Sets

From KickApps Documentation

Contents 1 Overview 2 Enabling and Disabling the Sets Application 3 Configuring the Sets Application 4 Creating Sets 5 Editing Sets 6 Finding Sets 7 Viewing and Interacting With Sets 8 Managing Sets as a Site Member 9 Managing Sets as a Site Administrator 10 Syndicating Sets 11 Reporting on Sets 12 Sets on Profile Pages 13 Sets on Your Site’s Homepage 14 Sets in Your Site’s Activity Feeds 15 Sets and Points 16 Sets and Groups 17 Advertising on Sets 18 System-Generated Emails 19 API Support for the Sets Application (for Developers) 20 Related Tutorials and How-to Articles

Overview

The KickApps Sets application enables you and your site’s members to organize your site’s media into collections for easy viewing and sharing. Sets can contain up to 100 items each, and can be comprised of photos, videos, audio tracks and blog posts (organized in any order).

When members upload media to your site, they can add that media to one of their existing sets, or they can create a new one from scratch. Sets can be searched for, browsed and interacted with just like any other piece of media in your site. Members can leave comments on sets, rate them, share them with friends, add them to their favorites, etc. Each set retains your site’s global styling and navigation (including your header, main navigation, background and footer), and the set’s contents are indexed by your site’s global search engine for easy retrieval.

Enabling and Disabling the Sets Application

Sets is an optional application that can be enabled or disabled in Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Add/Remove Apps page. When you enable this application, your site’s members will be able to create and edit their own sets, and view and interact with other peoples’ sets.

Note: If you disable this application after creating some sets for your site, all of those sets will become unavailable on your site and people who try to view those sets will see a message that the set has been remove. Re-enabling the Sets application will make those sets viewable again.

Configuring the Sets Application

When members add sets to your site you can automatically approve the content or you can specify that the content must be manually approved by a site administrator or editor before it goes live on your site.

You can configure this setting in the Affiliate Center on the Manage > Media page. If auto-approvals are not enabled for the sets application, each set will immediately be placed in your site’s Pending Queue, where it must be manually approved by a site administrator. Click here for more information on managing your site’s media in the Affiliate Center. (Note: you can designate specific members of your site as “trusted contributors,” which means that even if you have auto-approvals turned off, any sets added or edited by these members will be automatically approved.) Click here for more information on managing your site’s members in the Affiliate Center

Regardless of which auto-approval setting you choose, a “flag as inappropriate” option appears on every set page, which allows site visitors to notify administrators if they see a set that should be reviewed or removed from the site. When this link is clicked, a window appears where you can enter details about why you think the set is inappropriate. When this form is submitted, the site Webmaster receives an email notification containing a link to the set in question and the explanation from the person who flagged it. By setting your site’s “flag threshold,” you can automatically pull a set down off the site (and into your site’s Pending Queue) after it has been flagged a certain number of times.

When the Sets application is enabled, you can specify a default icon to represent sets throughout your site. This icon is used in rare situations where a customized icon is not available or has not been specified by the set creator. You set the default icon for sets in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Default Icons page.

On the Configure > Settings > Site Settings page in the Affiliate Center can configure your site to allow your members to submit “private media” to your site.

When this option is selected the create a set page is modified to include an option for the contributor to specify that “only their friends” can see the set. If this option is selected during the set creation process (see below), a link to the “private” set will only be visible on the contributor’s profile page, and only their friends inside your site will be able to see it. (Note: Private sets do not show up in your site’s search results or RSS feeds – they are essentially “invisible” to everyone in the world except the contributor, the contributor’s friends and the site administrators. If an unauthorized user tries to view a private set they will see a message indicating that the set is only visible to friends of the contributor.) The visibility of a set can easily be toggled from public to private at any time, as described below in the “Editing Sets” section of this document.

As the site administrator, you can choose to include a few other optional meta data fields on your create a set page. These include geo-location fields (country, city, state, zip) and an “email your friends” field. You can enable these fields individually in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Site Settings page.

The Sets application has a few default text strings that you can modify in the Affiliate Center in the Configure > Language section

Creating Sets

There are two ways to create sets. First, members can create sets “on the fly” while they are adding media to your site. On the upload pages for videos, photos, audio tracks and blog posts, there is an option at the bottom of the page where the member can specify which of their existing sets they want to add the media to, or they can enter a name and description of a new set. When adding media to an existing set, the media will appear as the last item in the set. When adding media to new set, the media will appear as the first item in the set.

Members can also create sets by clicking the “Create a Set” links which appear in a few places on your site, including the “Get Active” section of the myHome page and the sub-nav section of the main Sets page.

