses that data to quickly identify SPAMMERS.

Faster “AJAX-Powered” Profile Page (optional)

In the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Pages > Member Profile Options page, you can choose to use a faster-performing version of the Profile page which draws the key “above the fold” elements onto the page during its initial load, and the remaining “below the fold” sections as an AJAX call as soon as the page has rendered for the user. We strongly urge all of our customers to choose this option.

Pending Messages Now Visible on All Pages

A notification of your users’ “unread messages” now appears just below the global “site navigation strip” throughout your community, so it is always visible. Previously this info was only available on the MyHome page.

Preview The New App Studio (Beta)

If you haven’t already checked it out, the Beta version of the new App Studio can be accessed through the Affiliate Center on the App Studio > Widget Studio page by clicking the big green button just above the “component dock” (or you can click this link: http://www.kickdeveloper.com/appstudio/preview/) We are only a couple of weeks away from releasing this new interface to the world, and your feedback counts! Enhancements include:

Overall new design: more space, consistent configuration options across all widgets
Plug-ins: extend the core functionality of your widgets by uploading your own App Studio components. Keep your plug-ins internal for use in your organization, or work with us to make them available to all KickApps customers.
Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) video player complete with support for OSMF plug-ins. Tick off plug-in checkboxes to add sophisticated functionality to your OSMF video player, including Akamai streaming support and VAST ads. More plug-ins coming soon.
New advanced color picker: way more colors.
Usability enhancements to assist with component positioning, sizing, and alignment.

Update to How We "Sanitize" Blog Text Submitted Via API's

Going forward, we are not going to "sanitize" any of the text text that is submitted via the Add/Edit Blog Post API call. That means that whatever the client application submits to our API is exactly what we will store in the database. We do not sanitize the content or encode it this content. In the future we will be adding a global parameter that will allow affiliates to specify if they want us to do the sanitization of content on our side.

This change now allows HTML to be successfully uploaded via the blog upload API. One thing to keep in mind is that this change could allow users to upload dangerous content, such as script tags. If this is a problem, you must ensure that the content is handled on the client side. Here are some sample options you may want to explore:

For PHP: http://htmlpurifier.org/
For Java: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_AntiSamy_Project
For .NET: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_AntiSamy_Project_.NET

API Documentation Available on KickDeveloper

For those who didn't know, in addition to providing a fully-hosted front end for all of our applications, we also have a REST API that enables KickApps customers to access our applications at the data level. You can view the API documentation at http://rest.kickdeveloper.com (note: our REST interface is only available to enterprise customers. Contact us at this URL for more info: http://www.kickapps.com/contact-us/index.php )

We hope you enjoy these enhancements and look forward to hearing your feedback on the KickDeveloper Message Board!

Your Friends at KickApps.

App Studio Updates for 10-02-09

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:25:33 +0000

This morning we released an App Studio build with the following features, enhancements, and fixes:

New Features & Enhancements

The App Studio team has been busy cranking out a new version of the App Studio that has been completely redesigned and includes lots of new features that we'll cover in detail when we release the completed new version. In advance of that we've set up a "design preview" of the new App Studio, which you can access by clicking the New App Studio button:

The new App Studio is still under active development, so you'll see us adding new features and fixing bugs frequently. It's not fully functional yet, but we're eager to get your feedback on the new look and layout. Let us know what you think on the KickDev boards!
The feed element selector can now parse any XML feed, in addition to its existing support for RSS and ATOM feeds. As XML is one of the most common data formats on the web, this addition dramatically enhances App Studio widgets' ability to render rich, interactive content from other applications. In the screenshot below, the Feed Element Selector is parsing XML from a VAST ad server.
Video players can now play .m4v video files.
The Feed Element Selector and the internal feed parsing in the List component now skips invalid RFC-822 dates, like the one in this Google News feed.
We've added a new "Track Event" action that lets you use Google Analytics to track any event that a component can register. See the Events & Actions reference for more information.
The JavaScript API now enables you to drill into property chains, so, for instance, if you're working with a slideshow, you can fetch the name of the person who contributed the photo that is currently being displayed with this syntax: selectedItem.authors.0.name. See the Widget JavaScript API doc for more information.
The Advanced List's selectedItem property now has another chainable property called xmlSource that can be used to access values in the selected item's XML node. For example, #{Advanced List.selectedItem.xmlSource.cover} can be used as the value for an update property action that updates the content URL property of an image component with the URL contained in the cover node of the selected item's XML feed. For more info, see the Events and Actions reference.

Fixes

Fixed an issue preventing the "media end" event from firing when the video player is playing just one video.

