Having been around the block, other social platforms. I have a features list for Ning.
1. Mentions and hashtags. Also being able to place recent comments, mentions and hashtag widgets on pages and other content.
2. Support for smilies, emojis. All posting areas.
3. Manage the text editor tool bar. Decide what view loads first. Wyciwyg, html. Decide what buttons load.
4. Ability to share content by email. Add share button to pages, profiles, posts.
5. Add a gifts area. Attach gifts to comments.
6. Create import tools for other platforms.
7. Create export tools for Ning data, all of it.
8. Add a rating system for posts, profiles and pages.
9. Clean up the videos area so the likes and sharing options display at the top of the page. Same for the music section.
10. Make working polls widgets.
11. Assign categories to posts automatically based on tags or hashtags within posts.
12. Invite friends to a particular post.
13. See a list of all the people you requested friendship with on the site.
14. Control the maximum limit of content, friends, changes you can make to anything you do on the site based on custom limits.
15. Add footer controls to the design studio.
16. Add global header and footer areas to add widgets to.
17. Separate main page and post view page layout.
18. Add a column width adjustment area to layout editor.
19. Pingomatic integration and xml rpc pingbacks, trackbacks, linkbacks and alexa semrush analytics.
20. Create down grade tool to Ning 2.0 in case people with Ning 3.0 have a problem.
21. Allow network creators to control what individual html tags should be accepted.
22. Allow the uploading of .php files for developers. Create a testing area.
23. Fix the music page so people can add content to it using the layout editor. And also add uploaded songs to profile page as well as add music activity to the activity feed.
24. Control what types of content activity the activity feed displays. Such as no forum topic creation, but yes to forum replies. No sharing to facebook, but sharing to other platforms. Etc
25. Add albums support for videos, photos.
26. Add files and folder sharing feature.
27. Add wiki feature.
28. Add links directory feature.
29. Add email subscription and RSS feed options for groups and group content as well as profile content.
30. Keep up the good work.
Replies
Hi there!
Aha, I knew that you will make the post like this one day :-)
1. There were some works related to the push notifications, mentions etc. however right now they are on pause as other tasks have become our main priority
2. I have added your vote in the suggestion related to the emojis that we have created in the system.
3. Hmm, that seems to be a cool suggestion but I'm not sure that it would be widely used as usually most people do use just a default set up for the features like this.
4. The main disadvantage here is that if you won't be moderating your content on 24/7 bases this feature would be used by spammers widely.
5. Based on the experience from 2.0, gifts functionality hasn't shown itself well and hasn't been used a lot, that's why we are not able to spend our resources on it.
6. I'm not sure that the tool would be a good idea as there are so many things that go wrong and the supervision of the developer is highly recommended, so I don't think that such tool would be created in the near future but I would definitely create a suggestion.
7. Your vote has been added to the already existing suggestion
8. Could you please describe what do you mean? Is it the rating based on views, votes, likes, mentions, shares? Should each type of the post (discussion, blog, article) have separate "rating board"?
9. I'm not quite understanding what do you mean under the "clean up", however, if you wish to replace the share options you can do this with a simple javascript, if necessary I can write one for you.
10. We have the poll module, and as far as I see it's working here on creators, do you have any issues with it, if yes please let me know so could report a bug to the tech team.
11. The suggestion related to such functionality has been created in the system, once the decision is made by the management I'll post it here on creators.
12. It seems to be no difference between regular share and the option to invite somebody to a post, don't you think so?
13. Really reasonable suggestion, I have added to the list of ideas as well.
14. I have found several suggestions related to the custom limits, so your vote has been added to each of them
15. What exactly do you wish to control in the footer of the site? At the moment you can use below footer add box if you wish to add some additional blocks to the footer, for example, you may see how it works here on creators.
16. There are below the header and above footer ad boxes on each page in site pages where you can put any widgets which support embedding. Do you mean the ability to place there modules like blog, forum etc.?
17. Each page in site builder has its own layout, including the home page that has been chosen by you.
18. There are 3 possible settings for the column width presented in site-builder for each page on site and pages tab. If none of them is satisfactory for you, they could be changed with a bit of CSS code, if help needed just let me know and I'll provide you with the code
19. That is the new one, I'll pass it to the management and once there would any decision made or any additional info needed I'll get back to you.
