Salsa Weekly Highlight: (More) Web Features Upgrades

04:31 PM May 20, 2010

(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

A couple weeks ago, we told you about beginning our Website Management upgrades with Simple Surveys and News Items.

This week, we're putting out enhanced versions of three other Website Management mainstays:

• Tell-A-Friend Pages
• Press Releases
• Blog

And, a feature that will be new for many users:

• Photo Gallery

You should see the upgrades described here in your Website Management tab immediately. (No need to install anything; they're automatic.)

Tell-A-Friend Pages

Tell-A-Friends are among the most widely-used Salsa pages around. (Fun Salsa fact: there have been approximately four million friends told!)

We're not changing the TAF feature set ... only the headquarters interface for building and editing the pages.

You'll find an intuitive two-tab setup sequence for customizing your tell-a-friends with the same options you're used to (less a couple of confusing fields that weren't being used anyway). If there's anything you're unsure about here, it's all in the documentation.

Press Releases

Press Releases are a lot like News Items, and the Press Releases upgrade mostly just provides a smoother user interface.

This upgrade does change the url for the "river of press releases" page, which indexes all your past press releases for visitors to your site. Consult the documentation and update your links accordingly.

Blogs

The blogs feature also cleans up the interface, which now should look a lot more like the rest of Salsa.

If you were using the older blog feature, this will also update the end-user url of the blog itself and of its associated RSS feed. Consult the documentation for more information.

Photo Gallery

Photo Galleries are a simple but very useful tool that enable you to set up browsable image galleries for your site visitors. Share organization icons, photos from your last event, images of the people your organization helps, or anything at all.

Just use the slick image-picker to select any combination of images uploaded to your Salsa image directory, and configure the page as detailed in the documentation.

Hey, this isn't new!

Just like last time, this upgrade actually standardizes the tools in question across all Salsa installations. If none of this looks new to you, it's probably because your configuration has already been using the most up-to-date version. So, never fear: you're not missing out on anything!

More upgrades to other Website Management tools are in the offing for the weeks ahead. And as always, I'm eager to hear your feedback on these (or any other) tools.

One last thing: In last week's highlight, I asked you to let me know if you'd like to receive more frequent updates of code pushes. Many of you emailed me to say yes, indeed you would like more regular notifications. We've got some ideas in the works and I'll make an announcement about them shortly. Keep an eye out.

P.S. -- Monday is the deadline for discounted early-bird registration to the 2010 Salsa Community Conference. Don't put it off and cost yourself an extra $50 -- register today!

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