New features

• Responsive for Developers Beta
• Visual redesign of Contests for Responsive
• Videos supported in Masonry View
• Faster Studio save times
• Updates to the message editor
• Robots.txt editor updates
• API and SDK updates

 

Responsive for Developers Beta

Customers engage with your Lithium Community throughout the day whether they are on the go or relaxing at home. Lithium Responsive creates a single community UI across all devices and is a significant update to the default Lithium look and feel, but has all the same customization power and control. Using Lithium Responsive, you can provide a consistent brand and user experience everywhere, ensuring a feature-rich community on all devices. Learn about the five benefits of going responsive, including better search engine optimization (SEO), increased engagement, and a consistent experience.

 

Until now, Lithium Responsive has only been available via an engagement with our Professional Services group. We're excited to announce that Lithium Responsive for Developers is now available in beta to customers who want to lead their own responsive redesigns with their own development teams. It is important to note that moving to responsive is a development project and is not turnkey. It requires technical expertise and a dedicated project effort from your development team.

 

Responsive for Developers (in beta) includes:

• Tools in Lithium Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Tools in Studio
• Appropriate documentation

The Responsive for Developers documentation listed below is essential reading for anyone interested in moving to Lithium Responsive and will be updated regularly throughout the beta period.

 

Responsive for Developers documentation:

• About Lithium Responsive
• Things to know before you begin
• Skin architecture
• Feature versions and responsive
• Lithium Responsive Developer documentation
• Responsive for Developers Beta board for updates and to share feedback throughout the beta

 

Contact your Customer Success Manager if you are interested in participating in the Responsive for Developers beta program.

 

Also, be sure to check out the Responsive for Developers session in the Developer Showcase at LiNC’16 this year. To view the outcome of the beta program and meet with other developers who implemented Responsive in their communities, contact your Customer Success Manager or register here.

 

Visual redesign of Contests for Responsive

 

Contests are a great way to motivate community members and stimulate interest in a community to increase engagement by running photo or story contests. In updating Contests for Responsive, we improved the overall user experience based on feedback we’ve received from you, our customers.

Note: You must upgrade to Contests 3.2 and Responsive Base/Peak 1.9 or later to use these new features.

Note: These improvements are largely a cosmetic pass over the Contests user experience and not a deep structural change to the way contests work.

 

Contests can be visual, with photos being a popular type of entry so we’ve therefore improved the visual experience in several ways:

• We’ve improved the layout of the home page for the Contest to highlight the rules and access point for creating a new contest entry.
  
• We’ve integrated the Media v4 (aka Media Experience) image uploader to make it easier to contribute photos from desktop or mobile devices. (Note: In Photo contests, the Format options in the sidebar, shown in the screenshot below, will not be displayed, as they are not needed when the only asset in the entry is a single image.)
  
• A specialized form of the Masonry view is now used to display contest entries. It’s a visually-rich layout and we’ve emphasized the things that matter most: title, image, and voting controls. Other elements like the last reply timestamp are less relevant in Contests and have been de-emphasized.
  
• We’ve brought greater visual impact to the main page for each entry. The entry content (photo or story) is shown at full-width for maximum viewing impact. And we’re providing easy lateral navigation between entries so you can flip from one to the next easily and vote as you go.
  
• We’ve changed the way that you can sort entries. Instead of going to different tabs, you can now sort the entries from a drop-down menu:
  

 

Video support in Masonry view

Masonry view now displays a video still in the tile if a video has been uploaded in the message. An image in the message overrides the display n the masonry tile  by default. Note that this has been tested with Ooyala only.

Improved mobile experience

Like all features using the Responsive skin, Contests scales down elegantly to a mobile device. Additionally, we’ve made it much easier to enter a contest from your mobile device, where lots of your images reside.

Removal of 5-star rating option for Responsive Contests

Contests v3.2, Responsive Base v1.9, and Responsive Peak v1.9, change the default rating style for contests from 5-star to kudos. In addition, the option to set the rating style for a contest to use  5-star rating system has been removed from Community Admin. If you are using Lithium Responsive and currently have an open contest that uses star ratings, wait until that contest has finished and the winner has been announced before upgrading to these feature versions.

 

Update: 5-star rating support for Contests will be supported with 16.10. 

Faster Studio save times

With 16.4, we’ve made upgrades in the backend processes of how Studio saves changes, resulting in much faster saves. We’ve seen up to 75% improvements in Studio save times. Some of these changes include using the local repo to create new or saved changes to skins, optimizing the skin caching logic, and optimizing the quilt caching logic.

 

One big change relates to how we save skins. Skins now compile in the background so when you save a skin, Studio refreshes much faster. Note that your saved changes might not show up on the site until the background thread finishes compiling and writing out the skin CSS (which might take up to a minute).

 

You don’t need to do anything to take advantage of these upgrades and optimizations.

Updates to the message editor

With the 16.3 release, we have updated to the 4.3.7 version 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.

Robots.txt editor updates

We’ve removed the Robots sub-tab under Studio > Advanced to make way for a new, improved editor coming in a future release. Lithium Support will maintain your robots exclusion protocol until the new Studio editor is available.

API and SDK updates

Messages collection updates

We’ve added new fields, constraints, and sorts to the Messages collection.

New fields on the Messages collection

• popularity - indicates the number of kudos a message has received
• excluded_from_kudos_leaderboards - whether or not a message (topic or reply) has been excluded from kudos leaderboards using the Hide from Kudos Leaderboards link in the Options menu for a message.

New constraints on the Messages collection

You can filter by exluded_from_kudos_leaderboards and status.key in the WHERE clause of a LiQL statement.

SELECT id, popularity FROM messages WHERE excluded_from_kudos_leaderboards=false

SELECT status FROM messages WHERE conversation.style="contest" AND status.key="new"

New sorts on the Messages collection

You can sort messages by popularity (kudos received).

SELECT id, subject, view_href, popularity FROM messages WHERE conversation.style='contest' AND board.id='photoContest' ORDER BY popularity DESC

Create a skin with the SDK

You can now run the li create-skin SDK script from the root directory of your SDK plugin to create a new skin. This script requires version 1.2.1 of the Lithium-Klout SDK and version 16.4 of Lithium Community. See the SDK documentation under Develop > Customize and read “Creating a skin” for details.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

• We have fixed the display issue where the Idle time field was sometimes blank in the users online table. Now, the field displays the correct idle time value.
• When sending a private message to another user from the Profile Page, the user’s custom avatar image did not display in the user search field or Send To field. We have fixed this display issue, and now the custom avatar image displays correctly.
• Previously, when a URL included a period at the end, the link didn’t work properly. This issue has been fixed.