Creating a set involves finding media to put in the set, ordering the items in your set, then saving the set with a title, description and other meta data if necessary. This all happens on the “Create a Set” page, illustrated below.

The top section of this page contains a search function where the user can search through all of the media that is available to them for inclusion in their sets. By default, this includes all of their previously submitted media, as well as media that other site members have submitted and made available for inclusion in other peoples’ sets.

Click and drag items from the search results carousel to the “Contents” section in order to include them in a set. From there, you can click and drag items to re-arrange their order in the set. You can also drag items from the “Contents” section back to the search section in order to remove them from the set. Drag one of the thumbnails over to the “Thumbnail” section on the left to specify a representative thumbnail for the set,.

If you chose to include additional meta data fields on the upload page for the Sets application (see, “Configuring the Sets Application,” above), those optional fields also appear in this section of the create a set page.

If you have the “media privacy” feature enabled for your site, the create a set page contains an option for the contributor to specify that “only their friends” can see the set once it’s live on your site.

If the KickApps Groups application is enabled for your site, members will see a list of groups that they belong to on the create a set page (if they belong to any). The set that gets created will be added to all of the groups that the member checks (if any). Click here for more information on the KickApps Group application

Editing Sets

Sets can be edited by the site administrator as well as the member who created the set. If you are the member who created the set, clicking the “Edit Set” link on the set’s page will take you to the “Create/Edit Set” page (described above) where the contents of the set can be changed, along with the title, description and other meta data. If you are the site administrator, clicking the “Edit Set” link will take you to the Affiliate Center, where the set can be rejected or the meta data about the set can be modified. (More on this below, in the “Managing Sets” section of this document.)

Finding Sets

Each set that gets added to your site is immediately indexed by your site-wide search engine and is made available on the site within a few minutes after it is created. When you enable the Sets application for your KickApps-powered site, a “Sets” tab is added to your site’s global navigation strip. Clicking the “Sets” tab will display the most recent sets that have been added to your site, with options to sort the list by most views, most comments, most items, etc. In addition to the “Sets” tab in your site’s global navigation strip, a “Sets” checkbox is added to the Advanced Search form on your site, so that users can perform keyword searches against only your site’s sets. Click here for more information on the KickApps search application

Viewing and Interacting With Sets

Each set in your site has a dedicated page at a URL that is based on the name of the set. This page displays a series of thumbnail images, representing each of the items in the set. Hover over each thumbnail to display the title of the item.

Clicking on any of the thumbnails will take you to the “play page” for that media item. On the “play page,” below the main viewing area of an item that belongs to a set is a scrollable carousel containing other items in the set. Clicking a thumbnail in this carousel will take you to the “play page” for the selected item. This makes it easy for people to quickly click through all of the items in the set. Note: If an item belongs to more than one set, the carousel area also contains links to those other sets.

As mentioned above (see, ‘Configuring the Sets Application) , there is a “flag as inappropriate” option on every set page, which allows site visitors to notify administrators if they see a set that should be reviewed or removed from the site. When this link is clicked, a window appears where you can enter details about why you think the set is inappropriate. When this form is submitted, the site Webmaster receives an email notification containing a link to the set in question and the explanation from the person who flagged it.

Managing Sets as a Site Member

Your site’s members can see all of their sets in one place by clicking the “Sets” tab and then the “My Sets” tab in your site’s global navigation strip. From this page, members can view, edit or delete any of their previous sets.

Managing Sets as a Site Administrator

As a site administrator (Webmaster, Admin or Editor), you can view and manage all of your site’s sets in the Affiliate Center in the Manage > Media section. The advanced search form allows you to look for sets by specific members, within specific categories, created between specific dates, among other filtering criteria.

Clicking the “details” link next to any set will allow you to view and edit the set, including the comments, tags, ratings and other meta data fields. Changes that you make here are permanent.

Syndicating Sets

Your site’s sets can be syndicated in the Affiliate Center’s App Studio > Feed Builder section. To create an RSS feed of your site’s sets, click the “create” button on the Feed Builder main page, then select “sets” as your “Media Type.” From there you can sort and filter the results using the standard sorting and filtering options available in the Feed Builder tool, to produce a feed containing just the items matching your criteria. (For instance you could create a feed of sets submitted by a certain member, or group of members, sorted by most recent, or most viewed, or most comments, etc). Note: you don’t have to use the Feed Builder tool to create RSS feeds containing your sites sets. Advanced users can also manually construct an RSS feed URL containing the “mediaType=sets” parameter in our RSS Feed API. Click here for more information on the RSS Feed API

In addition to syndicating all of your site’s video posts via RSS Feeds, you can also syndicate the videos of any individual member by clicking on the RSS icon located at the bottom right of any video play page.