App Studio Updates for 7-25-09

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:38:19 +0000

New features and enhancements

New Rating component enables you to use custom images to display ratings, render ratings for items in 3rd-party feeds that aren't based on a 5 point scale, and more. Learn more about the Rating component.
CTRL-A now selects all components on the stage.
ATOM feed parsing now parses media:thumbnails
Added "Select from feed" button to Update Property actions for components in Advanced Lists
We've made it easier to use an Advanced List as a playlist for a player. Just pick the player you'd like to use in the "Playlist for" dropdown:
Added a new Set Depth action that enables you to change a component's layer:

Fixes

Fixed an issue with the video player rendering YouTube feeds of videos that don't have thumbnails.
Fixed an issue with video players and new playlists created in Content panel.
Players no longer auto-select the first item in their playlists if these items were not already pre-selected.

Docs for new App Studio features

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:48:28 +0000

Last night's release included a number of great new features in the App Studio, including the ability to create playlists, upload images and .swf's, and access the rest of your KickApps media from within the App Studio. Check out these new docs to learn how you can take advantage of the new features!

Update: 7/7/2009 release complete

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:18:46 +0000

UPDATE: The 7/7/2009 release was completed at 11 am EST on 7/7/2009.

UPDATE: We are still deploying the current release, and expect it to continue until 11am EST.

The good news is that we have not put any sites into read-only mode and don't expect to; we are aiming to make this release unnoticeable by your community members.

This release includes some behind the scenes performance enhancements and tweaks to the Widget Studio, which are outlined in the previous KickDeveloper article.

Update: 6/18/2009 release complete

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:47:30 +0000

LATEST UPDATE: The release was completed this morning (Thursday June 18, 2009), and the system is running smoothly.

UPDATE: The release scheduled for the morning of Tuesday, June 16th has been rescheduled for the morning of Thursday, June 18th, 2009 starting at 12:01AM ET (4AM GMT). The process will last a few hours during which your KickApps website will operate normally. You community will not be in read-only mode.

We’ll be performing a release with several enhancements and new features on the morning of Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 3AM ET (7AM GMT). The release will last approximately three hours during which your community will be in read-only mode. The new features and platform enhancements include a new set of API calls, privacy controls for member profiles, a couple of DOM changes, and new features in the Widget Studio.

Automatically set new member profile pages to private

New privacy control! Under Configure > Settings, if you enable profile privacy, you will see an option called "Default all profiles to be private." Selecting that option will default all newly created profiles within the community to private.

Blank Page Template

We now provide a blank page template that contains only the header and footer of your KickApps hosted community. Combined with the JavaScript Events API, you can use this template to create a fully customized experience for your visitors by injecting any HTML content you would like.

Learn more about this feature at KickDeveloper.

Update, 6/17: Introducing Widget Gallery Beta

We've added a new "Gallery" tab to the top panel in the App Studio. This new tab is loaded with a number of pre-built widgets that you can drag to the stage to use in your own project. We look forward to adding more widgets and skins to the Gallery going forward. In the near term we'll also be working to expand this functionality and open it up so you can share your widgets with the community as well!

Widget Studio enhancements

We also made a number of tweaks and changes to the Widget Studio. Here's the ones you'll probably notice:

Update, 6/17: You can now run JavaScript functions using the Open Custom URL Action. Very handy for triggering JS functions on the page that the widget is on when the widget throws a certain Event (like when a video starts playing).
You can now display members' levels and how many points they've earned by ticking off the Points and/or Levels checkboxes in the Custom Meta section of the List Item Properties panel.
.swf files loaded into the Image/.SWF component can now be resized and masked
We've replaced the Feed dropdown in the Content panel with an auto-completing dropdown that searches your feeds as you type
You can now apply Actions to the List component, which means you can finally have a hidden video player appear when you click a video in the list!
Added text truncation ellpises (...) to long component names in layers panel
Refactored the image component and its properties panel. The updated panel layout clearly distinguishes between whether resizing the image component's bounding box should scale the image with it and lets you center the image vertically and horizontally-- especially helpful when the image component will dynamically load images of different sizes.
Updated behavior to size to the dimensions of the first image/swf loaded into it when dragged/double clicked to stage
Proxying and bitmap smoothing gif and png when needed as proxy supports
Added check on actions panel drag operation to fix issue that occurs when a component is dropped on or through it
Changed feed builder save message

We also addressed the following issues:

Meebo widget not updating when properties are changed in design mode
YouTube audio still playing when switching between youtube and regular video
Audio player not playing on blogs
"Center content vertical/horizontal" not factored in when "Scale to Fit" wasn't enabled
Bypassing corrupt null actions
List component showPreloader=false being ignored in some situations

Now automatically killing the cache for a widget's Facebook thumbnail URL when you save it in the Studio.