20. The downgrade tool is a step back in the platform progress, and the time that would be spent on this feature could be used to develop something new for Ning 3.0
21. The tags that could be or not accepted by the system are located deeply in the core code, I'm afraid it would be easier to create the new site builder from a scratch.
22. We already have such suggestion and I personally would love to see such ability presented, I have added your vote to it.
23. As I see you have already mentioned to one of our account managers that you want to place Music module on other pages, the other has been passed to the management for the review.
24. I have added your vote to the suggestion related to the activity feed extended option as it was mentioned before by some other creators
25. Your vote has been added to the suggestion, however, meanwhile, you can use categories as albums I guess
26. The File manager is working for this purpose, also in our terms and conditions, it's written that we are not a file hosting site (the site to exchange file between each other).
27. This suggestion is also has been registered before, you vote for this feature has been added to it.
28. This feature has been suggested already once and I still don't understand the purpose of it, if you wish to list somewhere the links to the external services you can use HTML module, if you wish to use it make it easier to surf through your network, well, the advanced search function seems to be more convenient, isn't it?
29. In a group, you have the same modules as on the network itself and if you scroll the page of forums in a group to the bottom you will see the button "follow", that you can use to sign up on email updates.
30. Thanks, we will try our best :-)
Best wishes,
Ning Team.
3. It's an option on Ning 2 sites.
4. Same as 3. The option wouldn't be abused if you could only send to friends a certain amount of times. As in, once. Sending to emails outside the network would be limited to the amount of invitations you have remaining for the day. There's a fine line between advertising, interest and spamming. It's separated by necessity, then functionality, then needlessness, in that order.
5. A lot of networks I personally have been on used gifts to connect with people. Primarily because you were able to leave comments for people and attach a premium image to them. If all gifts were free, or you could choose a custom price for certain gifts, more people would use them. Particularly networks relating to art, or ones where you could add your own images. It's a huge part of branding and it keeps people interested and happy on a personal level.
6. Accounts with personal account manager and higher could apply to have it enabled on a case by case basis.
8. I was thinking based automatically on a view count system. The option for votes is appealing as well. Popularity based on comments, likes and other general activity such as shares should also factor into this at some point. And yes, each type of content should have it's own rating board.
9. Placing the share buttons above the content, not below it.
10. The polls widgets for displaying new and active and featured polls do not show up if they are applied to a page.
12. Inviting someone to post is different than sharing it because you're sharing it to a static place people come back to check periodically. This way it's personally saying, I'm inviting you specifically, not a thousand other people to come and see this and it's delivered as a private message.
15. Design studio limits do not allow footer borders, text colours, modules etc to be seen as they do in the Ning 2.0 design studio available on both profiles and the main site. While I'm on the subject, design studio functionality for profiles Ning 3.0 ought to be a thing.
16. Yes that's what I mean. But make it site wide.
17. I know that, but you can't separate what widgets appear when viewing a specific post, as opposed to an index listing of the posts sorted in the order you want them to be listed in to.
18. A column width slider would work well here.
20. I understand.
21. This is actually a part of tinymce, no?
25. It's not doable in cases where members want to make things happen but say personalize albums we can't possible put together. Like of a house, or a cat, or a night out.
26. So members can't share a simple .pdf file then.
28. The purpose is to have a list of references.
29. Groups don't have the RSS feed option, like the other modules do for folllowing updates via RSS.
Hi there!
3. Nope, on 2.0 you are not able to choose which buttons would be shown only the view could be changed.
4.
5. Based on the statistics that we have and the number of support tickets related to the gifts, we can tell that at this moment they are not popular at all, probably several years ago they were but not at this point I should admit.
6. Unfortunately, the account manager isn't the person who has access to the database and the skills required to handle extraordinary situations related to teh code.
