RealTown Development

<p> We have added &quot;Spell Check&quot; functionality to the editor toolbars found in RealTown Groups and RealTown Articles. The spell checker is powered by the open source software &quot;<a href="http://aspell.net/">GNU Aspell</a>&quot; </p> <p> The spell checker currently uses a standard American-English dictionary. We will be updating this dictionary with additional words as needed. If you find the spell checker is marking a correctly-spelled word as misspelled then please post it here. </p>

<p> For those of you that are Group Organizers and Group Moderators, we have just released a new tool to help you manage the posts in your groups. </p> <p> The tool is called <strong>Post Manager</strong> and is only available to Group Organizers and Group Moderators. To access the Post Manager, click the &quot;Post Manager&quot; link in your group&#39;s discussion list. </p> <p> The Post Manager displays an unthreaded list of all posts submitted to the group. From this page you can preview, edit, and delete any post in your group. This tool is especially useful for those of you who want to have better control over the posts in your groups. </p> <p> We are also going to be rolling out some advanced group features very soon, including the ability to have a fully moderated group. In a fully moderated group, all new posts will require approval by a moderator before being published to the group. This can be very useful in situations where you want to have a public group but monitor the posts before they are published. You can then preview or approve new posts using the Post Manager. Once the post is approved, it will be displayed in your group and your subscribers will be notified. </p> <p> If you have any questions, please post them here. </p>

<p>The &quot;Invite to Group by Email&quot; tool has been updated. If you are inviting people to a private group, the email will now include access tokens to enter the private group in case they cannot get in by normal means (that is,by using the &quot;My Group Invitations&quot; page).</p> <p>If the correct tokens are supplied, the user will be redirected to a &quot;confirm subscription&quot; page.</p> <p>The access tokens can only be used once, so there is no harm if the token is spread around.</p> <p>Please let me know if there are issues with private group invitations.</p>

<p> RealTown Groups now offers searching capabilities to help you find discussions of interest. To search group discussions, visit the new <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/search">Discussion Search</a> page. </p> <p> The Discussion Search page gives you powerful searching capabilities to find discussions across all public groups. Additionally, if you are logged in, your search results will also include discussions from your private groups. </p> <p> You can also perform a search within a particular group by using the search form found on that group&#39;s &quot;All Discussions&quot; page. </p> <p class="c1"> <strong>Advanced Searching Options</strong> </p> <p> You can perform advanced search queries directly from the input field by specifying the field you want to search for. For example, you can search for discussions that John Reilly has participated in by searching for &quot;author:John Reilly&quot;. </p> <p> Here&#39;s a list of all of the available search fields and how they work: </p> <ul> <li> <strong>Author:</strong> Searches the &quot;posted by&quot; field for posts written by the specified author. </li> <li> <strong>Subject:</strong> Limit your search to only the subject field. </li> <li> <strong>Contents:</strong> Limit your search to only the post contents. </li> </ul> <p> For the geek in all of us, the Discussion Search also supports boolean operators. In plain English, words like &quot;AND&quot; and &quot;OR&quot; can be used to help direct the search engine on what to find. </p> <p> For example, searching for &quot;realtor <strong>AND</strong> agency&quot; will return results that contain both of the words. If you search for &quot;realtor <strong>OR</strong> agency&quot;, then discussions matching either of the two words will be returned. </p> <p> You can also use the word <strong>NOT</strong> to exclude results that contain a certain phrase. For example, if you searched for &quot;realtor <strong>NOT</strong> agency&quot; will return all discussions that contain the word &quot;realtor&quot; and not the word &quot;agency&quot;. </p> <p> If you have any questions about Discussion Search please let us know. </p>

<p> We&#39;ve enabled two new pages for RealTown Groups that we believe many will find useful: Recent Discsussions and My Discussion Tracker. </p> <p> <b>Recent Discussions</b><br /> <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/recent" rel="nofollow">http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/recent</a> </p> <p> This page is very useful to see what&#39;s happening at RealTown Groups. It displays a list of all of the recently updated discussions across all public groups. This page is available to the public without the need to log in to RealTown. </p> <p> However, if you are logged in, the Recent Discussions page will also include discussions from any private groups you may be subscribed to (in addition to the public discussions). </p> <p> <b>My Discussion Tracker</b><br /> <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/tracker" rel="nofollow">http://www.realtown.com/groups/post/tracker</a> &lt;- requires login </p> <p> My Discussion Tracker is similar to Recent Discussions but is limited to only the discussions you have already previously viewed, which is why it requires you to log in. In other words, think of this page as a way to ask RealTown to show you a list of all the posts you&#39;ve read before so you can check for new replies (discussions with unseen replies will be bolded in the list). </p>

