The 15.4 Release includes several new feature enhancements, reporting capabilities, and developer productivity tools.

We’ve provided a manual sort option for articles in a TKB so TKB admins can manually set the order in which articles appear in a TKB. LSI now offers more robust filtering capabilities so you can view the specific information you want in your LSI reports. LSI also now includes a Top Members report, so you can get a snapshot of who your most active and influential community members are.

We’re excited to announce the open beta release of the Lithium-Klout Software Development Kit (SDK). It introduces a way for developers to contribute customizations to the stage environment using their own tools and workflow.

New features and enhancements

• New TKB article manual ordering option (open beta)
• Advanced filters for LSI reports
• LSI Top Members report
• Product Mentions
• Community API v1 changes
• Lithium-Klout SDK (open beta)

New TKB article manual ordering option (open beta)

We have added a new TKB article ordering option that enables you to control the order in which TKB articles are listed on a TKB page. In addition to the existing ordering methods (date, views, kudos, comments), TKBs now support a “manual” option.

The manual option enables the community admin to define the exact order in which TKB articles appear on the page, regardless of any future edits or activity to these articles. Up to now, when you edited a published TKB article, it jumped to the top of the article list, if you sorted by date.

Sometimes, this is the behavior you want. However, if you want your TKB articles to retain a specific order, you can now set the TKB ordering method to “manual” for individual TKBs. For example, you might have a TKB on a particular topic and want specific “overview” articles to always be at the top of the page in a specific order.

When you set the sorting order to manual, you can order the articles using the TKB article ordering controls in the Community Admin for that TKB.

To configure a TKB for manual article ordering:

1. Go to Community Admin > Discussion Styles > TKB.
2. Click Choose and navigate to the TKB that you want to configure for manual ordering.
   
3. Click the Ordering
4. Set Default sorting articles on a TKB page to Manual.
   
   Note: This ordering setting does not control the order in which articles are listed in other page components (for example, Recent Knowledge Base Articles).
5. Click Save.

To reorder articles for a manually sorted TKB:

1. Go to Community Admin > Discussion Styles > TKB.
2. Click Choose and navigate to the TKB that you want to order articles for.
3. Click the Ordering
   
4. Click and drag TKB articles up and down into the order you want them to appear on your community site. (Alternatively, you can enter the number in the Article Order column and click Enter on your keyboard.)
   
5. Click Save Order at the bottom of the list.

Note: To revert the list back to the original order before clicking Save Order, click Reset.

Note: When new articles are published to the TKB, they are added to the bottom of the TKB article list, until you manually move it to a new order position.

Your changes are reflected on your live community site.

Check out this quick demo.

Current limitations in this open beta:

• Manually sorted articles do not display in defined order on mobile devices
• REST calls and RSS Feed do not honor the manual ordering of TKB articles

Advanced filters for LSI reports

LSI now enables you to filter reports for more granular data. Different reports support different filter types, which include:

• Country
• Role
• Rank
• Category or Node
• Thread
• User
• Badge

To add filters to your LSI reports:

1. Sign in to LSI.
2. Go to the page where you want to view data and build your filter.
3. (Optional) Set the date range for your report.
4. Click Add a Filter.
   
5. Select the type of filter you want, choose the equals or not equals operator, and select/enter the values.
   
6. To add more rules to your filter, click the + button and enter the new rule on the next row.
   
7. Click Apply when done.

Your filtered report appears. The page indicates any filter rules that are applied to the report in the header.

Note: A green pipe next to the filter indicates an “equals” filter; a red pipe indicates a “does not equal” rule.

Edit and delete filters

You can always edit and remove rules in your filters to fine-tune or change them.

To edit a filter:

1. Click the pencil icon on the right side of the page.
   
2. For each filter rule, you can:

• Change the operator and values as needed
• Click the x to the right of a filter rule to delete it.
• Click + to add more filter rules.
  

3. Click Apply.

Note: Click Clear All to remove all rules from the filter and start over.

Notes about using filters

• Filter rules are case sensitive. Enter a space (not an underscore) between words in the filter value name (role, rank, badge, category, board, thread). You can enter multiple values in each rule as a comma-separated list (no space after the comma).
• Filters are not maintained between sessions or all page views. To preserve a filter, we recommend setting up the report with the filter you want and then creating a scheduled report or exporting the data to a CSV file.
• Filter settings are retained between reports that share the same filter capabilities but are not retained if the filter you set is not available in the other report. For example, if you filter content across all categories to show conversations viewed by users in the United States and then click the Blogs subcategory under Content, you’re filter is retained. But if you filter data on the Badges page for a specific badge and then go to the Content page, that filter doesn’t exist in that context and is removed.
• Sometimes, you might not see any results on the page after you apply a filter. This could mean that no results match your query or that you entered an invalid value in one of your filter rules. Check your filter rules for typos and incorrect values.

