Affino 6.0.4 Release

This is a major Affino release with hundreds of great new features and updates. There are four transforming aspects of this release: Deep Social Integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; major performance improvements; extensive evolution for real-world use cases; and the reworked Affino Media Libraries.

 

We have transformed what it is to have an Affino User Account so that Affino users can now be authenticated by the three leading social networks, which allows for seamless integration between Affino and the networks. It means that users’ online identities can be used to populate and update their Affino profiles.

 

Many Affino sites are growing rapidly and Affino has been optimised to be up to 800% more efficient in real-world scenarios with this release. Targeted optimisation and dozens of scalability fixes make Affino 6.0.4 far more robust than any previous Affino release.

 

Other key enhancements are the updated Forums, which have been greatly refined in this release to be more user centric, and a greatly improved Application Bar which has a new Commerce panel and improved usability and options on the other panels.

 

Affino is now far more capable of real-world commercial, media and community scenarios with hundreds of enhancements and fixes for real-world user cases. We look forward to seeing Affino communities accelerate their development and for all Affino sites to become more engaging and entertaining.

 

Upgrade Guidance

 

It is essential that you do not update to Affino 6.0.4 without confirming with Comrz support or your account manager beforehand.

 

This is a major Affino release, and as such you should check with the Comrz team to ensure that it is safe to update your site. This roll-out will be an incremental one with sites under development updating first, followed by the social and promotional sites, and finally transactional sites.

 

It is recommended that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update and Skin Update.

 

Key Enhancements

 

Deep Social Integration

In the age where the majority of users already have their identities on the leading social portals it is essential that Affino user accounts can be tied seamlessly into the social fabric of the web, and in this release we’ve done just that.

 

Affino now has multiple user account types and connects with the key social and commercial communities. Previously it was only possible to have full Affino accounts where the email address was the key identifier, now Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn accounts are just as valid.

 

By embracing social user accounts we enable much deeper integration into the social platforms in an age where increasingly communication is moving away from email and into newsfeeds and micro-blogs.

 

Affino also introduces powerful mechanisms which encourage users to fill out their profiles, the key ones being Conversion Events and the new Completion Profile (see below). These help drive deeper user engagement and help members to rise up the customer ladder.

 

LinkedIn Integration

Affino now integrates with LinkedIn for the first time. Users can now populate almost their entire Affino profile from LinkedIn including all professional and educational details available in LinkedIn. Users can also use LinkedIn for authentication, micro-blogging, promoting their blog posts.

Register via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Affino registration has been rewritten from the ground up to allow users to register via their Facebook / Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. This pre-populates their registration details as far as Affino is able to get the information from the social connector and it also joins their Affino account with the social platform.

The key benefits are that users have some or indeed most of their registration details pre-filled. Their profiles are also connected directly to the sites so that they can seamlessly share content.

 

Login / Authentication with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Affino users can now be authenticated by the leading social networks; this means that with just two clicks users can become members, no need to register. It means that communities can grow much faster and users can participate in discussions more easily.

This is also an essential milestone for Affino Facebook apps since it means that Affino can be used to drive Facebook apps for the first time.

 

Update Profile with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn info

Users can now update their profile information by pulling in the latest details from their social profiles. Two clicks will join accounts and pull in the latest details.

A great usage case scenario is that you can import a 10,000 member newsletter list, send out an invite to join the community, users can then simply click to join and all their profiles will be populated with profile details, status updates and avatars.

 

Enhanced Customer Ladder

We’ve added lots of smarts to the Customer Ladder in the form of evolved Conversion Events and improved analytics. You can now graph any activity, e.g. the number of new connections being made between your users and the leading social networks.

You can also now create Conversion Events based around the size of member’s networks, e.g. a person registers and they have 500,000 Twitter followers then it can trigger an event which could send a special invite and alert the marketing team.

As a whole the Customer Ladder has become a great deal more capable in this release.

 

Content Claiming

As of Affino 6.0 users have been able to do Guest comments by entering in their email address, equally users can be imported into mailing lists. Affino now has a ‘claim process’ in place whereby users can claim ownership of their comments when they register or update their profiles with their email address.