<p>We have just released a major update for your member profiles. The new profiles include some fancy new features along with numerous optimizations.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><u><b>New Features</b></u></p> <p><b>Applets</b><br /> Each of the main sections on your profile are like mini-applications (aka applets). We have plans to introduce more applets very soon (in addition to the ones introduced in this release).</p> <p><b>Friends List Applet</b><br /> Your profile will now show up to 10 of your recently added friends. We have plans to futher customize this applet.</p> <p><b>Groups Applet</b><br /> Your profile now displays the groups you have created along with the groups you are a member of.</p> <p><b>Other Applets</b><br /> Several of the existing applets have been improved as well.</p> <p><b>Applet Ordering</b><br /> The various applets on your profile can now be dragged up or down to order them as you choose. To do this, simply log in to RealTown and visit your own profile, and then drag the titles of the applets up or down. The order you choose will be saved automatically.</p> <p><u><b>Optimizations</b></u></p> <p>Along with the new features, we have highly optimized your profiles to help them load faster. We have enabled server caching for the profiles to make them as fast as possible. Please note that it may take up to 24 hours for certain parts of your profile to be updated.</p> <p>Your hobbies, interests, and activities have always linked to a search results page of other members that share that same property, but now the resutls will come up much faster. This means more people will be able to find you faster if you keep your profile filled out.</p> <p>Please take a moment to view your own profile today and let us know if you have any thoughts.</p>

<p>We have been making some significant changes to RealTown and one of them includes a rewrite of the base code. Initially, RealTown was created entirely from scratch, but once the site began to grow, so did our code base. The biggest obstacle for our developers was the learning curve -- not only did they have to know PHP, but they had to learn RealTown's custom PHP code.</p> <p>After many discussions and meetings, we came to the conclusion that RealTown needs to be in a framework. A framework is a common set of programming code that developers can learn once and use to build many sites. Most frameworks also have a very large developer community, meaning our own development questions can be answered from people outside our 4 walls.</p> <p>Once we were certain that a framework was necessary, we had to answer the next big question: which framework to choose?</p> <p>If you're a PHP developer, you probably have heard of or even used several of the popular frameworks out there. You may have even written your own. We needed something that was not only powerful but had a strong user community. Our two main choices were <a href="http://cakephp.org/">CakePHP</a> and <a href="http://framework.zend.com">Zend Framework</a>.</p> <p>To help familiarize ourselves with the two frameworks, we dove right in to rebuilding some of our applications in them. CakePHP had the best learning curve, where we could have a basic CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) application up in less than an hour. We began rebuilding our Communities application in CakePHP, and we are currently in the process of migrating each of the Communities over to the new platform.</p> <p>To check out the new Communities, <a href="http://www.realtown.com/community-beta">click here</a>.</p> <p>Part-way through the development of the new Communities, we decided to explore the Zend Framework. Setting up a website took a little more time than it did with CakePHP, but once everything was configured it started to become easier.</p> <p>It was around this time that we decided we need to let our own RealTown members create <i>their own</i> communities. We decided to tackle this project as a completely new application written in the Zend Framework. The learning curve of Zend Framework paid off as it is extremely powerful and flexible once you get the hang of it.</p> <p>The &quot;Member Communities&quot; that you are seeing here is powered by the Zend Framework. Also, the &quot;login&quot; page is also now powered by the Zend Framework to take advantage of its powerful Zend_Auth component.</p> <p>Working with two frameworks can be just as confusing as developing under a custom one, so we are slowly rewriting the entire website in the Zend Framework.</p> <p>The first of RealTown's current applications to be re-written in Zend is the RealTown Articles. The new Articles application will have new features and better usability, especially in the area of comments. We will then rewrite the rest of RealTown, starting with the homepage. The Blogs application is going to be re-written as well, so you longer will need to be redirected to the old &quot;realtownblogs.com&quot; web server for managing your blogs.</p>

<p>We have just enabled feeds for RealTown Groups. Subscribing to a feed will allow you to stay updated on new group posts without cluttering your email inbox. The group feeds come in two flavors: RSS and Atom.</p> <p>If you are not familiar with feeds or want to learn a little bit more, check out <a href="http://www.realtown.com/hector/blog/technology/rss-guide">Hector's Guide to RSS</a> (yes, it's a shameless plug for my own blog!)</p> <p>Each public group now has its own feed. You can find the link to the feed underneath the discussion list for the group.</p> <p>Currently, private groups do not have group feeds.</p> <p>There is also a master feed for RealTown Groups that is a collection of all of the latest posts across all public groups. You can find that feed under the list of groups when viewing All Groups.</p> <p>For an added bonus, you can add any of these feeds to your &quot;My RealTown&quot; page by clicking &quot;Add Feed&quot; and entering the feed's URL. It's just another great way to stay up to date with one of RealTown's fastest-growing applications.</p>

<p>We have just enabled a new feature in RealTown Groups that allows Group Organizers to &quot;sticky&quot; a discussion. Sticky discussions will always appear at the top of the discussion lists for that group and are a great for announcements and &quot;must-read&quot; discussions.</p> <p>Sticky discussions will have a light orange background and a special icon next to the title when viewing the discussion list. This will help them stand out against normal discussions.</p> <p>If you are a Group Organizer and want to &quot;sticky&quot; an existing discussion, click the &quot;edit&quot; button for the first post. You will see an option at the bottom to select &quot;sticky&quot; as the type. Click &quot;Submit&quot; and you're all done!</p>

