­­In the last release, we launched Media Experience. In this release, we have made enhancements to some of our new Media Experience features to provide more ways for members to discover images. These enhancements include full-screen viewing mode for the lightbox, the ability to filter the masonry message view by label, and support for floated accepted solutions in the masonry view.

In addition, we have made several SEO-related improvements to make it easy for people to find content in your community when making Internet searches, thereby driving more organic search traffic to your site.

Finally, we now enable admins to increase the number of bookmarks to display on each page of the My Bookmarks page.

New Features

• Media Experience enhancements
• SEO improvements
  • Moved “Title tag in page header” Admin setting
  • Support for manually overriding a TKB article’s canonical URL
  • New SEO-specific Title and Description fields for blog and TKB articles
• API changes
• Support for Twitter cards
• Ability to increase the number of bookmarks to display on the My Bookmarks page
• Changes to Minutes to First Reply and Minutes to First Comment metrics in LSI
• Support for advanced search in Private Messages
• Support for the Microsoft Edge browser
• Updates to the message editor

Media Experience enhancements

In the 15.10 Release, we launched the new Media Experience (Media v4) feature suite. We have made the following improvements:

• Full Screen mode for Lightbox: We have added support for full-screen display mode for the new lightbox. Just click the full-screen button in the top-right corner:
  
  In full-screen mode, you see only the image and caption (if there is one):
  
  Tip: You can use the Command-F shortcut to enter/exit full screen mode.
• Masonry view Label filter: Boards using the new masonry view can now be filtered by labels.
• Masonry view now supports floated solutions: Accepted solutions now “float” to the top of the masonry view when the Community Admin > Features >Accepted Solutions > Float Accepted Solutions on the top of threads setting is enabled. Learn more about floating accepted solutions. Floated solutions, like all floated items, have a slightly different presentation in the masonry message list. Floated items have a thicker boarder at the top of the post, shown here:
  

 

Moved “Title tag in page header” Admin setting

In the 15.9 Release, we introduced a new setting to set the text for the Title tag in the Page header of a community page. With this setting, Admins can make it easier for search engines to find and categorize community pages by defining unique PAGE TITLE tags in the header of each page/URL.

To take full advantage of this tag (based on how search engines, like Google, process and display search results), title tags are limited to 60 characters. We highly recommend you make the tags for each node unique and include your brand name in the title.

Note: If you do not enter a value in this field, Lithium creates one using the node name and brand name (for example, “Node title – Brand name”).

Previously, this node-scoped setting was available in Community Admin > System > SEO. To make it easier to define and edit your SEO content in one place, we have moved this setting to the properties page for the specific node, located under Admin > Community Structure.

 

To set/edit the Title tag for the Page header for a forum (for example):

1. Go to Admin > Community Structure.
2. Open folders in the structure to go to the specific category or node you want.
3. Hover over the row and click Edit Properties😐
   
4. Enter the text (up to 60 characters) you want in the Text for the Title tag in Page Header
   
5. Click Save. 

Support for manually overriding a TKB article’s canonical URL

We have added the ability for permissioned users to manually override the canonical URL for individual TKB articles. This capability is provided with the Create, edit, publish, and manage articles permission and is granted to Admins and Moderators by default. You can use canonical (or “preferred”) URLs to prevent duplicate content issues and improve SEO when the same content is accessed through multiple URLs.

Learn more about using canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals.

To edit the canonical URL for a TKB article:

1. Sign in to the community as an Admin or Moderator (or user with the Create, edit, publish, and manage articles permission).
2. Go to a TKB article and click Edit Article.
3. Edit the URL in the Canonical URL field:
   
4. Click Post.

Note: If the TKB article is later moved to a different board, these canonical values are carried with the article and are not changed.

New SEO-specific Title and Description fields for blog and TKB articles

Sometimes, authors don’t provide the most informative or descriptive titles for their blog and TKB articles. As a result, search engines might overlook these poorly titled (for search purposes) articles. Since it’s generally recommended that Admins and Moderators do not edit author’s posts, we have added the ability for admins and moderators to provide additional SEO-friendly titles and descriptions for specific articles.

Users who are granted the Manage any article permission (for blogs) or the Create, edit, publish, and manage articles permission (for TKBs) can enter article-specific SEO Titles and Descriptions.

Note: By default, these fields use the text the author entered in the Subject field (for SEO Title) and Body field (for SEO Description).

To enter an SEO-friendly title and description for an article:

1. Sign in to the community as an Admin or Moderator with the appropriate permissions.
2. Go to the article you want and click Edit.
3. In the SEO Title and SEO Description fields, enter your SEO-friendly text.
   

4. Click Post.

Implementation note: These SEO-related fields are available by default. However, if you have modified your res/forms/MessageEditor.form.xml file, you need to add some code to make these fields display.