8. Thanks for the clarification, the suggestion has been posted
10. Right now they do, as I know it has been fixed a few days ago.
12. For example, when you are sharing something on the facebook, you can also add the text to the shared content. In such case, you can write there any personal message you wish, and lets' imagine you are inviting somebody from the facebook to post something on your network, somehow the system should understand to whom the message should be sent, so you would need to find the profile of somebody, wouldn't it be easier just open the profile on the facebook itself and just sent the link to your friend, as both approaches would require you to search for the specific person on facebook.
15. Yep, but those could be changes with few code lines, also the colors there are getting picked up based on the colors you have chosen for the other elements in order to make everything be in harmony. Regarding the design studio for profile pages, at the moment, if you put member's customizable HTML box on the profile page of the member they should be able to insert their own CSS and customize their profile in that way.
16. You can just don't use that field in such case the modules that you have placed on the page would appear in the place we are talking about, maybe I'm missing something of course. Could you please describe for example the work and layout of the forum module in that field so I could understand better how exactly they should work, deliver your suggestion fully.
17. If you wish to have such indeed control over the posts I think that would be better to use site and pages and create the separate page with HTML module and represent it as the post and have the other page where all such pages would be listed. In such case, you will be able to control modules for each blog and everything else
18. I don't how the column wide slider is related to the tool which is determining the width of the column by pixels
21. And yes and no. The first time the tags are getting filtered by the tinymce, which is not a problem to change, then the tags are getting to the core code where some of them are getting filtered as well.
25. If a member wants to have personal album yep it's not going to work however if we are talking about whole network organization the categories could be used with success.
26. The member can share simple .pdf file just don't make your whole site be the place where each member in each post is sharing the .pdf files especially protected by the copyright
28. If it's the purpose you can simply use html module and the custom page to create the list of useful links.
29. Agree, groups don't have RSS feeds, so I have created the suggestion and give them one, or several ones for each instance. The management would decide which option would fit better.
Best regards,
Ning Team.
16. It's really simple. I'm talking about recreating the area on 2.0 networks that you can drag modules under it where it displays itself on every page. Like how the username module appears. Like how the Ning account bar displays. It's a fixed point. Just like custom code. Only it's done on a site wide basis.
18. Column width sliders make it easier to visually design the page width on a per column basis. So you don't need to clutter up design studio advanced CSS with unnecessary code. Here's a working example of this in action using Dolphin. http://demo.boonex.com/administration/pageBuilder.php?Page=index
Username admin password dolphin
Here's an example of this used manually as an extra widget using Social Engine. https://demo.socialengine.com/admin/content
Notice, Social Engine even has an area where you can add blocks throughout the global header and footer. https://demo.socialengine.com/admin/content?page=2 and https://demo.socialengine.com/admin/content?page=1
Many, modern, site builders today offer this functionality. It's not new. It's actually quite old. Even PHPFox and IPBoard and VBulletin have this. As does Wix, Weebly, Una, Socibd, Jamroom, Social Go, Spruz, Elgg, etc. My point being it's a proven technology that helps you see things clearly.
Even Ning 2.0 has it. I find it kind of odd that it's not being used now because especially where groups are concerned, take a look at both the page builders for Dolphin and Social Engine, the only public ones I can find atm, and you'll see there are separate areas where you can customize everything about groups. You can do the exact same thing with PHPFox and many other platforms. With Ning, you can only customize a simple title for the group hub. Little if anything else about it is there to customize. I wish you could choose the default features for groups when ever a new one is created, but that's just me. doing this on Social engine, Dolphin etc, is standard. It's done by dragging it into existence, literally. when ever you created a new group in Ning 2.0, in PHPFox and other platforms, you can control what features the group has upon creating it and setting up the title, description, etc.
Hope that helps.
Hi there!
16. Such module that is placed on each page of the network could spoil a bit the whole concept of the ability to have a completely different layout for each page on the network, however, such feature could save a lot of time for people who are creating the sites where several modules should be placed on each page. What do you think if in the suggestion I'll make a note that this modules (area) would be optional and could be enabled and disabled by the network creator?
18. I have created the suggestion related to the column width. It, of course, would be an additional option that would help to create something unique, but at the same time in the hands of the person who is not familiar with the design, it could spoil the look of other modules placed in teh column and so on.
Best regards,
Ning Team.