 

Up to 800% Performance Gains

Affino has a new caching engine which intelligently caches up to 10,000 pages for each site. These pages are the anonymous views for guest users and Bots. Affino will also pre-cache the 20 most popular pages on any site at any time so that users get instant delivery of those pages. This frees up computational resources massively and means that in real-world testing average page speeds have improved by up to 800%.

 

The continuous pre-caching of pages has the added benefit that little-used sites will be much more responsive as they don’t have to be loaded into the production cache, and are instead served in a matter of milliseconds.

 

There has been considerable targeted optimisation, whereby the Comrz team has analysed and optimised many of the elements in Affino which required the highest computational resources and in many cases these have completely removed or been optimised so they take up 20% or less of the resources they did previously.

 

Dozens of scaling errors have been fixed in this release which further improve performance by removing computational stress events, and make certain functions available on very large Affino sites. The rapid growth and growing traffic volumes on Affino sites mean Affino has to be continuously redesigned to scale to support ever larger sites.

 

The net effect of all these changes will be much faster Affino sites, with greatly reduced computational requirements, and greatly improved scalability. It is hard to stress just how significant these gains are, but they will be very clear on your sites.

Media Library v3

The Media Library has been transformed in this release so that we now have optimised the experience on both the Control and Display sides. This makes for much more effective media management and transforms the ability to create engaging customer-facing Media Libraries.

 

Many elements have been completely re-styled and made more contemporary.

 

Media Management

The Media Centre has been greatly refined to provide a much more usable experience for finding and managing media.

 

Media Templating

It is now possible to create custom interfaces for media libraries for the first time. It provides much more flexibility to media sites and allows for more effective monetization of media.

 

New Media Presentations

Two new media listings have been introduced: it is now possible to select any media section and turn it into a video wall; it is also possible to transform the section layout into a video listing.

 

CSV File Support

Affino now supports CSV files as an official Media Library file format. This is especially important as these are used in most Affino imports and exports.

 

Forums v6

The forums have had dozens of updates in this release which are aimed at making them more social, engaging and simpler to use. A key change has been embracing Avatars throughout so that it is much easier now to see at-a-glance who’s participating in discussions.

 

Simple things like: tracking when threads were posted; how many discussions are going on; who’s moderating are all much easier to spot. All the screens have been refined, whether it is the thread listing, search, and entry forms or thread details. There is also a new paging format for more effective browsing of Threads.

 

Affino ‘bug’ forums can now be created with the advent of new Forum options which provide greater flexibility for how they can be used. It is also possible to have a formal ‘Reference URL’ field in each post.

 

Forum Thread Tags

It is now possible to tag Forum Threads; this allows one-click searches across a forum for all threads with the same tags.

 

Application Bar v2

The Application Bar has had some key updates in this release, the main one being the new eCommerce panel which gives great insight into the commercial aspects of each webpage. It is now possible to see all the essential information at a glance which was previously only possible through deep browsing of settings and attributes.

 

The Design Panel has had a major upgrade and now shows much more relevant information and gives you access to all key design attributes for each page. It also allows you to update all skins from a single click. The Text Item panel and Page Dashboard have also been further refined.

 

The net result is that you now have much better intelligence right on the page, which means faster diagnosis and actions.

 

Profile Completion DE and Profile

Users will now be able to see at any stage how complete their profile is, and what the best action is for them to complete their profile further. This encourages users to fill out their details which in turn make for better community and improved targeting and analytics. This smart element is shown on members profiles and can be placed anywhere as a Design Element.

 

Other Enhancements

 

Accounts – greatly improved usability when managing accounts; improved styling and new ability to set Parent Accounts

 

Article Highlights DE v1 – new Design Element which can be used alongside any standard content listing to show Tags, Recent Articles, Latest Comments and Popular Articles. This replaces the previous Tag Cloud Design Element.