Reporting on Sets

Usage of the Sets application is tracked along with the rest of your site’s content in the Reporting section of the Affiliate Center. You can see how many sets were created, and how many times your sets were viewed in aggregate, for any date range. Click here for more information on KickApps Reporting.

Sets on Profile Pages

There is a section on each member’s profile page where hyperlinked thumbnails of their most recent sets are displayed. When members add sets to your site, this section of their profile page is automatically updated with a link to the recent sets.

There is also a section on each member’s profile page where links to their favorite sets are listed. When a member of your site adds a new set to their “Favorites,” this section of their profile page is automatically updated with a link to the set. Click here for more information on the KickApps Social Networking Application

Sets on Your Site’s Homepage

You can configure your site to include a pre-configured “community home page” which contains a bunch of modules that feature the most recent content that members have contributed to your site. Click here to learn more about configuring your site to include a pre-configured “community home page.” When a new set is added to your site, the “Most Recent Sets” module is automatically updated with a link to the set.

Sets in Your Site’s Activity Feeds

Your KickApps-powered site comes with a number of “activity feeds” that are constantly updated as members interact with each other and with the content of your site. There is a “community activity feed” on your site’s login page which contains a running feed of all member activity across your site. There is a “member activity feed” on the profile page for each of your site’s members which contains a running feed of each particular member’s activities. There is a “my friends and my news” feed on your members’ myHome page which contains a feed of their friends’ activities and the also the activities of the people they are following. Lastly, there is a “group activity feed” on each group page which contains a feed of activities that have happened inside that particular group.

Each time a new set is added, edited or interacted with (rated, commented on, added to someone’s favorites, etc), the appropriate activity feeds are automatically updated with a link to the member who performed the action, as well as a link to the set. Click here for more information on the KickApps RSS API

Below is an illustration of a member activity feed on someone’s profile page:

Sets and Points

The KickApps Points & Levels application allows you to automatically award points to your site’s members when they perform certain activities on your site. Click here for more information on the Points and Levels Application If you have enabled the Points & Levels application for your site, you can configure the application to award points when your members add sets or add items to their sets.

Sets and Groups

The KickApps Groups application allows you to create “micro-communities” within your site that members can join to share and interact with others in a more granular context than your entire site. If you have enabled the Groups application for your site, each group has a “group page” with a section featuring the most recent sets that have been added to the group. Click here to learn more about the Groups application.

Advertising on Sets

There are a few different types of pages on your site associated with the KickApps Sets application. Clicking the “Sets” tab in your site’s global navigation strip reveals a “list page” containing your site’s most recent sets. From here, you can click on an individual set, which is rendered on a “play page.” Editing or adding a set happens on a “profile management” page.

Each of the three types of pages mentioned above have “ad slots” in them that you can populate with whichever content you want. You can configure these ad slots in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Advertising page. Click here to learn more about configuring the ad slots on your site.

System-Generated Emails

The Sets application sends email notifications to site administrators and members when certain events occur. The contents of these notifications can be modified by editing your site’s Language settings, as described above (see, “Configuring the Sets Application”). Below is a list of the email notifications that get sent from the Sets application, including the “trigger events” which cause the notifications as well as the contents of each notification.

• Set Auto-unapproved due to Flagging / Recipient: Administrator / Notes: From a Set page
• Set Forwarded to Friends / Recipient: Member’s friends / Notes: From a Set page
• Tell Friends / Recipient: Member’s friends / Notes: From the add a Set page

Trigger	Recipient	Notes
Set Approved	Member	N/A
Set Rejected	Member	N/A
Set Tagged	Member	From a Set page
Another member comments on a set after you	Member	From a Set page
Set Commented On	Member	From a Set page
Set Flagged	administrator	from a Set page
Set Auto-unapproved due to Flagging	administrator	from a Set page
Set Forwarded to Friends	member’s friends	from a Set page
Tell Friends	member’s friends	from a Set page

API Support for the Sets Application (for Developers)

This document is intended to provide an in-depth look at the Sets application on the KickApps hosted platform, to help you understand how the application can be configured, used and managed on a day-to-day basis.

If you prefer to host all of the sets pages on your own web servers, or if you’d just like to use bits and pieces of the Sets application, we offer a complete set of REST API calls which allow you to construct whatever kind of user interface you can dream up.

Regardless of which front-end deployment option you choose, the functionality of the Sets application (and the content created by it) is managed in the Affiliate Center as described above. Click here for more information about the KickApps REST API

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