<p>The &quot;Ask the Experts&quot; application in RealTown has been updated. If you have any questions for RealTown's Real Estate Experts, feel free to submit it <a href="http://www.realtown.com/experts">here</a>. We have a team of industry experts including Real Estate Lawyer John Reilly and RealTown CEO Saul Klein in the distribution. </p>

<p>Today we added the &quot;Daily Digest&quot; delivery mode to RealTown Group subscriptions. Each morning, at 2:00am PST, the posts from the previous day will be compiled into a single email and distributed to the digest group subscribers. Each group will have its own digest, so if you are subscribed to several groups you should receive one digest from each group each morning.</p> <p>We realize that very active groups may produce hundreds of messages per day, which could lead to an <i>extremely</i> large digest. To help prevent this, we are limiting the number of posts a digest may contain. By default, group digests may not have more than 15 posts each. We feel that this number is a good balance of usability and maintainability. However, a Group Organizer may override this limitation and increase it to 30 posts per digest for their group, which will affect all digest subscribers.</p> <p>Group subscribers with the &quot;individual&quot; delivery mode are not affected by this daily limitation and will continue to receive email notifications upon each new post.</p> <p>To update your subscriptions, visit the <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/subscription">My Subscriptions</a> page and then click the pencil icon for the subscription you want to modify. You can then choose which email address to send to and your preferred delivery method. The bravest of RealTowners may choose to subscribe to both delivery methods by selecting &quot;both&quot;.</p>

<p>RealTown is preparing to release a new &quot;Friends List&quot; feature over the next few weeks. The Friends List is going to be centered around Member Profiles with a backend Friend Manager in MyRealTown.</p> <p>Now would be a good time to fill out your profile, upload your favorite photo, and start making contacts with other RealTown members.</p>

<p>We have just added a new feature to RealTown Groups. Group Organizers can now promote any Group Member to Group Moderator status.</p> <p><b>What is a Group Moderator?</b></p> <p>Group Moderators are trusted members of the group that have been granted additional group privileges. These privileges include the ability edit and delete any post made to the group. Normally, group members may only edit/delete their own posts.</p> <p>Group Moderators, however, are <b>not </b>allowed to promote other group members. Nor are they allowed to modify or cancel the subscriptions of any other member.</p> <p><b>How do I promote [name] to Group Moderator?</b></p> <p>Only the Group Organizer (the person that created the group) can promote a Group Member to Group Moderator. If you are a Group Organizer, click to view all members of your group from the Manage Groups page. Under each Group Member's name there will be some additional buttons, including &quot;Promote to Group Moderator&quot;.</p> <p>If you wish to demote a Group Moderator back down to a regular Group Member (therefore removing their permission to edit/delete any post), you can do so from the same View Members page.</p> <p>If you have any suggestions for enhancing this feature or have any questions, please post below.</p>

<p>We have just enabled the &quot;Individual&quot; delivery mode of RealTown Group Subscriptions. If a post is submitted to a group that you are subscribed to, and your delivery mode is set to &quot;Individual&quot; or &quot;Both&quot;, then you will automatically receive an email of the post in your email inbox.</p> <p>The email will contain the submitted post in a fashion similar to the way it appears on the web, including &quot;Quote&quot; and &quot;Reply&quot; buttons. There is also a new button that says &quot;View on the Web&quot;, which takes you directly to the post's discussion page to view it in context.</p> <p>If you are familiar with the Individual Messages of RealTown Communities, please note that there is one major difference. Due to the unmoderated nature of RealTown Groups, you may <b>not</b> reply to the email message directly. If you do, your reply will be lost. </p> <p>In order to post a reply, you must come back to the web and visit the discussion page. We apologize if this is an inconvenience, but the decision to drop inbound email support was made to prevent spam, bounces, and auto-replies from polluting your groups.</p> <p>We also have plans to give you all a very robust &quot;Digest&quot; delivery method option. More on that later.</p>

<p><b>RealTown Group Invitations</b></p> <p>In order to help jumpstart group activity on RealTown, we have added a new button on member profiles that allows you to send an invite to join your groups. This feature works exceptionally well on all public and open-membership groups, allowing you to take action to increase group membership.</p> <p>Please note that if your group is set to &quot;invite-only&quot;, then the only way a member can join is to be sent an invitation.</p> <p>Additionally, if a group is set to &quot;private&quot;, then only the group organizer can send invites for the group.</p> <p><b>Invite Limitations</b></p> <p>We are currently only allowing one invite per group, regardless of who is sending it. In other words, if I invite John Doe to my group &quot;RealTown Development&quot;, then no one else can send him an invite to the same group. This should help prevent duplicate requests for the same action.</p> <p><b>Pending Invitations</b></p> <p>If you did not receive the email notification, or are unable to check your inbox, then you may visit your Group Invitations page at any time to manage your incoming requests. I have added a nifty counter next to the link so can easily see how many invitations you have.</p> <p>I am planning on implementing an expiration date for the invitations. We are thinking that a 2 weeks should be enough time to respond to the invite. If there is no response in 2 weeks, the invitation will disappear and you will need to re-invite the member (or let someone else do it).</p>