January 2010 Affino Updater - Details, Details

We’re on course to deliver the latest Affino release next week. It’s been the longest release cycle (i.e. two months) since we started Comrz, thanks to the Christmas break. Also thanks to the fact that there are a number of significant breakthroughs coming in the 5.5.14 release. Here’s a quick heads-up (there will of course be a lot more detail in the release notes).

Details

A lot of what we’ve been doing over the past couple of months is focusing on the details. In fact this week, that’s pretty much all we’ve been doing. So far we’re up to 142 enhancements and fixes in this release as well as a dozen larger projects. We’ve shifted most of the media updates to the following release so that we can focus on customer specific enhancements.

We’ve had more daily traffic on our support forums than we were having each week last year, and it’s clear that a lot of work is being done on Affino sites right now. What’s great is that a lot of the newer functionality in Affino is being used, and as a result we’re fixing and refining. The net result is that a lot of the rough edges have been polished up in this release.

eCommerce

There are a lot of subtle and more significant enhancements coming on the eCommerce side. Big projects include the new eCommerce API; new licence store service and security API; re-worked Wish Lists (3rd release in a row); new product templates; and significantly refined My Store. There’s also numerous of refinements throughout the entire eCommerce experience which add up to higher conversions with minimal additional effort.

New Design Elements

We’re releasing a couple of new Design Elements: Photo Stack and Highlight Scroller which are more funky ways of showcasing new content than we’ve had previously. The Video Player also gets a major upgrade, especially the video store mode.

The biggest changes though are probably with the key content highlights e.g. Detailed Standard Section and Blog Highlights. These have been refined significantly and are now much easier to use than before, e.g. no need to build a custom menu to point to the section from the menu title.

We’ve also resurrected a couple of the design elements which had fallen into disuse. The Blog Archive Design Element now works nicely and is essential for any blog skin. More significantly we’ve updated the Stunt Design Element to become a key tool for supporting new users and launching new functionality on a website. It makes it possible to target different users with key content which will enhance their experience. An example is for beginner guides, which can be closed when users have familiarised themselves. Stunts can also be used for campaigns and big news messages that you want to promote.

Incoming Feeds

Possibly the biggest impact in this release is the evolution of Affino as a content hub. We’ve significantly improved incoming feeds with custom handlers for incoming YouTube and Twitter feeds. The key enhancements revolve around our efforts to reduce duplicates, since every interesting thing gets re-tweeted a hundred times and every press release gets submitted through a dozen press release services.

We’ve extended the duplicate checks right through to the media included in the incoming feeds so that content with the same media, e.g. Twitter thumbnail, is reused rather than re-imported. We’ve also introduced ’excluded keywords’ whereby off-topic content (or different languages) can be easily excluded. The other area which has been greatly improved is the automated tagging of incoming content, which is both indexed automatically against the assigned taxonomy, and it can also be tagged manually.

Twitter Integration / Social Campaigns

The other side of the content equation is improving the outbound connections, and to that end we’ve rolled out the first stage of our social media integration. It is now very simple for users to connect their accounts with Twitter which will keep their Affino and Twitter accounts in sync with two way synchronisation. Users’ Blogs are also promoted directly to Twitter.

We’re also rolled out Bit.ly integration so that URLs can be automatically shortened bot with a Site-based Bit.ly account, and with the users’ own accounts. This release will also see the introduction of Social Campaigns v1. It means that Affino will be able to seamlessly promote any standard content, including articles, events, products, news, reviews, jobs etc. on Twitter. This is a big deal and the start of what will become a major aspect of Affino and a key Social Commerce driver.

Media

Although we’ve had to push back most of the media projects to the next release, we’ve rolled out a couple of key new developments. The first one helps with media uploads, and means that it is possible for users to upload a single Zip file which can contain dozens of media items. This greatly simplifies bulk uploading for some users and works well through firewalls and within tightly secured intranet environments.

We’re also rolling out Artist and Artworks, which means that Affino will be great at setting up simple Art Gallery sites.

Live Design

Last but not least is the roll out of Live Design. It’s currently undergoing extensive QA, but I can tell you this is a killer productivity boost for anyone working on the design side. It’s a real pleasure to be able to simply click on any cell on the page and check and update the properties and content. 

Refactoring

For the more technically inclined, we’ve also done quite a lot of work behind the scenes to improve the Affino code base. We have had a continuous campaign of code quality improvement since we took over Affino, and this release sees numerous significant enhancements which will make Affino more stable and easier to develop on. We’ve also re-written a number of components from the ground-up. Although there is no visible effect in these improvements, there is a performance boost which comes from refining so many components and it all adds up.