XChange - The CollectiveX Blog

You've Got Photo Galleries

Posted by Clarence Wooten Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:05:00 GMT

Theeeere here! We’ve just added photo galleries to the ‘Files & Media’ section of your group. You are now able to create photo galleries and upload sets of photos. You can even set permissions so that other group members can add to your gallery. This is very useful when sharing photos from events where multiple group members take photos. This way, everyone can contribute to the gallery.

Features

Upload multiple photos at a time; add descriptions and captions; view photos as small (75×75) thumbnails or larger (200×200) thumbnails.

Screen shot of small thumbnail view:

More features

Also view photos in browse or slideshow modes. Browse mode enables group members to view photos individually and add comments to any photo in the gallery. Slideshow mode produces a automated slideshow. While in slideshow mode, you can pause or use the photo strip to jump ahead in the slideshow.

Screen shot of slideshow mode:

Enjoy, but stay tuned, there is more to come!

In the near future expect support for aggregating photos from external photo sites and much more! Also, upgrade your group’s storage capacity to 3GB and take full advantage of this great new feature.

Discussions Revamped!

Posted by Clarence Wooten Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:11:00 GMT

Understanding that discussions are central to building community, we have finally given the discussion forums the attention that they deserve.

The main forums page

We reworked the display to include a search options in the sidebar as well as a list of the most recent discussion posts including the most recent discussion posts within topics in which you’re participating.

Additionally, when creating new forums, we now enable group managers to upload an icon to further reinforce the purpose of the forum.

Screen grab below:

The topics list page

We’ve improved the topics list page to include information about the starter of the topic; the number of posts to the topic; and the number times the topic was viewed.

For group managers, we enable you to highlight any discussion topic that you feel is important. Highlighting discussions does the following:

  1. Puts the discussion topic on the group’s summary page for increased visibility; and
  2. Makes the discussion topic “sticky” so that it remains at the top of the of the topics list for that forum.

Discussion topics can also be locked so that no further posts can be added

The discussion topic page

Last but not least, we are most excited by the changes and enhancements that we’ve made to the individual discussion page. We redesigned its look-and-feel to provide more information including the ability to send private messages to participants; identify group managers from members; subscribe to the topic via email or RSS; and sort by oldest or newest posts. We also continue support HTML within discussion posts for embedding YouTube videos, images, even widgets.

We feel that this is a great start, but we’re not done yet, so expect many more improvements to come.

Create a new Groupsite and see for yourself—It’s free!