Your community members aren’t behind their laptops 24/7, so your SocialEngine community needs to be easily accessible from everywhere your users are. Imagine how empowered and valued your users will feel once they’re able to seamlessly connect to your SE powered site from their phone.

Recently I talked with Jason Martell from Booya! Media about their “white label” solution, how easy it is to integrate with SE PHP and what SocialEngine users can expect from their impressive app.

For those that aren’t aware, explain what Booya!Media can offer current SocialEngine users?

• An easy way to launch your mobile app into the app stores and have full control over design and content.
• Never have to re-submit your app to the app stores in order to make changes.
• Update your app design and content anytime instantly with just a few clicks.
• Get around expensive mobile developer costs in order to customize your social engine app.
• Sell products through your app without having to pay apple 30%.
• Easily add any page from your SocialEngine community, as a section of your mobile app.

How easy is it for a non-technical person to customize the Booya! app?

We just spent $300,000.00 to develop these tools. Once we build the app, our customers are given full access to these tools to modify their app content and design instantly.

As a community admin, what are some additional benefits of incorporating a native app for your community members?

• Reach all your community members by sending PUSH alerts.
• Offer GPS and location based coupons through your app to drive customers back to your business.
• Sell your app in the app store and make additional revenue from your community.
• Sell your products in the app from eBay, Amazon, and more….

The post Booya! Media Launches SocialEngine Mobile App appeared first on SocialEngine.

Here are just a few of the ways I’ve engaged with friends, family and co-workers in the last few hours:

• Email

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Voxer

• Text

• Instagram

• Quora

• LinkedIn

• Path

• Phone (old school I know)

With a wide and overwhelming variety of ways to get in touch, how do you know which is best for your company and / or customers? Most brands turn to two specific methods, forums and social networks, to address the range of queries they receive. A single, easy-to-find place for discussions, troubleshooting and relationship building is also key. How do you know whether you will better benefit from a forum or a social network?

Forums

Simply put, forums are evolved bulletin boards. They are designed for threaded discussions about specific subjects and sub-subjects.

The nature of a forum is built around:

• transactions – a customer or user has a question or concern they want immediately addressed
• one time log-in – the user with the question or concern tends to visit only once, leaving when their need is addressed or ignore

“Forums are like social mixers, where everyone is at equal level, milling about and discussing with others. These many communication tools allow anyone to start a topic and anyone to respond to one. Members are often at equal level, and content is usually segmented by topic. (rather than by people).”

Social Networks

One of the best reasons to join or even create a social network is because doing so nurtures a customized experience. When you personalize an online community around your company, you build lasting connections with others. A social network allows you to stay up to date on the people in your life, power users, repeat offenders, and target customers. Better put, social networks are centered around people whereas forums are centered around topics.

In your typical social network, people are held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships; friendship, colleagues, family members, classmates, etc. These connections are built on a one-by-one basis. Generally speaking, there is a larger sense of commitment to social networks than forums because the subject matter is centered around people and their personal connections.

Forums vs Social Networks

A forum might be a good choice for a company with many technical queries. Take for example a company like Comcast. The cable giant has over 405 million pages populated on their own online forum, the majority of which are focused on providing targeted assistance with one of their products or services.

Let’s say you’re experiencing a problem with your Comcast internet. You have millions of pages full of information and resources to help troubleshoot your issue without having to call customer service (and most likely be put on hold) only to receive the same information. Chances are good that someone else has experienced the same problem and the forum contains an article detailing steps to take to remedy the situation.

A social network is always more optimal for a company whose users are mobile and want a clean interface with which to interact with others. A great example of this is what Warby Parker is building on Pinterest and Instagram. The New York based eyewear company has a fantastic digital presence and is constantly takes full advantage of promoting their frames on these visual networks. In January they organized a Warby Parker Instagram Photo Walk. People registered, met up with one another and snapped pictures, including a branded hashtag about the event. This is the kind of content you don’t see populated on a forum. The event was a massive hit and created a lot of buzz for Warby Parker.  More importantly, it galvanized the relationships formed on many of their social networking sites by providing an opportunity for people to meet in real life.

So which one best for you?

It’s really up to you and you overall objectives. If you’re looking for a great customer service tool where people can log on and find information quickly, forums might be the best way to go. However, if you’re looking at creating lasting relationships and want to meet people who share similar interests, a social network is the answer.

