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Enhancements in Directory / Pages Plugin

Wednesday September 21, 2011   |   News & Updates , Plugin Upgrades   |   Leave a Comment

At SocialEngineAddOns, it is our goal to develop feature-rich, robust SocialEngine plugins so that you can create thriving online communities and offer excellent experiences to your users. It has been exciting to see the various purposes, and multiple ways in which our "Directory / Pages Plugin" is being used on numerous communities.

Since the initial release, we have developed many useful enhancements in the "Directory / Pages Plugin" based on the suggestions received and our internal discussions:

- Data Importing: You can now import Directory Items / Pages on your community from CSV files and listings from "Listings / Catalog Showcase Plugin". This tool enables you to launch your community with already created Pages. You can then have businesses claiming their Pages using the Claim Pages feature. Importing can also be done anytime, even in a running site to create Pages in bulk.

- Search Form Settings: We understand that the search form is very important to enable users to be able to search for the right directory item / page. Search Form Settings enable you to choose which of the available search and filter fields should be shown in the form and what their sequence should be. We will also soon be releasing more enhancements in search.

- Category and Sub-category based filtering in search form: You can now choose to have filtering over categories and sub-categories in the search form itself via their dropdowns. This would be useful if there are many categories on your site for directory items / pages and you do not want to use the Categories side-widget for filtering.

- Package based settings for Community Ads: The setting for enabling Community Ads for directory items / pages has been moved from Global Settings to Package based settings. You can use this setting to give extra privileges to Pages of special / paid packages by making them free of ads display. Thus, your customers will now have an extra incentive to pay you for their Page as they can then have their Page ad-free. Better monetization!

- Activity Feed enhancements: Activity feeds for directory items / pages on your site can now be generated with Page Photo and Title instead of photo and name of the Page Admin. Also, users can now receive on their homepage the activity feeds of Pages that they have liked. For details, please visit the "Activity Feed" tab in FAQ of admin panel of this plugin.

- New widgets for search and filtering:
    ~ Alphabetic Filtering: This widget displays all the alphabets. Clicking on an alphabet shows the directory items / pages with names starting from that alphabet.
    ~ AJAX Search: This widget enables AJAX search over Page Titles. Search interface is similar to Facebook's search.

- SEO improvements: SEO has been improved for Page profiles and category / sub-category browsing pages for directory items / pages.

- Pages I Like: Users can now easily see the listing of Pages that they have Liked.

- Linking Pages: Page Admins can now link other Pages to their Page. The "Linked Pages" widget on Page Profile shows Pages related to that Page. An example usage of such a widget could be a movie theater page linking itself to Pages of movies being played over there.

- Offers Extension: If you have the "Directory / Pages - Offers Extension", you can now choose to show a Page Offers link in the Pages Navigation Menu linking to a page showing all offers created in directory items / pages on your website so that users can easily browse over them. Additional links for managing offers have also been added to the Page Profile Offers widget.

- Photo Albums Extension: If you have the "Directory / Pages - Photo Albums Extension", Page admins can now easily make any album photo of their directory item / page as the page profile photo by clicking on a link.

- Code optimizations.

- Enhanced FAQ section: To enable you to make the most out of the features of this plugin and help you effectively manage it, we have enhanced the FAQ section by categorizing questions and also adding new FAQs.

- Extensions section in Admin Panel of this plugin: This section enables you to see the latest released versions for Directory / Pages Extensions on your site so that you can keep them updated on your website. Information about other extensions is also available.

We have more exciting things coming up and we hope you enjoy these enhancements!

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