What will be in the new roadmap? Just curious.

[Denis]

Yes 2012 is here. er doomsday isn't coming in December, is it?

I just keeping checking to see whether we have a new roadmap yet. One of the reasons is our plan to shut down one of our networks. But we are very curious about what's ahead before we hit the next annual pay date in June.

If you have read anything mentioned anywhere here about things to expect in the next roadmap please share.

If nothing what are you expecting? 

[Jordon McGee (Jords)]

Weather its hard or not shouldn't be to big of an issue, especially when Ning's competitors are rolling out solutions that are equivalent to current technology that is the industry standard on the web. The main delay would a decision to dedicate resources to the feature development.

[Charlie]

I also want us to be able to see when members last logged in.

This is a really useful tool as it enables us to see if people who aren't actively posting are still logging in and using the site, over people who have forgotten they even joined the site or are simply not interested in being a member any more but can't be bothered to come back and leave properly, so their profile page is still there even though they left months ago. 

As with having the ability to move posts and change who the group hosts are, it's about giving us tools that help us manage our site more smoothly, giving us greater control over our own sites and how we choose to manage them.

[Eric Suesz]

Hey, Charlie. Check this out. Might be useful. 

[Charlie]

Hiya Eric,

Thanks for that, I am doing my first 'export' now lol

But I actually want to see this on the management pages for members (Dashboard ->Members->Moderation). We currently have over 9300 members and it would be really helpful (and a quicker way to access this information) if it was listed on the Members Moderation page. Where we have the columns 'Name', 'Email', 'Role' and 'Date Joined' we need another column that shows 'Last Logged In', rather than only having the information available on a report that takes a long time to access. 

It's all about making things quicker and easier for us to manage our site. The information needs to be available 'at a glance'. I really appreciate that Ning has made a start by adding this info to the exported member data list, but we need Ning to go further with this and actually place it on the members moderation page as well. That is what I am asking for here.

Thanks for reading this Eric. Having read through other threads I am fully aware that I am not the only one asking for this, so I really hope that Ning will now put this on the roadmap :)

[Eric Suesz]

Totally understand that you'd prefer to have that data directly in the interface. (I had a feeling you would say that!) Stay tuned for some improvements to moderation very soon (like next week). It won't include this particular detail, but we are working to make managing members and roles easier.

[Charlie]

Looking forward to seeing what these improvements are, Eric :) 

I (and others here too I expect) will keep pushing for the 'last logged in' column to be added to our dashboards :)

[Jordon McGee (Jords)]

Great to hear!

[Denis]

Thanks for the hint Eric. Talking about moderation I'd like to suggest something. Let's have a way to tract recent activity from our network administrators and moderators. Some of our networks have about 5 or more administrators and moderators. These persons have powers and sometimes they modify something that gets members complaining before the NC finds out. A well organized NC could handle this well by getting admins to report their activity always but having a place where we can simply view what has been done by a network administrator would be awesome.

I used to see this kind of information years back when I was running a forum on Vbulletin. When you log in as an administrator, on the news section of the administration panel, you see recent activity by admins, when they logged in and what they did.

If this is not too demanding please consider it.

[Phil Sim]

This is a really good idea. I've got a lot of moderators and we have ended up with people complaining about deletions I've not known who to talk to when they've been over zealous.

[Denis]

Yeah, networks with large membership and activity really need it. Smaller networks probably don't. But we all want our networks to grow, I guess.

[John Petrowski]

The answer to "what do we want" is "everything." 

As NING rocks, and it does rock, I work a lot with Wordpress and everytime I'm doing something with WP all of NING's flaws become evident. I can do ANYTHING with WP. Developers are making custom themes, plugins are insane and the functionality is fantastic. 

In Wordpress if I want "this to go there" then it happens. NING is so restrictive. I should be able to completely customize my groups page....not how the NING engineers THINK I want to be but how "I" want it to be. I should be able to drag anything anywhere. 

Every single page should be able to be customized. Again, not how NING thinks I want it but how "I" want it. Until they open this up wide to developers it'll continue to be stunted. NING engineers can only do so much. I'd hate to question their skill but some things that appear to be very simple, according to the NING engineers are complicated. That's not much left in this day and age that's complicated....if you actually know what you're doing. 

The widget gallery is an embarrassment. Really. We should have 500 widgets to pick from. 

But alas, the exact same thing that NING craves also greatly limits them - the need for control. 

[Arnold Burian]

Well....Ning is designed to be easy to use. If you want total control and complete customization, you really should be hosting your own platform. I'm not being sarcastic - just being honest. As far as I'm concerned, I would appreciate Ning moving its customization options closer to what Squarespace does....not WordPress.

I you have ever tried hosting your own WordPress installation, you can quickly get in over your head trying to be an IT administrator for your own site.