New API Calls

Approve media
Reject media
Approve member
Reject member
Retrieve Pending Media
Extend get tag count call to accept multiple media ID's
Extend get article with tag call to accept mutiple media Id's
Block API calls based on IP's

Please note: API access requires a special account. See the API docs for more information.

DOM Changes

A separate body class has been added to the My Friends (.ka_mkp_myFriends) , My Fans (.ka_mkp_MyFans) , and I'm a Fan of (.ka_mkp_FanOf) pages.
A body ID of #ka_requestGroup has been added to the group request page.
On the Getting Started page, #ka_manageSubNav has been moved out of #ka_manageContent to conform with all other KA management pages.
On private profile pages, there was a missing closing div tag on #ka_profilePrivacy that was causing private profile pages to break. This has been added in.
On the profile page, the li.ka_profileRSSLink is now identical to the other li's in the list where the icon and the anchor text are both linkable.
The body class .ka_myhome_pages has been added to the My Fans and I'm a Fan of pages to be consistent with all other KA management pages.
On the profile page, under .ka_stats, the comments and views areas are now in separate divs, to give users the ability to hide one or the other.
On the My Groups page, a div #ka_allGroups has been wrapped around the All Groups section, to enable css hiding.
List pages: Media list pages now have the body class .ka_listResults while a search results list page has the body class of .ka_searchResults to help distinguish between the two.

Questions? Comments? Let us know what you think on the KickDeveloper Message Board.

KickApps 4.1 page code updates

Mon, 11 May 2009 05:00:00 +0000

Update, 5/14: jQuery upgraded to version 1.3.2

KickApps 4.1 includes updates to your member join and login pages. You can see what these pages will look like by visiting our staging environment at http://staging.kickapps.com/user/displayAffiliateLoginPage.kickAction.

If you're using custom CSS or JavaScript, we recommend going through both of these pages to ensure that your site looks and functions as intended. If you need to make any adjustments to your CSS or JavaScript, you can do so in your Global Page Template on staging, and then copy your changes over to the Global Page Template on your live site. As you'll see below, the new sections on the member join and login pages all use new CSS hooks, so you can target these hooks in the CSS on your live site today without affecting your pages-- the new styles will just lie dormant until the new release. Then, when the new release launches, your new and updated pages will seamlessly assume the new styles.

Please note: The staging environment is loaded with a pre-release version of KickApps 4.1, which means that we're not done testing it yet. You may see a bug or two, and some functionality will be limited (notably, you won't be able to upload videos or send e-mails out from staging).

Diagnosing any style or JS conflicts is best done with Firebug, but we've also put these annotated screenshots together to give you the lay of the land.

On the member join page, you'll find a new section that lets people join using their Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID accounts.

We've also added icons for Facebook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and OpenID to your member login page.

The same icons also appear on your member login pop-up.

Update, 5/14: In addition to these CSS and mark-up changes, we've also upgraded our version of jQuery from 1.2.6 to 1.3.2. This upgrade contains some very minor changes that could affect any jQuery code that you've written. If you find any conflicts with custom jQuery code on your site, we recommend reading the jQuery 1.3.2 release notes and this article on upgrading to jQuery 1.3.

We hope you enjoy checking out these new features on staging. If you have any questions or feedback, please post to the KickDeveloper Message Board. For support issues, e-mail support@kickapps.com.

Announcing KickApps 4.1

Fri, 08 May 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Updates: jQuery upgraded to version 1.3.2, App Studio Updates

Early morning EST on Friday, May 15th, we'll be launching a small release including several enhancements to your login and join functionality, a couple new point-earning actions, the ability to set limits on how frequently members can earn points for a given action, and a new set of APIs for the Points & Levels app. Your site will be in read-only mode during the release, from from 3AM - 6AM EST/7AM-10AM GMT.

Please note: this release includes updates to your member join and login pages. If you're using custom CSS or JavaScript, we recommend visiting the KickApps 4.1 staging environment to ensure that your site looks and functions as intended with the new functionality. For more information, check out the KickApps 4.1 page code updates doc.

New Message Board Section - Affiliate Spotlight

Fri, 08 May 2009 16:23:43 +0000

Hey developers! We've added a new section to our Message Boards specifically designed for your to brag about your accomplishments, find hired help for customizations, and show off your site! It would probably be best to post your topic subject as your site name if you'd like to broadcast your site, as well as the focal point of your community, to give our other members a clue of what they're looking at.

These threads can also be used to explain how you have accomplished a specific task and to ask for some expert advise on how to tackle a concept you have derived.

Well what are you waiting for? Go show off your community!

App Studio Updates for 5-01-09

Fri, 01 May 2009 05:00:00 +0000

This morning we launched an App Studio release including several powerful new features, a few bug fixes, and a slew of enhancements. Read on for the details!