The post Forums vs Social Networks appeared first on SocialEngine.

Features & improvements

• New Modern theme
• Added link support to poll options
• Performance improvements (improved loading of comment likes in feed, optimized Zend locale data files)

Bug fixes

• Missing attach link icon in composer on mobile
• Translation support for profile field privacy settings
• Several missing phrases added to default language pack
• Hiding the global header/footer using the layout editor now works correctly for mobile
• Fixed duplicate results in message search
• Fixed event privacy option “Group Members” not saving
• Fixed error in Chrome on video view page
• Forum widgets now respect forum privacy settings
• Fixed placeholder/overtext positioning in the composer on mobile
• Twitter OAuth now uses SSL

Modern Theme

SocialEngine PHP 4.5 includes a new default them named “Modern”. We hope you guys think it’s nicer and more contemporary than the previous default theme, but let us know.

Performance Improvements

We know performance is an absolute priority for some of you so we’ve done our best to identify and improve on the bottlenecks we’ve found without creating any compatibility issues for third-party addons. Some of you should see page load speed improvements with SE PHP 4.5, depending on your server config, resource limits and usage levels. We’ll continue to focus on performance improvements with our next SE PHP release. Remember – if you’re having speed issues, please be sure that your site is in Production Mode (you can enable it from your admin panel homepage).

Let us know what you think about SE PHP 4.5. Happy community building!

The post SocialEngine PHP 4.5 Released – Performance Improvements & New Modern Theme appeared first on SocialEngine.

I got to talk with Anant from CometChat who was really excited about the new SocialEngine Cloud integration.

“We are excited to announce the launch of CometChat for SocialEngine Cloud. CometChat will enable you to instantly add hundreds of features to your site and keep users glued on for hours. CometChat will seamlessly integrate with your SocialEngine Cloud site meaning, your users will be automatically logged into CometChat when they login to your site. It only takes a minute to install and there is no programming knowledge required.”

Features include audio/video chat, chatrooms, screen sharing, whiteboard, games, announcements and more.

CometChat also integrates with the SocialEngine mobile site!

When your users visit your mobile site, CometChat will automatically appear as a tab in the mobile menu enabling your users to chat from wherever they are.

Learn more and get a 14-day free trial at: http://socialengine.cometchatcloud.com

The post CometChat for SocialEngine Cloud appeared first on SocialEngine.

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• Status posts are now searchable
• Usernames now linked in new signup post feed items
• Connecting accounts to LinkedIn now pulls user’s avatar
• Tags now created for only alpha-numeric phrases
• Delete link now being displayed for feed items in the activity widget
• Fixed highlighted menu item being lost for Admin > Manage > Members pages
• Bots no longer increment post view counts
• Featured posts now show in descending order
• Fixed missing span tag in activity widget
• Fixed 404 errors being thrown for like lists
• Fixed issue causing replies from Hotmail to include mail headers
• Fixed 500 errors on post delete
• Notifications are now removed when comments are deleted
• Fixed issue causing some sites to show a “Not Found” error when using a custom domain
• Fixes birthdays showing an incorrect date
• Fixed “View More” and HTML display issue for Topic posts
• Fixed LinkedIn sign up for private sites
• Modal-based post composer hidden from Clean theme menu bar (can be added back with CSS if desired)
• Title and message no longer required when posting new images
• Admin an moderators can now delete comments from the activity feed
• Captchas on signup are now valid for 5 minutes, instead of 1 minute
• Notifications about deleted users are now hidden from digest emails
• Custom fields “Hidden Everywhere” no longer show in the member-about widget
• Fixed double overlay issue caused by using the share-it button
• Create Account button now hidden on the sign-in form for private sites
• Fixed data-type=”featured” option for the mini-feed widget
• Fixed issue with Facebook likes not showing up on Facebook’s activity log
• Comments inserted via AJAX now correctly show user avatars
• “Everything” main menu item label renamed “Categories”
• Added client-side validation for user input on sign up

New Features

• Sign In form now shown on landing page for private sites
• Members autosuggest added to site search
• Top, Hot and Following sorting modes added to the activity feed widget
• Post category added to activity widget
• Posts now support animated GIFs
• Members can now post messages anonymously (Admin > Settings > Posts)
• A unique ID is now added to the <body> tag for all pages for easy CSS styling
• Files and photos can now be attached to new posts from the activity feed composer, including drag-and-drop support
• Activity feed items can now be commented, liked and voted on.
• Mentions in new posts (not just comments) now send email notifications
• “View more” link in activity feed now expands to show more comments
• (beta) Members can now create Topic posts via email (Admin > Settings > Notifications)
• (beta) Reply to posts, comments and messages with email (Admin > Settings > Notifications)

