Last week, Khoros announced the launch of a game-changing new version of Khoros Communities. This powerful new version, Aurora, reimagines the community experience and leverages more than 20 years of expertise and learnings in the digital community space. This next-generation community software delivers a sleek, modern, and high-performance system that adheres to community best practices while still giving brands complete flexibility to make changes or updates to address their specific needs.
The next generation of Khoros Communities enables you to:
- Infuse your brand into every aspect of the community
- Make changes on the fly without involving IT teams or developers using the platform’s drag-and-drop design
- Supercharge community management with workflow automation, organization, and AI-driven content filters that let you spend more time on strategy and less on routine tasks
- Measure community performance with elevated analytics to better understand member engagement and make decisions based on real data to continuously improve your community
- Increase engagement with beautiful, responsive, and accessible end-user experiences powered by an updated web application framework
What’s changed in Aurora from Community Classic?
First, the Admin experience has been redesigned and simplified, making the process of creating and structuring a community more straightforward and user-friendly. Users can configure various feature settings and manage member roles and permissions within the new Settings area.
Next, the new version of Khoros Communities has a built-in centralized content management dashboard, where users can perform all tasks related to content moderation, including accessing drafts and reviewing spam and abusive content.
Several core terms and features have been simplified, including:
- Kudos are now called Likes
- Subscriptions are now called Follows
- Discussion Styles are now called Content Types
- Group Hubs are now called Groups
- Tags and labels have been combined and are now just all called Tags
Other changes and enhancements made to community tools include:
- The site-building tool Studio has been replaced with Designer and Dev Tools.
- Members have access to the full version history of content with the ability to delete, edit, compare, and restore versions.
- Unsplash image libraries have been integrated for blog cover images and page template sections.
- Community Analytics is now built into the Community application and is no longer a separate tool.
Finally, the way communities are themed and designed has undergone a significant overhaul. The new Aurora Designer feature provides visual Theme and Page Template editors that allow users to customize the visual appearance of the community. This customization includes changing the overall look and feel, as well as modifying page templates to prioritize and showcase the most important content.
Built on the same platform as Khoros Community Classic, the new Aurora version includes significant framework enhancements:
- Optimized member experience: The Aurora version delivers better performance and design, including a modern UX, beautiful layouts, and pre-configured community best practices. It also provides more personalization, integration with other digital properties through syndication, and an overall better experience so that communities can more easily become the heart of any brand’s digital experience.
- Redesigned community manager experience: The Aurora version enables community managers and designers to build and customize pages easier with a visual Page Template designer. Pre-defined and customizable themes allow users to control the look and feel of the community while matching the visual message and tone of the brand. The best part? You no longer need to know how to code to build these pages.
- Revamped developer experience: Developers can now easily find, use, test, and extend any integrations, custom objects, or data calls (in and out of the community), expanding the capabilities of the community and providing members with a more customized experience.
- Other backend and platform changes: The Aurora update uses new front-end technologies like React and Storybook, and leverages tools like Jest and Typescript for rapid iteration and robust design. On the data side, the Aurora version uses GraphQL as a way to program API interactions and get data out of the platform. Finally, the entire architecture is completely built on modern cloud services from AWS and Docker.
Upgrading to Aurora
The new version of Khoros Community is built on the same backend data architecture as Community Classic, so existing customers do not need a full-scale migration to move to the Aurora version. However, most Community Classic customers do have some customization on the front end. For these customers, some additional work is required to move to the Aurora version.
Reach out to your account manager to learn more about what to expect when upgrading to Aurora.
