Recent updates and developments, January 2011

A status update of recent developments ...

Printer friendly pages

We have recently implemented printer friendly pages. Astute users may have already noticed the printer icon appearing at the top right of a story. Currently, printer friendly pages are only for story and image gallery pages (as full text), as we feel this will cover most the majority of users' needs. We may consider making printer friendly pages configurable some time in the future.

We were also planning to add some sort of 'Email to a friend' button, but that was relegated to a lower priority in preference to other features. We will return to do this in the near future.

Service links

Service links are buttons and icons to things like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc., that appear at the bottom of stories. You can see it in action on the ProsePoint Express demo site. Service links are only for stories and image gallery pages (as full text).

By default (and for newly created sites), service links are not enabled. If you'd like to enable service links for your ProsePoint Express site, please visit Settings » Service Links in the Control Menu for your site, and select the services to link to.

Partial ad server

We have created a skeleton of a native ad server, but it is not yet quite complete. Presently, the ad server only shows individual ads staticly. We will be adding ad rotation and (hopefully in this iteration) click tracking next.

Actually, this ad server has been around for a while, but it isn't quite ready yet so we only enabled it for selected sites as a beta feature.

Please be patient with us whilst we complete the ad server (and then write the corresponding documentation).

Disqus

We have just implemented integration with Disqus, a third party online service for website comments.

We considered writing our own comments system, but it would have taken a large chunk of time and resources that might be better spent elsewhere than attempting to recreate a service that's already adequate for most sites.

We may still write a native commenting system for ProsePoint Express in the future (and then users can choose which system they wish to use), but that will be some time away.

To enable Disqus, visit Plugins in the Control Menu.

Changes in circumstances

We adjust our development priorities according to user feedback and merit. These recent changes have been the direct result of requests by existing users. We will continue to adjust our to-do list depending on circumstances. If there is something you need for your ProsePoint Express site which isn't yet available, please drop us a line.

Thank you.