 

Artworks – improved and optimised layout of Artworks Media Library presentation

 

Blog Archive DE v3 – greatly improved Blog Archive Design Element which now goes way beyond simply showing previous Blog posts; now also shows Popular Blog posts, latest comments and latest comments on Blog posts in a nice tabbed interface; it also works for browsing Blogs at all levels including the main Blogs page

 

Checkout – the checkout pages now have thumbnails for the items

 

Comments and Ratings – no longer highlight when there are 0 comments on items, instead users are encouraged to comment; major optimisation of comment posting so that it now happens instantaneously

 

Community Manager – new External Info panel available for contact which shows all key information for connected users; main user panel also highlights the number of followers each member has, both on-site and with any connected social network

 

Conferences – Conferences have now been entirely removed from Affino. In the future we will be using a combination of Groups and the Affino Messenger to replicate the functionality offered by Conferences

 

Conversion Events – Conversion Event can now be triggered when a user reads a newsletter message; Conversion Event can now be triggered when a user exceeds a given number of followers, these are a total of all their followers both on-site and on their connected social networks

 

Design Centre – new larger previews of Design Objects and Skins for easier browsing; completely new Snapshot engine for greatly optimised image processing

 

Detailed Media Section DE – new Artworks layout which allows the framed presentation of media with a pop-up browser for a more detailed view

 

Detailed Standard Section DE – improved listing formatting

 

Dynamic Forms – improved search interface for Dynamic Messages from Dynamic Forms, now works in a more intuitive manner

 

Encrypted Passwords – all passwords in Affino are now encrypted. This means that all interfaces for editing passwords and the password reminder notifications have been updated and in effect modernised. This means greater security but also more care required by site owners

 

Google Base Integration – custom Google Base tracking code added to inbound URLs for 3^rd party tracking and analysis

 

Incoming Feeds – optimised the default incoming feed settings so as to greatly improve and optimise incoming feed content

 

New News Article Templates – Affino now has dedicated News Article detail and listing templates; these allow greatly improved presentation of news articles

 

Online Forms – improved form layout

 

Ooyala Integration v2 – Affino now handles 3^rd party Ooyala embeds, extracting and generating the relevant details and preview images

 

Order Processing – now track payment gateway status codes in orders when they have been returned by payment gateways. This greatly improves ecommerce managers’ ability to identify where their checkout process / orders are failing

 

Pending Users – it is now possible to instantly assign users to accounts from the Pending Users listing. If an account exists then users can be instantly assigned to the account; if it doesn’t then the account is automatically created and the user assigned to it

 

Public Profiles – restructured Main Tab to show the members’ content on the left and profile on the right; this will be further refined in future releases to present members’ newsfeeds on the left; new Profile Completion page element highlights how far you’ve gone to completing your profile; new Comments page element shows your latest comments; members can now enter their Twitter ID as a distinct element

 

Redirects – we’ve completely rewritten Redirects in Affino. They now work as 301 SEO Redirects so that when setting up a new site it is possible to simply import a list of the old ranking pages and repoint them to the new locations. This is a major enhancement for SEO delivery

 

Related Accessories – it is now possible to relate accessories as well as products, this improves the retail experience and increases conversion rates

 

Related Items – new vertical layout option for related media to improve presentation when using narrow right-hand column

 

Shopping Basket – new styling options and improved formatting for pop-up shopping basket

 

SoundCloud Integration v2 – greatly enhanced SoundCloud integration so that it is now possible to use SoundCloud files in the MP3 player. Members can now also upload SoundCloud files on their profile pages.

 

Spam Prevention – added hidden field to the newsletter sign-up to further prevent spam account creation on Affino now that Affino has Newsletter Accounts

 

Stand Alone MP3 Player DE – new ‘Mini Player’ mode to include small audio player in page designs

 

Standard Sections – improved the usability of Standard Sections by changing defaults to better map today’s norms

 

Tagging – tagging is now faster and more intuitive as users can simply click – tag – and enter to submit (two less steps)

 

Users – it is now possible to edit all user attributes from the main user editing screen

 

Video / MP3 Players – it is now possible to style the Buy Button on the media players to improve the visibility and ease purchasing of media items

 

Video Promotion Panel – new smart promotion panel which can promote related products and accessories when watching a video, e.g. if a viewer is watching a video on surfing they may be shown a surfboard and other surf gear in a panel below the video player. The panel is smart in that it can be set to only promote associated products once the video has been purchased.

