Telligent Community 9.1 Now Available

I'm thrilled to announce that version 9.1 of Telligent Community is now available and ready for production use:

• Get Telligent Community 9.1

Telligent Community 9.1 is a minor release, but we packed some great additions into it:

• We ran multiple versions ourselves (here) starting nearly 6 weeks ago
• Soliciting feedback from our community about the product
• Making available a preview releases to solicit additional feedback
• Moved more of our integrations to open source on GitHub
• Transparent communication on our progression of bug fixes, updates and improvements
• Introduced ideation to gather feedback directly from you

While we fixed a lot of bugs (over 60) we also added some key new features. Some of which I'll highlight here, but we're also going to showcase these in more depth through a series of blog posts over the next few weeks:

Theme "Love the Community Manager"

Community Manager told us they want to spend more time working with their customers and this was a key theme for us in the 9.0 release. In 9.1 we added some improvements to make the community manager's job even easier.

Let me move my content and make the old links still work

Nothing is more frustrating than making changes within your community (or website) and having to then go do the work inside of your web server to handle all the redirect magic. Specifically going through and updating link paths through RegEx and rewriting them with an HTTP 301 (permanently moved) header. In prior versions of Telligent Community the advice if you moved content was to go into the IIS configuration file and manually update it to properly re-write the HTTP request like this:

    <!-- use a rewrite map (see rewritemaps.config)
        taxFaculty/post/foo -> /taxfaculty/b/weblog/posts/bar  
        taxFaculty/post/company-cars -> /taxfaculty/b/weblog/posts/companycars  
     -->
    <rule name="Rewrite Map example" stopProcessing="true">
        <match url="^taxFaculty/post/(.*)" />
        <conditions>
            <add input="{MapName:{R:1}}" pattern="(.+)" />
        </conditions>
        <action type="Redirect" url="/taxfaculty/b/weblog/posts/{C:1}" redirectType="Permanent" />
    </rule>

Yuck.

In Telligent Community 9.1 when you move content within your community we'll automatically handle the old URLs and send the HTTP 301 redirect headers. This redirect table is also smart enough to handle circular loops, content removal and other cases that you might have to account for.

Convert forum discussions into ideas the community can vote on

How often have you seen a great suggestion in the forums and thought "what a great idea, I wonder if anyone else thinks we should do that"? In Telligent Community 9.1 we now support an easy way to convert a forum discussion along with its replies into an idea:

From here you can select which group you want to move it to and the Ideation application to place it within.

Enhance the wiki table of contents to allow sorting and hiding of content

Ok, I'll admit we should have done this from the beginning. But, in our defense, we were trying to stick with the 'original' wiki concept that all documents were published and it was the authors responsibility to manage the linking. The general reaction from our customers was, dare I say, annoyed?

The good news is we've addressed this in 9.1:

Help me more easily find draft content

Previously to find content that you were working on you would have to navigate through the management screens and view all the posts. Only then could you find the post marked as a draft that was not published. Now, when you manage a blog, wiki, etc. you'll see a highlight indicating any drafts you have available. Clicking on this link will bring you directly into your draft content:

From there you can edit, view, publish, move and delete:

And we highlight the content as being in draft mode if it isn't published yet:

Theme "Love the Developer"

Another important theme for us in the 9.0 release was making developers love working with the software. In 9.1 we added even more improvements to Widget Studio to make it even easier to work within this environment.

It would be great if Widget Studio had auto-complete

If you are a developer working within Widget Studio - Telligent's tool for working with our user experience layer - you'll know that we have plenty of code, samples and documentation. But what you might be missing are some of the familiar tools that you love in more advanced environments, such as Microsoft's Visual Studio. Probably one of the most well-known of these features is auto-completion.

The auto-complete feature (also known as statement completion) provides an easy way to navigate through methods and properties and ensures the spelling of a particular API call is done correctly. This capability is now also available as part of Telligent's Widget Studio capability:

Auto-complete will help you as a developer save time and effort when working in Widget Studio, but also help you more quickly learn the Telligent Widget Studio environment.

An immediate window in Widget Studio would really help me debug widgets

In addition to auto-complete another common developer tool is an immediate window. The immediate window enables you to execute code and test without the need to load the full widget into your environment.

For example, let's say you want to see what the return value of a particular Telligent API is. You can use the immediate window to execute that code and return the value. 

Theme "Love the Customer's Customer"

While we didn't spend on a ton of time on end user features in the 9.1 release we did include a few nice enhancements to existing functionality.

Let me copy/paste into the Telligent editor

You can now copy/paste images directly from your clipboard into the editor. We'll upload the file and insert a preview into the editor (how I published all the images in this blog post). We spent a considerable amount of time on this to account for the nuances of all the different browsers. We also did a comparison against both Office 365 and Google Doc's support of this - Google Doc's is by far the best and we have equivalent support.

