NOTES FOR August 2nd, 2010 RELEASE
Dear Metro Publisher Community,
On August 2nd we will install release v 1.9. As always, you will NOT be required to do anything. These new features will automatically become available to you once the release has been installed.
Here are some highlights of what to expect:
NEW FEATURES:
Even More Social Media On Your Metro Publisher Site:
In the last release we brought you a sprocket for the popular Twitter service. In this release we focus on Facebook (the largest social media site with over 500,000,000 users) with two new sprockets:
Facebook Activity Feed Sprocket: The Activity Feed sprocket displays the most interesting activity taking place on your Metro Publisher site. The activity feed displays stories both when users like content on your site and when users share content from your site back to Facebook. If a user is logged into Facebook, the sprocket contents will be personalized to highlight content from their friends.
Facebook Like Box Sprocket: The Facebook Like Box Sprocket enables your site visitors to read recent posts from your Facebook page directly in the sprocket. It also allows a user see how many people like your Brand and if they are logged into Facebook how many of their friends do as well. They can then directly show their approval to their friends by clicking the like button without leaving your website.
Are you not yet using using Social Media sites like Facebook or Twitter? Check out free Metro Publisher Magazine's Guide to Social Media and Putting the Social in Social Media written by New Mexico Magazine Associate Editor Ashley Biggers to develop a strategy and get some ideas.
Reviews Now Can be Assigned to Sections and Subsections
Previous to this release, Reviews were treated as a separate content type that lived outside of the site hierarchy. But that has changed now. Reviews remain a separate content type, but they can now be assigned to sections and subsections and will inherit the ad slots of the section or subsection to which they belong. If you decide not to assign a review to a section or subsection, they will inherit the default ad slots from the homepage.
NEW! Lead Story
Based on requests from Metro Publisher clients, we have added an optional Lead Story for sections and subsection pages. The Lead Story lives at the top of the section or subsection pages and only appears if an editor has decided to fill it with content. Lead Stories can link to any URL. Use them to highlight events, articles, blog entries or whatever you want.
NEW! Event Export
Would you like to publish the events you and the community submit on your website in print? Would you like to share or resell your event information to a third party? Metro Publisher now offers two export formats for event information that should make any print production or nerd happy: Machine readable HTML or Excel friendly XML.
Enhanced Features for Tags and Topics Pages
In recent releases we added features to let you upload an iconic photo for any tag and corresponding topics page. When you use a strong photo and a good description Topics pages don't just feel like aggregation pages, but take on almost a wikipedia like quality for a given subject. We have further enhanced Topics pages with:
1. Each topics page now has its own RSS feed so your readers can subscribe and be made aware of any content published on your site about a particular topic.
2. Tags now have a new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) content field so that you can make your topics pages more compelling with longer and formatted copy
We Value Your Time: Major Admin Search Overhaul and New Filtering Features.
Based on a proposal we put up on our community and support portal for discussion and the feedback we received we have made some major enhancements to the admin screens for all content types.
We expect these changes will make the daily tasks of editors easier and most importantly save minutes, hours, which ultimately add up to days of time creating content in Metro Publisher.
To begin with, when manually adding feature stories, by default the new stories will appear at the top of the list rather than the bottom. This change was the result of several requests from clients to streamline this repetitive daily task.
Additionally, the search for content within the admin has also been greatly improved and, for example, tries to return results even if words are accidentally misspelled. Metro Publisher will save any searches for 20 minutes which should prevent an editor from having to start over if doing a repetitive task.
As a Software-as-a-Service Metro Publisher is always improving with the goal to reduce the amount of time it takes to author content or provide new services to your readers. We value and depend on your input to make the service better. If you have any ideas how we can further improve Metro Publisher, save you time, and provide services that your readers will love -- please let us know either by submitting a feature suggestion or starting a discussion on the Community and Support site.
Thanks!
The Metro Publisher Team at Vanguardistas
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