 

VoicePay Integration – Affino now integrates with the VoicePay payment gateway

 

Fixes

 

Articles – fixed issue which occurred when copying an article and then changing the section

 

Blog Highlights DE – now displays active links in the correct colour

 

Browse Menu DE – fixed the search so that it now displays the full results set reliably

 

Campaigns – fixed the issue whereby it was not possible to re-use Campaign Placement areas in a Design Object, i.e. move them; resolved issues which were causing Campaign Analytics to error out

 

Carousel DE – numerous formatting improvements which more gracefully handle different usage scenarios

 

Catalogue Item Attributes – major fixes done, now much more robust when handling complex scenarios; works reliably for inventory variations; works reliably for tick-box options

 

Catalogue Item Export – fixed issues which were causing the export to error out

 

Catalogue Item Import – numerous fixes to improve the integrity of catalogue imports

 

Channels – fixed issue with editing Group channels; resolved error when applying a Campaign Theme to a channel

 

Checkout – purchase notification now always send out the County / Region details, previously text entries were not being sent out; fixed issue which caused shipping not to update when changing addresses in Chrome; fixed issues which caused multi-page checkouts to error out; added new attribute so that it is possible to set a title to the Guidance Panel; fixed formatting on ‘delivery not required’ message

 

Comment and Rating Profile – fixed errors with creating and copying C & R Profiles

 

Comments and Ratings – fixed issue whereby some users were unable to post comments; editing comments now also works reliably; correct comment creator ID now being shown on notification emails; fixed issues with Comment and Rating Section highlights so they now only appear as selected and use the Design Menu when selected

 

Community Manager – fixed issue with broken thumbnails on analysis listings

 

Community Tools DE – when empty it no longer displays a menu on the screen, i.e. is now hidden

 

Competitions – fixed handling of text answers in competitions; fixed error with listing competitions

 

Contacts – contacts can now be edited reliably again

 

Content – fixed issue with deleting final content item from a Channel

 

Conversion Events – registration, downloads and login Conversion events now working reliably

 

Coupon Import – fixed issues with importing Coupons; now works reliably

 

Cover Flow DE – fixed numerous layout issues so that covers are displayed better. In effect Cover Flows are now ready for deployment in media sites

 

Customer Ladder Analytics – New Prospects panel now accurately showing new prospects

 

Dailymotion Integration – now works reliably for all videos

 

Dashboard – fixed issues with displaying details on the Top Articles widget; now displays the total number of users reliably

 

Design Centre – Affino now gracefully handles previews of Design Objects and Skins where elements have been deleted from the Affino instance, no longer errors out; resolved eBay Profile error which was causing some Design Object previews to error out; Object Designer now allows you to pull in Design Objects from the right-hand menu

 

Design Styles – fixed issues which were preventing Design Styles from being copied; improved layout to always show buttons appropriately when listing in Control Centre

 

Detailed Media Section DE – now displaying artist under Artwork information

 

Discounts – fixed issue which meant it was not possible to assign catalogue items to a discount where there were too many catalogue items

 

Dynamic Forms – now displaying conditional fields reliably; fixed issues which prevented forms from being added, edited or copied; notification emails now send reliably again

 

eCommerce – fixed issue where error was being thrown when users are viewing Products in certain scenarios; now allow 500 items to be listed out on the Order Processing screen; include the order Comments in the order confirmation email and when viewing orders in Order Processing

 

eTest– fixed issues with analysis erroring out; fixed issues when creating eTest questions; fixed issue when viewing eTest results

 

Events – no longer taken to the 404 page when adding a Location to an Event

 

Facebook Integration – all known Facebook Integration issues resolved

 

Friend Requests – notification formatting issues resolved

 

Google Base Integration – fixed issues which were preventing all catalogue items from being promoted to Google Base; optimised the process extensively; improved handling of removing entire product catalogues from Google Base; now encode all Access Tokens to prevent character errors; Manufacturer Code now supersedes Catalogue Item code; optimised catalogue item deletion when integrated with Google Base; Google Base integration now takes into account the Channel filter

 

Google Sitemaps – resolved time zone issues which were causing errors with Google Webmaster Tools

 

Groups – fixed issue which was causing the group listing to error out in certain scenarios

 

Jobs – back button now works when users go from viewing a job back to the listing

