Upcoming feature release Thursday, Sep. 25

[Ning Developer Admin]

We have a new release coming on Thursday, September 25 at 6pm PST. This release will include:

1) New Message Center & Friend Request Interface: the Network Inbox and Friend Requests are moving out of the Ningbar and will now be fully integrated into your social network on Ning.

2) Simplified Main & Profile Pages: changes include more space between columns, standardized text size across modules, and the introduction of a blog tab. NOTE: if you have customized your network's CSS, please review these important details.

3) A New iPhone Interface: a supported mobile version of your network, accessible at the domain "http://yourdomain.ning.com/m/". You can read about these in more detail here.

Additionally, we're making some changes of particular interest to developers:

1) Removal of Dojo: jQuery, which has a lighter footprint, more extensive documentation, and a higher amount of plug-ins and extensions, will be replacing the Dojo JavaScript framework.

2) Exclusive support of WebDAV access: SFTP will no longer be available.

For screenshots and further details, check out the Preview.

Thanks!
The Ning Team

[Update: With so many new, improved and modified features coming, we are going to take another week to do further testing and polish it up. As a result, this release is now tentatively scheduled to take place on Thursday, Sep. 25. This will allow us to tackle outstanding issues before — not after — this release goes live on to your networks. We want you and your members to have a flawless transition to this new release, and hopefully you understand the need for the delay. We'll continue to update you as we get closer to the new release date.]

[Eric Shannon]

guys, intelligible URLs is much much more important than the stuff you are releasing! get it done soon and you will see many many many more networks created and a lot more organic search engine traffic coming to all of your existing networks.

[JAWAAN]

sounds cool

[Bruce Wagner]

What's wrong with the current URL structure?

[Edward]

I have one question! is this new feature thats being released automatic or do we have to uninstall and install anything new, and how will it affect anything we already may have on our networks? Ed

[Nick Barr]

Hi Eric,

We're working on shorter and simpler URLs, and we expect to unroll this changes in October.

Thanks!
Nick

[Nick Barr]

Hi Edward,

If you're running on standard code, these changes will be automatic.

If you've made major customizations to your CSS, check out this link. We're also disabling gadgets, as mentioned here. Otherwise, none of these changes should impact your network.

Thanks!
Nick

[Freshly-Baked]

Great News!

Cant wait to start hacking up ning with some jQuery-fu.

oh and btw, when did you disable the PHP hacks in the analytics tracking section??
sure would love to see that back in action and working!

- F-B -

[Edward]

Ok another question, does that mean I will no longer have Audio and Video chat, Google calendar and weather on my club site? I just added those items to improve my Metal Detecting club, some of our members are to far away to have meetings in person every month and if this is the case will there be any other audio/video chats I can add? Ed

[Ernie H.]

Hi Edward,

The removal of the Dojo Javascript Platform should not negatively impact the A/V Chat or Google Calendar widgets from your club site. If it does, you can contact a Customer Advocate member at the Help Center at http://help.ning.com and we'll investigate it more closely for you.

Thanks,
- Ernie

[Long John]

I have been using Dreamweaver 2004 with SFTP with no problems so I thought I should test it out using webdav before the change over. As I use VISTA I followed the instructions to add a networked drive which worked fine. However I like to use a local copy of the code and then copy to my ning site so I didn't want to go out of Dreamweaver to copy the file I have just edited in explorer so I then tried to set up Dreamweaver to use webdav however I cannot get it to work. I am using the same parameters I used to set up the networked drive but no luck.

Any help would be appreciated!!

[Edward]

Ok, thanks Ernie. Ed

[Shy Matsi]

FYI: The title says Tuesday, but I see the new day is Thursday.. thanks for the update :) I'm really looking forward to this!