For example, I found this Minions High-Five image on Google Images and copy/pasted the image below - no dialog boxes, just copy on one screen and paste on the other:

Those are some of the highlights!

On behalf of the entire Telligent team: thank you for your contributions to 9.1. We wouldn't be here without you.

Rob

Added

• Added ability to filter content on creation date when retrieving threads or content by tags.
• Added ‘contentId’ filter to Like REST endpoint
• Added Widgets defined by plugins are now listed when viewing the plugin, enabling easier editing
• Added blog and gallery management listings and search options.
• Added IUrl API to IApi.
• Added support for creation dates for media (and other post types) via REST
• Added JobService to IApi
• Added the status key in the custom status panel
• Added performance update when retrieving subscriber count on forum thread and replies
• Added improvements to previewing experience
• Added missing Telligent.Glow.MultipleFileUpload.FileManagerProvider entry to job server configuration file

Improved/Changed

• Updated Twitter search plugin to pull tweets since last run
• Updated text extraction for abuse detectors to extract meaningful text.
• Updated idea list cache improvements
• Updated users are sent to login page instead of access denied when attempting to access an unauthorized media file
• Updated DisplayName to support 255 characters
• Updated forum list to show latest Thread\Reply, not just the latest thread
• Updated "Invite a member" link now shows in site banner when “Invitation only” activation mode is configured
• Updated Sticky threads now being returned in RSS feed
• Updated Group Navigation Widget - Change "Group Ideas" to "Group Ideation"
• Removed duplicate text from profile select field in User - Login and Create Widget
• Removed IInternalAuthenticationPlugin has been marked as obsolete

Bug Fixes 

• Fixed issue with incorrect expected gender value in REST.
• Fixed cs_posts_deleted_archive table now being dropped when running DeleteMigratedData.sql script
• Fixed logic around username validation when renaming users
• Fixed issue where people searches fail if there were more than 20 searchable profile fields. Updated documentation to UserProfileFields API to accurately identify that paging parameters are not honored.
• Fixed issue where the exceptions filter/dropdown would sometimes not be visible when viewing exceptions
• Fixed issue with IE 11 and lower intermittently not connecting to sockets
• Fixed issue where reverting to a wiki revision did nott revert to the revision's raw body
• Fixed case sensitivity when searching widget contexts in Widget Studio
• Fixed error when deleting group containing subgroups
• Fixed mailing list management panel in 9.0 was incorrectly expecting integers opposed to GUIDs
• Fixed Account Activation Mode Settings not being saved
• Fixed the ability to add translations for custom idea statuses
• Fixed the loss of validation on the body field of the first comment widget if two comment widgets are on the page
• Fixed issue that prevented further listing of other widgets in Widget Studio when any widget with an unknown theme ID
• Fixed accessing private wiki page links no longer redirects unauthorized user to first accessible wiki homepage
• Fixed threads are now correcly marked as read when viewing the thread via a reply permalink
• Fixed thread Reply API times are now consistent and returned in the user’s time
• Fixed UI tweak to remove UI shifting on hover with recommended content
• Fixed correct .aspx extensions not working properly in ideas application
• Fixed Sample image snippet when viewing attachment in widget studio
• Fixed issue with filtering groups in site banner via "include groups" not working
• Fixed honoring of the "Inherit Headers from Parent Theme" widget option
• Fixed issue with event logs not loading when a filter is selected and site is using SSL offloading
• Fixed issue when copying a factory default theme would not copy supplemental files
• Fixed caching issue in Navigation widget - Users Groups - links
• Fixed issue that did not a user to exit preview mode
• Fixed wiki page previewing
• Fixed double encoding issue RSS Feed Widget
• Fixed file uploading in iOS when the upload handle didn't move with the visible link
• Fixed null reference when attempting to delete a user from in-process moderation tab
• Fixed issue with moderation tabs are lost when navigating to delete menu and back
• Fixed issue with hidden content records being orphaned if a user is deleted
• Fixed bad Velocity script when viewing a leaderboard anonymously
• Fixed issue where meta description, title and keywords were always reset on updates
• Fixed issue with URL introspection failing on job server
• Fixed unable to find an existing ideation when adding a new single ideation.
• Fixed usernameFilter in Group member list API working correctly now
• Fixed logic checks in widget studio private APIs when parsing themed import options and listing of fragments
• Fixed Site Banner resizing issue on Touch-based Chrome/Windows
• Fixed issue with users unable to upload files when editing an idea
• Fixed issue paging is not working in ideas (PagedList constructor issue)