 

Keyword Manager – auto-tagging of content now working reliably

 

Latest Articles DE – now displays active links in the correct colour

 

Live Editor – now prevent articles from being posted when they’re missing formatted titles; screen names now being auto-populated when using formatted titles

 

Logins – auto logins now being tracked reliably; numerous login re-direct issues fixed

 

Main Menu – fixed issue with creating CSS Main Menus; fixed issue with some elements of the CSS Main Menu were not being handled under SSL; fixed Menu Path issue with the Flex Accordion menu

 

Media – Zip files can now be embedded in articles and forum posts

 

Media Editor – fixed numerous issues caused by new Adobe Flash 10.x security restrictions; videos now playing reliably

 

Media Uploads – resolved issue which was causing media uploads to fail on sites with high media volumes; fixed issue with uploading MP3 files to albums; fixed issue for some accounts when uploading media to blogs

 

Member Listing – optimised some sort options which were causing the listing to time out; fixed issue which was causing members listing to error out for specific user cases

 

Message Boards – can now be viewed by Guest users again

 

MP3 Player – mini MP3 player tracker now aligns properly and resets itself to the beginning when the track is complete

 

My Account – fixed issues with My Account screen and with the print views which were specific to certain scenarios

 

My Messages – it is now possible to look up multiple users when sending messages; replying to messages now also works reliably and displays the full original title; fixed issues when creating messages; My Message attachments now display reliably for all users

 

Newsletters – duplicate newsletter messages no longer sent when Affino load-balanced across multiple servers; updated the Text DE to reduce spacing in newsletter messages, now looks as intended; fixed domain issue which was blocking newsletter messages from being sent out

 

Online Forms – fixed character set issues with submitting online forms

 

Ooyala Integration – Ooyala embeds now working in personal media

 

Page Dashboard – now works for all timeframes

 

Payment Methods – fixed issue with editing Payment Methods

 

PayPal Integration – numerous PayPal integration enhancements and fixes to resolve rounding issues and errors

 

Personalisation Profile – now accepts line breaks in the invite acceptance notification email

 

Polls – it is now possible to have multiple Poll DE’s on the same page and have them working reliably; pending users are no longer able to vote in restricted polls

 

Sections – can now be copied reliably again

 

Shopping Basket – zero quantity items are removed from the shopping basket; text alignment now works reliably

 

Site Analysis – numerous optimisations to fix errors when viewing stats on whole site performance; also fixed sorting issues

 

Site Settings – added new validation checks on fields to prevent them erroring out; expanded some of the site information fields to handle more information

 

SlideShare Integration – fixed issues with missing titles and information on SlideShare embeds following API / embed code changes

 

Smart Article DE – the header image now also has a clickable link

 

Smart Image & Text DE– fixed alignment issues where some items were out of alignment by 1 pixel when using Dynamic Menus; Focus States now working reliably when using sub-level navigation

 

Social Campaigns – can now target members irrespective of gender

 

SoundCloud Integration – fixed issues with handling SoundCloud embeds following changes in SoundCloud API

 

Structure Copy – fixed errors which caused Structure Copy to fail in specific scenarios

 

Subscriptions – fixed issues with recurring automated billing

 

Team Time – improved styling as numerous styling issues resolved for different usage scenarios

 

To Do Lists – now working for Mac OSX and no longer include Control Centre menus

 

User Import – optimised to handle much larger user imports by running a scheduled task (rather than simply attempting to import 1,000s of users in one go; much more scalable

 

User Thumbnails – fixed issue in numerous locations whereby some user thumbnails were appearing much larger than normal

 

Video Carousel DE – fixed issues which were causing it to error out and not display videos; also now enforce the maximum items limit; new High Def mode when viewing YouTube and Dailymotion videos full-screen

 

Video Player – now gracefully handles missing preview videos and images; improved access to the buy buttons; sidebar menu can now be closed reliably; users can now click on and close ads on YouTube and Dailymotion videos; greatly improved Playlist presentation; live streams can now be paused and the live streaming bar is now working reliably

 

Vimeo Integration – updated handling of Vimeo embed codes to be compatible with latest Vimeo API

 

Zone – fixed error caused when copying a Zone