Notes on specific filter types

• Country: Includes or excludes users with IP addresses associated with the respective country. You can select the country name from a drop-down menu.
• Role: Includes or excludes users who have specific roles. To view your role list, go to Community Admin > Users > Permissions > Roles.
• Rank: Includes or excludes users who have specific ranks. To find your rank list, go to Community Admin > Users > Ranks.
• Category ID: Includes or excludes events that have taken place in specific Categories. To find the Category ID, click the category in LSI and look at its URL. Copy the “category_id" value in the URL. For example:
  https://intelligence.lithium.com/data/workspaces/##/categories/overview?filter_scope=node&viz_mode=all&category_id=123.
• Board ID: Includes or excludes events that have taken place in specific boards. To find the Board ID, click the Board in LSI and look at its URL. Copy the “node_id" value in the URL. For example:
  https://intelligence.lithium.com/data/workspaces/##/apps/forums?date_range=5-25-2014%2C6-25-2014&node_id=123
• Thread ID: Includes or excludes events that have taken place in specific threads. To find the Thread ID, go to the particular thread in the community. Copy the “thread_id" value in the URL, after the last backslash. For example:
  https://community.lithium.com/t5/Lithium-Community-Platform/Are-we-Responsive-or-not/td-p/155016
• User ID: Includes or excludes specific users. To find a User ID, go to the Community user profile page and copy the last series of numbers after the backslash. For example: https://community.lithium.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/12345
• Badge ID: Includes or excludes users who have earned specific community badges. To view your badge list, go to Community Admin > Users > Badges > Manage.
• Badge is retroactive: Includes or excludes users who have earned specific community badges, based on behavior completed before the badge went live on your community. To view your badge list, go to Community Admin > Users > Badges > Manage.

LSI Top Members report

Use the LSI Top Members report to get a snapshot of your most active and influential community members.

To see whom your most active and influential members are:

1. Sign in to LSI.
2. Go to Members > Top Members.
   

The Top Members report provides the following information:

• Registered Members: Breakdown of active community members over the last 60 days. Observers read, navigated and observed, but never posted. Casual Members posted occasionally. Superusers posted often and accounted for most of your community content.
• Superusers: Members who produce at least 50% of the total content on your community over the last 60 days, ranked based on the average number of daily posts over the last 60 days.
• Klout Community Score: Ranks your top influencers, based on the influence of their community contributions as measured by the Klout algorithm over the last 90 days. Klout Community Scores are derived from a combination of attributes, including the ratio of reactions members generate compared to the amount of content members share. More influential members have higher Klout Community Scores.

Note: If a member has been deleted from the community, only their user ID displays in the reports:

Note: The Superusers and Klout Community Score charts list only the top 10 members. To see the full list, export each chart to a CSV file.

Product Mentions updates

The product image carousel (created by the product-snippet component) is now supported in review comments. For more information about this feature, see About product mentions.

Community API v1 Changes

We’ve added a new parameter to include or exclude duplicate users when retrieving the count of users online. Pass the Boolean users_online.include_duplicates to any of these calls:

• community/users/online/count
• community/users/online/registered/count
• community/users/online/partiallyregistered/count

The call community/users/online/partiallyregistered/count is a new call to retrieve the number of partially registered users.

Lithium-Klout SDK (open beta)

We are excited to announce the open beta release of the Lithium-Klout Software Development Kit (SDK). It introduces a way for developers to contribute customizations to the stage environment using their own tools and workflow. This product, an alternative to Studio, makes it easier for developers to collaborate with their team and develop more efficiently.

Developers can use their own IDEs or text editors (such as Eclipse or Sublime) to customize their community. The customizations contributed by a developer via the SDK are packaged into a plugin. Plugin resources include things like skins, components, page quilts, text strings, and assets. They are the building blocks that make your community unique. These five resources are supported for the beta and we intend to add more in future releases.

A plugin is the mechanism for storing and organizing customizations for your community. Essentially, it is a directory structure containing customization resources. By externalizing the plugin from Studio, you can place these resources in your own source control system such as Github and enjoy the benefits of your source control’s team collaboration features such as branching and merging.

Our developer environment runs on top of node.js, using bower and gulp Node Package Manager (npm) dependencies for its package management and streaming build system. For the open beta, we support Mac and Linux operating systems.

When customizing the community via the SDK, an SDK plugin is created. Customizations made in Studio are packaged into a separate plugin, the Studio plugin. Customizations in plugins are loaded in a specific order when a community page loads. The SDK plugin is loaded first, and then the Studio plugin. This means that if customizations exist with the same name in the SDK plugin and the Studio plugin, the version in Studio override the version in the SDK. Because of this, communication between community developers and community Studio users is very important so that customizations are not accidentally overridden.

Studio users and developers can learn more about plugins, how they interact, how to override and revert files in About Studio. Custom pages, components, assets, and skins are denoted in Studio with an SDK icon.

Developers should discuss with their community team before they begin contributing customizations to the stage server using the SDK to be sure that Studio users understand how the SDK plugin interacts with Studio.

Developers can refer to the Lithium-Klout SDK documentation to set up their developer environment and begin using our developer tools. To log in to sdk-docs.lithium.com, use the username/password: sdk/sdk.

Notes:

• If you have more than one stage environment, the SDK is only supported on the stage environment that is connected via Studio Publish to your production site.
• For any questions, support issues, or to provide feedback about this product, post a topic on this forum.
• Beta products have risks so consider your business goals and tolerance for bugs before joining the program.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• When opening the emoticon pop-up menu in TinyMCE in Internet Explorer, all the emoticons used to display on a single line, making the picker very long and difficult to use. We have fixed this display issue, and now the emoticons stack in rows, as expected.
• We have fixed the issue where quotation marks were being displayed as HTML code (“&quot”) in plain text subscription email notifications.
• We have fixed the issue where hidden groups were still being shown in the Groups section, despite having the “hide from lists and menus” option checked. With this fix, these hidden groups will no longer appear in the Groups list. As a result of this fix, some users might not see Groups that they could previously see. To enable these users to see these groups again, just uncheck the “hide from lists and menus” option for those groups.
• On Mobile v1, we have fixed the issue where the Last Post date was displaying “null” instead of the appropriate date when “Enable mobile-friendly dates” was not enabled.
• Previously, the location parameter was being dropped if you changed the discussion style or scope while performing a search on the mobile community. This issue has been fixed.
• Previously, if you tried to view an idea that had been marked as spam and had its status set in the Spam Quarantine, you would see a blank popup when you clicked on the idea. This display issue has been fixed.