New Email Features (beta)

Our goal is to help you attract and retain your community members. A big part of that is making it easy to keep your members engaged without changing their current behavior. We’ve added two key email features to help you do that. Firstly, when your members receive a comment response to their post and get an email notification, they can now reply directly to that email notification – that reply will be auto-posted in your community. Secondly, each member in your community can now make new posts simply by emailing a unique email address (which they can see on their settings page). Members will also receive this unique address and instructions on how to use it (it’s easy) when they first sign up. As the admin, you have total control – you can enable or disable these features.

Anonymous Posting

Another interesting new piece we’ve added is the option to enable anonymous posting. If you enable this feature, your members will see an “Anonymous” checkbox within their “share something” composer box. If they select this, their post will be anonymous. Depending on your community’s theme and purpose, this can be a powerful tool that introduces a whole new dynamic to the way your members interact.

File Sharing & Attachments

Your members can now drag and drop files into the “share something” box and attach them to their posts. SocialEngine will detect if they are photos and display them accordingly.

Unique page IDs

Now the <body> element on every page has a unique ID, e.g. <body id=’page-new’>. This should make it MUCH easier for you to add CSS style adjustments for specific pages in your Custom CSS page in the admin panel.

Improved Search

Now, when your members start typing in the search box in your main menu, they’ll see an autosuggest list of other members’ names. We’ve also added more content types to the search index – it will now include “status”-style posts.

Animated GIFs

Your members can now posts animated GIFs. So brace yourself for the impending cat maelstrom.

So, what’s coming in March?

We’ll be doing another major SocialEngine PHP sprint in the next two weeks. The main focus will be on A) performance improvements (specifically page load speed), and B) frontend/style improvements. We are cooking up a whole new default theme that should blow the current one way – it will resemble the new themes we’ve built for SE Cloud in some ways. Performance-wise, we are working with an independent expert to see how we can safely refactor parts of the SE PHP codebase without interfering with third-party addons.

Let us know what you think of all the changes. We really hope you like them!

The post New SE Cloud Features: Anon posting, post-by-email, Clean theme improvements and more! appeared first on SocialEngine.

An easy enough question to answer, yet more people are finding it increasingly difficult to take time out of their busy lives to connect with one another. Take SocialEngine user Kim Starks for example. Kim has always been interested in people and how they interact with one another. She was inspired to create an online community to better connect with the people closest in her life while also sharing the latest ‘buzzed’ about topics from around the web.

In this week’s Client Spotlight, I got to talk with Kim, creator of VoiceBee, about how she got her start with SocialEngine and what we can expect from her latest project.

Tell us all about yourself!

Kim: I’ve lived here in Florida all my life, and I think I’m one of nine Floridians here. When meeting people here, they are always shocked to hear of a Floridian. I live minutes away from all of the tourist attractions such as Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea World, Wet & Wild, and more. The nearest beach is about 35 minutes away and my neighborhood is surrounded by golf courses. I don’t golf, but I do love telling people about them. My neighbors are people and gators, literally. Living in a tourist attraction, I’m always getting to meet different kinds of people and that led to online networking, which I’ve been doing for the past three years. People’s interests and their conversations have always intrigued me and are the very reasons for my current adventure in life.

My latest adventure is a new online community that I started called VoiceBee. VoiceBee is an online buzzboard to share “buzz” from around the web or from your life. Our scheduled launch date is March 1st, but we are now live for our pre-launch. It’s a very exciting time for me!

Explain how you came up with VoiceBee.

Kim: I actually came up with VoiceBee in 2010 while having a conversation with a friend. When meeting up with friends, the phrase I always use is, “What’s Buzzing?” We proceed to update one another with what’s going on in our lives. I thought to myself, “Voice and Buzz” and at that moment, I knew I wanted the “bee” to signify “buzz.” I immediately went to my computer to check if the domain name ‘voicebee’ was available and to my surprise it was. So I pulled out my credit card and bought as many VoiceBee domains as I could, not realizing exactly what I wanted to do with it. Several people and companies have contacted me wanting to buy the domains and I would turn them down. In 2012, I decided it was time to bring VoiceBee to life.

