28 May 2010 Zingzam Software Updates

Our latest release went live last week. We've focused on feedback that we received during the Internet World 2010 show. Let us know if there is something you would like to see added. We do our best to quickly turn these around. Fixes and features in this release include, in no particular order:

1. Subscription payments via Paypal. The site administrator can now pay for your monthly service easily. Click on "My Account" and you'll see a new item underneath it labelled Subscriptions. You can pay for your Zingzam service through there.
2. Enabled private communities. The site administrator can choose to make the entire community private. This means that all new registrations will need to be authorised by the site administrator before the user can view any site content. When a community is private, anonymous users cannot view any pages.
3. Enabled private forums. The site administrator can restrict forum viewing and posting to only selected community members. If a user doesn't have access to view the forum then it doesn't even show up in their forum list.
4. Investigated alternative WYSIWYG editors. We decided to keep TinyMCE because it is the most usable.
5. Added better file and image browsers to TinyMCE. Upload and selection of uploaded files is much easier and more usable.
6. Allowed site administrators to change the home page to wiki home, forums, blog home or any page in the system
7. Allowed site administrators to re-order and add to the main navigation links
8. Added a data export function.  The site administrator can now download a current database dump or a compressed tar file with all of the image uploads and attachments for your site.
9. Added a page in "Create Content" that shows your draft content. Previously these were only accessible through the dashboard in the new content widget. They weren't supposed to be there so when we fixed that we created this new page so you could find your draft content again.
10. Fixed a situation where search indexes weren't being created properly.
11. Reduce number of CSS files included. This fixes some IE problems and should improve performance for everyone.

By the way, we've purposefully not created version numbers for our software. We find it annoying when you're using a web site and they proudly inform you that they've just released version 3.2 of their site. I don't care and I don't want to know. It's useful to expose version numbers when there are different versions of the software that could be in use so you can track bugs or know what features your particular version supports. We do have version numbers internally but publicly there's only one version of Zingzam available so we will both always know that you're using that one! Can anybody think of a reason why we should state version numbers publicly other than making it easier for me to make a title for this blog post?