IGLOO Software Beta Migration Plan

As you know, on Saturday December 19, IGLOO released a powerful new set of web publishing features that will enhance the way you build and maintain site navigation and create content in your online community.

Click here to watch a quick preview video of the new functionality.

By deploying the new features to your community, we've provided you with the opportunity to start familiarizing yourself with some of the great new technology and design enhancements like the drag-and-drop user interface for building dynamic web pages. Today's beta announcement is an important and exciting milestone as it provides you with an opportunity to gain valuable hands-on experience and provide us with feedback.

For our business users, we invite you to explore the new features within the comfort of your existing community. Continue to use your existing folders / pages exactly as you have been and, when you're ready, start familiarizing yourself with the new framework for creating page layouts.

For our technical users, once you are comfortable with the new framework, feel free to commence the full migration of your content. Please note that your content migration may require some additional adjustments to the global theme to ensure they display the way you want.   

During customer beta, we will develop ways to make migration easier for all users based on the way you work. Then, during the next release, we will enhance the drag-and-drop widget architecture to allow you to not only easily migrate content but, also leverage and extend your enterprise applications such as SharePoint^® and Salesforce.com.

On behalf of the entire team here at IGLOO, we would like to thank you in advance for helping make this our best release to date and we look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Sincerely,

The IGLOO Team

1. Pages

The new framework for creating and managing the layout of content in a community is called Pages. Previously, Folders were used to create and manage community web pages. 

Administrators can add and manage community pages through the Site Manager located in the Control Panel or from the Quick Add function from the user bar. While adding or editing a page, administrators have access to a collection of new application widgets which they can drag-and-drop onto their page, and configure to populate community pages.

Pages: Layout with widgets in edit mode

Titles, Navigation & URLs:

• Page Title - defines what appears in the browser window.  This title is often indexed by search engines so it can be optimized and customized to deliver better organic search results.
• Navigation Title - defines what appears in the community navigation.
• URL Identifier - defines the web address of the page.

What does this mean for Folders?

Moving forward, Folders will become a new community application called Documents and will be used for organizing and managing community content such as documents, images and multimedia files. The existing folder structure in communities is fully backwards compatible. This means that all communities currently using Folders to display their community content can continue to do so (i.e. the HTML option will still be available).  However, new pages can no longer be added using community Folders. The new Page framework will need to be used to create additional community pages.

2. Widgets

Widgets allow administrators the ability to populate community web pages with dynamic content by simply dragging and dropping widgets onto a page layout! Choose from a list of widgets that pull data from all of your community applications, such as Blogs, Calendar or Forums. For a full list of available widgets, please see widget wiki article.

Widgets: Drag-and-drop into a page layout

Columns & Rows:

Configure the page into any layout using a combination of rows and columns.

• Rows - add or remove rows from the page layout to position widget content horizontally.
• Columns - add or remove columns to position widget content vertically in a three column grid option:

• 1 column - the entire width of the page
• 2 columns - one larger column with a narrower side column (either to the right or the left)
• 3 columns - one medium sized column flanked by narrower side columns

For each widget on the page, the layout of information and the widget appearance can be customized. 

Layout:

• Choose from the default layout (best suited for wider column configurations) or list views (better suited for narrower columns)
• Customize the layout by choosing to display or not display selected items (ex: profile picture of the blog article author)

Appearance:

• Backgrounds and Borders - define the colours for all background and border elements
• Border - define the border size, type of corner (square vs. rounded) and style (solid vs dashes)
• Padding - define the padding within the widget area
• Class - customize the design (for advanced CSS users)

3. Site Manager

The new Site Manager in the Control Panel replaces the old navigation tool. The new Site Manager allows new pages to be created, renamed, hidden, reordered and deleted. The Site Manager visually displays the community's site map in a tree structure with all page associations and hierarchy. The site map also displays existing top-level folders and community applications.

Site Manager: Displays the community site map

Using Site Manager:

• Rearrange root level pages to organize the site's navigation by dragging and dropping items.
  • Changes made by dragging and dropping are saved instantly and will have an immediate effect on the site's current navigational structure.
• Set any page or application as the community homepage.
• Quick Edit (accessed from the dropdown menus) allows users to:
  • Rename page title
  • Change the URL identifier (where applicable)
  • Hide pages you don't want to display in the navigation
  • Use "Full Edit" from the dropdown menus to modify the layout and content of the page
• Note - Folder management:
  • Root level folders can be deleted from the folder location (using the action menu to access the delete option).
  • Administrators can delete all root level folders except the last one because eventually the last root level folder will be transformed into a full community application.

4. Control Panel

In addition to a brand new look, the revised userbar now includes a Quick Actions link which allows Administrators to add a new page or invite new members. In addition, the Control Panel now provides you with shortcut links to help you navigate quickly to your areas of interest.

Three resource links have also been added to the Control Panel links:

• IGLOO Support - shortcut to the support community which provides valuable tools and resources
• Report Bug - report a technical issue to IGLOO
• Request Feature - suggest a new feature or enhancement

5. Other Enhancements & Notes

• Calendar
  • Individual events can now have an access level (permissions) set, in addition to the overall calendar application.
  • Community search now includes events.
  • Please note: that extended fields (ex: agenda) have been migrated and inserted in the main description area to allow more flexibility as new features are added to the Calendar.
• Permissions
  • Pages do not have the ability to cascade their overall public/private access (permission) levels because each page exists as a single entity, without explicit knowledge of its sub-pages.
  • Individuals with write, full or administrator access levels can now set a forum topic to 'sticky'.
  • Individuals with a full access level can only lock/unlock a forum topic if that user has full access on the forum it belongs to.
  • Individuals with a full access level can now create categories and forums. Users no longer need to be a part of the administrator group to perform these actions.
• Search
  • Significant speed improvements have been made reducing the time it takes to generate and deliver search results.  Content will now be indexed in less than 5 minutes, helping to lower the lag time between content changes and search results.
• Creating Links
  • The dialogue for creating links in the editor now allows you to easily select a page or sub-page on your site to link to.  You are still able to enter an external URL for your links as well. 
• Document Uploads
  • The file size of each individual document is limited to 30 MB or less.

For additional information on the new features, please visit the support wiki:

• Pages
• Widgets
• Site Manager

Register for one of our FREE online training sessions where we will review new features, set up a Web Page using Widgets and migrate an existing Folder to a Page.