May 2010 Affino Updater - Stylin'

Affino 5.5.16 has been a great success. Virtually all sites have already been updated to the latest release and the feedback has been very positive all round. The release has been incredibly solid for such a major update but a small number of bugs were introduced late in the release process. We have been very quick to respond to any issue which has arisen and have released Affino 5.5.16.8 which resolves all the reported issues to-date. If you are not on the latest version of the new release then we strongly recommend you run the Affino Updater to bring your sites up-to-date. There may be one final 5.5.16 release next week.

A record number of Affino sites is being rolled out at the moment (we’ve been training new companies every day for weeks), and the the past couple of weeks’ Affino development has been primarily focused on us on styling and usability enhancements to make all the new sites look good. It means that Affino sites will be even better looking (check out the new form buttons) following the next release.

Next week sees the development team move on to the more significant projects. These will be a combination of premium community features, such as user generated ads, and core ecommerce updates. The integration team will be working on direct integration with Google Base / Products, followed by Amazon. We will also be developing localised recommendations which will be one of a host of recommendations updates.

The most complex project will be the enhanced internationalisation of Affino, with multi-lingual articles, media and catalogue items. There’s still a fair amount of research, specifications and development to be done here.

Following the great work done on Structure Copy in the last release, which allows the very simple cloning of site structures when rolling out new sites, we’re looking to make significant improvements in how content is re-used across multiple sites. This will come in two forms: improved publishing automation and making it easy to have multiple language variations of the same item. When combined, the best-fit content will be displayed across all sites.

Of course there will be another one to two hundred other improvements as well (we’re already at 72).