 

To add the Canonical URL, SEO Title, and SEO Description fields in the Message Editor, edit res/forms/MessageEditor.form.xml and add the following:

 

<field-group id="Metadata">

                        <field id="canonicalUrl"  />

                </field-group>

                <field-group id="Title">

                        <field id="messageSeoTitle"  />

                </field-group>

                <field-group id="Description">

                        <field id="messageSeoDescription"  />

                </field-group>

API changes

New Community API v2 Resources

We’ve added the following Community API v2 resources:

• Metric –metrics from Community Admin
• Notification_Feed – a user’s notification feed
• Inbox_Note – a private message in a user’s inbox
• Outbox_Note – a private message in a user’s outbox
• Floated_Message – a message that has been floated using one of the “Float This Message” options in the Topic Options menu on the Forum Topic Page.

Updated Community API v2 Resources

You can now get the count of users online from a LiQL query on the Users collection:

SELECT count(*) FROM users WHERE online_status = ‘online’

Support for Twitter cards

Similar to the Facebook treatment we released in 15.10, we now enable Twitter to read the meta data in a community link to create a Twitter profile card. So, now when you copy and paste community links to Twitter, your tweet includes your text, plus the Title, Description, and any images associated with this link.

 

To use Twitter profile cards:

• You must be using and enable the Twitter integration feature
• The author of the content being shared on Twitter must have their Twitter account linked to their community account

Learn more about Twitter cards.

Ability to increase the number of bookmarks to display on the My Bookmarks page

Some members use the bookmarking feature extensively. Members access these bookmarks from their profile under Subscriptions & Notifications > My Bookmarks), shown here:

By default, the My Bookmarks page display 10 bookmarks per page, before pagination starts. For members who have dozens of bookmarks, it can be difficult to remember on which page a bookmark exists or to page through the bookmark pages to find the bookmark they want.

 

You can now set the number of bookmarks to display on the My Bookmarks page:

1. Go to Community Admin > System > Subscriptions.
2. In the My Bookmarks page: Number of bookmarks per page field, enter the number of bookmarks to list before starting pagination.
   
3. Click Save. 

Changes to Minutes to First Reply and Minutes to First Comment metrics in LSI

Based on feedback from many of you, we are changing the Minutes to First Reply (avg) metric (under Content > Forums) and the Minutes to First Comment (avg) metric (under Content > Q&A) to exclude minutes for replies that have occurred after 7 days. Many of you said the average reply time metric was not actionable, because outliers such as replies to posts originally created 2 years ago would throw off your averages for the week, month and even year. The new metric calculation to exclude replies greater than 7 days will be backdated to the start of LSI so you can compare your average response times over history using the new calculation.

 

We anticipate this new calculation to be live on all communities in early January.

 

 

Support for advanced search in Private Messages 

We have added support for advanced search options (all words, specific words, one or more words, without words, and result locations) for Private Messages. Now, you can narrow your search results for the private message that contain exactly what you're looking for.

 

To perform an advanced search for your private messages:

1. Sign in to your community account.
2. In the Search drop-down  menu, select Private Messages and click Search.
3. Click Advanced Search.
   
4. Fill in the appropriate advanced search options and click Search.
   

Support for Microsoft Edge browser

Lithium now fully supports the Microsoft Edge browser. Learn more about our preferred browsers.

Updates to the message editor

With the 15.11 release, we have updated to the latest version (4.2.8) of the TinyMCE message editor. While there are no visible UI changes to the editor, there have been a number of fixed issues, listed on the TinyMCE site. 

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• Previously, you were able to set Number of labels per knowledge base page to zero (under Community Admin > Features > Labels), which would result in errors on TKB pages that tried to pull labels. We have fixed this issue, and you can no longer set this value to zero.
• When a community using SSO has more than one account using the same username, and you attempt to message that user, you're presented with an error message asking you to select the correct user. This is normal behavior, but the error is still triggered even when you manually go to the profile page of the desired user and click Send this user a private message. We have fixed this issue, and the error message is no longer displayed.
• We have fixed the issue where date_start and date_end parameters were not working with the API v1 /solutions/count
• Previously, when you attempted to select Email to a Friend on a community using the Spanish (Mexican) locale (es-mx), you received an error. We have fixed this issue.
• We have fixed the issue where messages were not being hidden on the Recent Questions page of a hidden node, even when the Hide from lists in menu and Hide messages from nodes in lists settings were selected.
• The Reason notification email template was missing the link to the message in the community as well as the unsubscribe link. We have added these links to the email template.
• We have fixed the display issue where numbered (ordered) lists were being cut off (when the number was greater than 9) in the TKB message editor when using the Mondrian skin.