How long have you been using SocialEngine?

Kim: Wow, I’ve been following you and your members since 2010. I remember when you were SocialEngine.net and someone else had SocialEngine.com. So please know how happy I was when you obtained your dot com. Yes, this is how far back I go with following you guys.

How has your SocialEngine Cloud experience been so far?

Kim: Social Engine Cloud is amazing and the administrator panel is really easy to navigate and understand. The demo SEC community you launched for Admins is the second best thing you have done for us. The first thing of course is the amazing SEC platform. I’m appreciating the fact that we are all able to help one another and make new friends at the same time.

What’s next for you and VoiceBee?

Kim: Shhhh, it’s a secret, but what I can tell you is that we use one of the SE third-party developer’s seTweaks. They have done all designs and customizations for VoiceBee and they will be working on our next project that we are hoping to implement in April.

Anything else you would like to add?

Kim: Yes. Firstly, I want to reiterate what an amazing platform SocialEngine Cloud is. The added bonus to SEC is the support you receive with it. It’s like having your own IT team. Therefore, I’m giving the entire SE team a world of thanks for giving us the tool to follow our dreams at such a low cost. Secondly, I want to thank the seTweaks team for the amazing work they have done for VoiceBee. Lastly, I want to thank the SEC community. I have made some really great friends on there who are now my brothers and sisters of SE. Making friends on the SEC community is simply the best.

Thanks again, SE, and “BEE HAPPY EVERYONE!”

The post Client Spotlight: Kim Starks of VoiceBee appeared first on SocialEngine.

We’ve included a bunch of fixes and some new stuff in SE PHP 4.3 – here’s a consolidated list. You can also check the included changelog for complete details.

New pages added to layout editor:

• Groups > create
• Groups > manage
• Events > create
• Events > manage
• Forums > topic > create
• Videos > manage
• Videos > create
• Polls > create
• Polls > manage
• Music > manage
• Music > create
• Settings > general
• Settings > networks
• Settings > notifications
• Settings > change password
• Settings > privacy
• Settings > delete account
• Classifieds > manage
• Classifieds > create
• Blogs > manage
• Blogs > create
• Albums > upload
• Albums > manage
• Core > search
• Messages > message > view
• Forgot password

Bug fixes:

• Poll options with the highest values don’t display percentages
• Activity items that are shared now include media type
• JSON error fixed on admin’s site-wide statistics page
• Duplicate link title problem (when sharing a SE-generated page on Facebook) now fixed
• “Number of playlists per page” setting in music plugin fixed
• Now possible to see who has RSVP’d to an event after viewing event guests
• Fixed problem with photos persisting in album plugin even after clicking “clear list” or “remove” when uploading photos
• Fixed problem where clicking “approve all selected” box on Member Management page in admin failed to create new activity items for newly approved members
• Fixed problem where pagination links would be broken when two widgets of the same kind were placed on the same page
• Fixed problem where songs within the Music Plugin couldn’t be played on some mobile devices
• Fixed problem where disabling access to music features in member level settings didn’t hide the “add music” link on the compose message form. “add photo” and “add video” also fixed.
• Fixed problem where some IE9 users couldn’t post comments.
• Fixed problem where incorrect menu item was active within Music Plugin.
• Fixed problem where event invite page went blank due to language pack issues.

New stuff and improvements:

• Private message compose form now appears as a pop-up modal, instead of it’s own page.
• Private messages are now searchable.
• “Check all” box added to private message inbox page.
• Photos can now be uploaded to the activity feed via mobile devices.
• Admin’s control panel layout refactored and improved
• Added individual privacy level settings for each profile field on the user’s edit profile page.

Let us know what you guys think. Again, please be careful when upgrading and make a COMPLETE backup – and avoid upgrading on your live site. We’ll be rolling out another SE PHP upgrade in less than 1 month which will include many more improvements, including a major frontend overhaul for the default theme.

The post SocialEngine PHP 4.3 Released appeared first on SocialEngine.

We are excited to interview Robin Outrilla of AppFarma, another great SocialEngine Cloud community that’s primarily focused on applications in the healthcare space that help you stay fit and monitor your overall well-being. 

First things first: Tell us about yourself!

Robin Outrilla: I’m a French guy based in Spain, working as a CRM Expert Consultant specialized in International on-site software implementation for healthcare & life science organizations. For many years, I’ve been closely following new and emerging technologies while trying to learn and work on various communities and other software, even if I have more fun adapting CSS and JavaScript.

