New Release Launches

Over the course of the weekend, we launched a new release of the KickApps platform. The best way to experience the updates is to dive right in:

1. Create an affiliate account
2. Browse a KickApps-powered site like the Arena Football League Fan Zone
   or Cleveland’s My43.net.

Release highlights

Updated profile pages

The updated member profile pages display more thumbnail images, showcase member comments, and include a richer set of biographical information.

Personal profile themes

Allow your members to customize their profile pages’ colors and styles. You can also create and edit Featured Themes to share with your members.

Configurable advertising, including in-stream ads

All of your KickApps-powered page experiences offer include a range configurable slots for banner ads, as well as an initial offering for pre- and post-roll videos.

Improved blogs

Members can create video, audio, and text blogs from a web cam or by uploading files from their desktop. Blogs now include a full range of media metadata, so users can tag, rate, flag, and add comments. To balance these new features, we’ve updated your media management pages to allow you to review, edit, and approve new blogs.

Groups

With new Groups functionality, your members can share media and comments with other like-minded users.

Site navigation bar

A new site-wide navigation bar helps users find new and popular media from any page in your community.

Single sign on

If you have your own member population, you can now integrate your own systems with the KickApps platform to maintain a single interface for registration, login, and sign out functionality.

DNS masking

Preserve your own site URL! Map an unused subdomain to your KickApps-hosted pages for a fully branded user experience.

A Note For Existing KickApps Affiliates

If you’re already powering your online community with the KickApps platform and have customized your pages’ CSS (cascading style sheet) rules, please take a moment to review these notes about the updated page CSS.

What’s Next

We’re not going to slow down just yet: we’re planning new releases every six weeks or so, adding as many big new features as we can comfortably manage.

Release Preview Pages and Updated CSS

We’re happy to announce that our new release is coming very soon, possibly even tomorrow.

To help you prepare for the release, we’ve put together a .zip file of the updated page experiences and CSS file.

If you’re using the KickApps platform, please review the .zip file. The upcoming release includes a lot of new functionality, so we’ve updated some of the underlying HTML and CSS. The .zip files will allow you to update your own custom CSS rules in advance of the launch.

The new release will only affect your custom CSS rules. Your existing header and footer HTML will remain intact when the new release is put up.

Pete was helpful enough to write these instructions for using the .zip files:

To use the .zip files, you’ll need a web browser and a text editor. For each HTML page in the package,

1. Open up the .htm file in your favorite web browser(s).
2. Open up the main.css file in your favorite text editor.
3. Update the main.css file as desired.
4. Once you are happy with your updates, move onto the next .htm file and repeat steps a through c.
5. Once all pages have been customized, upload the main.css file to your own web server, renamed to something unique, such as main_10.css. (Do not overwrite any existing KickApps-related CSS files you may be using.)
6. KickApps will send email all registered affiliates to let you know that we’ve officially put our new release live. If you’re not registered, email support@kickapps.com and we’ll add you to the list.
7. When the new release launches, log into your KickApps Affiliate Center and go to Site Settings -> Site Styles. Put the URL to the CSS file you uploaded in the CSS Rules text area (e.g. http://www.mysite.com/main_10.css). Click Save Site Style
8. Voila! Your site’s styles for KickApps have been applied!
9. Oh, Be sure to check out this great new feature called groups that “Marky” Mark McComb and “Prickly” Pete Clark did up. It’s really the bomb!

(Please remove step i.)

Thanks Pete!

Blog Updates

Eric’s blog has moved to Community in Context, where he’ll be posting his thoughts on social networks, user-generated media, Widgets, and the future of community.

In the future, we’ll use this blog to post news and notes about what we’re up to. Expect several important posts in the next few days.