April 2010 Affino Updater - Leaps and Consolidation

There is no specific theme to this Affino release apart from the fact that it is 100% customer driven. We’re putting a lot of resources into extending Affino to help our customers meet their business objectives. In many instances these are frequently minor enhancements, but ones which add up to a big leap in usability.

Subscriptions

A good example is all the work we’re doing on the registration and checkout process. We’re making a dozen improvements in how the registration form is presented; reducing the number of steps and hiding unnecessary elements when users buy subscriptions. We’re wrapping it up by making it easier then for users to complete their demographic profile. It means a completely different experience when users purchase memberships.

Custom Style Sheets

A much bigger project is the rolling out of Custom Style Sheets. These address the very significant issue that companies are facing when rolling out custom CSS on Affino. The fact is that it is possible to tailor designs considerably with great effect using custom CSS code in Affino. The problem is that given the nature of Affino’s rapid evolution and release cycle, custom code of any sort adds a significant support overhead.

To square the circle we will be rolling out Custom Style Sheets. These are re-usable CCS templates which can be rolled out throughout Affino. Additionally Affino will support extending Affino Design Styles with CSS. We’ll be adding in more identifiers so that each design cell can have a unique CSS applied will be providing greatly improved access to the Affino generated CSS.

The most significant development will be a new switch on the Application Bar which will allow anyone logged in with Control rights to turn on and off the custom styling. That way it will be possible for site owners to easily try out custom styling and for the Comrz team to identify whether issues are core Affino or related to the custom styling.

Analytics

Plenty of developments going on around the Analytics capabilities of Affino and integrating Affino directly into Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. See here.  

Structure Copy

We’ve covered structure Copy before since we thought it would be in the in the last release. It will definitely be in 5.5.16 since it’s already wrapped. This really is a great breakthrough for creating new sites, portals and micro sites. Being able to copy entire site structures over to a new Zone (site) will be a major productivity boon.

Renewable Pay Pal Payments

We’ll finally be launching renewable PayPal payments. We’ve been wanting to release this for a while now. It means you will be able to take in renewable daily, weekly monthly, whatever payments. Greatly reducing the barrier to subscription purchases.

Team Time

A much requested enhancement is that we roll out the Team Time app we’ve been using at Comrz, and which is an indispensable management tool for us. It has a great In / Out board with daily reporting and time logging. It’s really useful for team members to see who’s in or not, or on holiday etc. It’s also great for the team to see how projects and tasks are moving ahead. Finally it’s an essential management tool with the detailed daily , weekly and monthly reporting functions.

We’re going to roll out a lot of enhancements on this compared to the version we’re currently using so I’m very much looking forward to it.

Fixes and Enhancements

The list is already at over 100 fixes and enhancements for the next release. They cover all aspects of Affino so expect improvements all round. The key area I’ve not covered here is that there are stacks of community enhancements coming. I’ll do a separate post on that later.

There’s still a fair amount to be done on this release so it’s currently scheduled in for late April.