What types of projects are you working on?

Robin Outrilla: If I’m not working on AppFarma, I spend a lot of time helping others around me on their own projects.

How long have you been using SocialEngine? What originally drew you to it?

Robin Outrilla: Everything started 3 years ago when a few colleagues of mine and I decided to start a community for a specific niche. I learned a lot discovering this world with SE PHP. When SE Cloud launched back in September, I couldn’t wait to start  Appfarma with it.

You are one of the most active, followed and all around popular members on the SocialEngine community site, why is that?

Robin Outrilla:  I enjoy playing with SE Cloud. Each time I think of something useful for my own website, I share my work with other members and by doing this am able to easily connect and converse with others. I am convinced that by helping other SocialEngine members in my own way, will make other members share their knowledge too.

You recently posted about an idea you had called the “SE Cloud Theme Challenge” (Which was one of the most commented topics on our community site ever!) How can other designers reach out to you and submit their creations?

Robin Outrilla: Yes, after few weeks of working on my own design and exploring other SocialEngine Cloud websites, I wanted to see what others were doing, so I made this challenge.

Here’s the deal: Anyone who wants to can create a layout on their own site, submit their design to the SocialEngine community and post it to the SE Cloud Theme Challenge. Whoever receives the most votes wins!

What’s next for you?

Robin Outrilla: As always I have many ideas for this year. Technologies change and evolve so fast but don’t always meet the needs of all end users. SE Cloud or SE PHP can give you this opportunity. With more time, I hope to make some real strides on AppFarma.

Anything else you would like to add?

Robin Outrilla: I want to thank you for the SocialEngine Cloud platform and all of your support on it. Also, I don’t want to forget my followers and their much appreciated support that makes what I do worthwhile.

The post Client Spotlight: Robin Outrilla appeared first on SocialEngine.

• Various frontend improvements to the default theme
• Adding any missing pages from the admin’s Layout Editor back to the page selector
• Various improvements to private messaging, including a modal-based (popup) message composer, a check-all button in the inbox, and proper message searchability
• Profile field-specific privacy options, so your members can give each field on their profile a unique privacy setting
• Photo-uploading abilities for mobile browsers

We are also fixing these bugs:

• Comment posting is problematic in IE9
• Music files don’t play on all mobile devices
• “Number of playlists” setting in music plugin’s admin section isn’t being applied
• Sharing links from a SocialEngine-generated page on Facebook results in the page title appearing twice
• Display bugs in the admin’s site-wide statistics area
• Group discussions don’t always appear in group activity feeds
• Multi-language issues with the Events plugin
• Pagination breaks if more than 1 video widget is added on a single page

We’ve dropped everything else and the whole team is sprinting to get 4.3 ready by this Friday. There’s a small chance we’ll need to release on Monday, so our support team will be in full force to support anyone that has issues with the update. We know many of you have been waiting for 4.3 for a long time, and we’re sorry that it’s overdue.

Looking ahead to 4.4, we are also thinking about a possible SE PHP API (since it’s been requested quite a few times). For those of you hoping for an API, can you clarify: Do you want the API to be external-facing (e.g. a REST API), or an internal PHP API? Can you tell us what you’re looking to build on the API? This will really help us figure out how we can build the best API for everyone!

The post SocialEngine PHP 4.3 Incoming appeared first on SocialEngine.

Improvements

• Added “Create Account” button to sign-in popup
• Added “Sign In” button to “Create Account” popup
• Added Facebook and Twitter share buttons to inline composer (above activity feed)
• Admin and moderators can now delete comments in activity feeds
• Added post-preview widget (http://www.socialengine.com/support/cloud/theme-doc#widget-post-preview)
• Many, many front-end improvements in the new Clean Theme

Bug Fixes

• Fixed error preventing templates from saving
• Fixed display errors on liking posts and comments
• Fixed error preventing imported tweets from being indexed for search
• Fixed missing avatar and usernames on imported tweets
• Fixed double email notifications on mentions in comments
• Fixed status posts not being displayed in digest emails
• Fixed null description in link posts
• Fixed alignment issue with the close link in the gallery modal

Let us know what you think about the new Clean Theme on SE Cloud. What new features do you want to see?

The post New SE Cloud Features & Patches appeared first on SocialEngine.