Blogs Revamp in Dolphin 7.1 Osho (UPDATE: Small Calendar)

Dolphin is getting increasingly popular as a content generation social networking platform, and we see Blogs as one of the most important modules now. So, in 7.1 we've improved them quite a bit, and yet not too much, to make sure 3rd party mods still work well. Here's what to expect:

Post Snippet 

The way snippets are formatted and displayed is one of the major factors that influence your site's popularity. Mostly it is known to affect pageviews-per-visitor metric, because users get to open and read more posts if snippets are engaging. 

So, to liven-up the snippets we added photo-thumbnails, increased front sizes, removed clutter and added some "negative space" to focus attention.

As you may see the thumbnails go to the right side, as it turns out to be the most favourable way to keep things in order, especially when in some posts thumbnail images are not present. We also removed most of the meta information to scrub off noise. 

The Post

The main post block is also much more neat now. Post image is moved to the right, duplicate block title fixed, default fonts and spaces increased for better readability. 

The post is still created using TinyMCE editor, so rich text formatting and media embedding features are there for your site members to play with.

Post Page

The entire page of a blog post has been rearranged. It now has a more "classic" layout with post and comments on the left and all the meta data on the right. Again, this is done to make sure the most important content is prominently separated from any information mishmash that all those categories, action buttons, tags and author bio typically add. 

Perfectionists among you may consider cleaning the page even more by removing "rate", "categories" and "tags" blocks via Page Builder, if need be.

Blogs Homepage

The main page in blogs module features just posts and top blogs. "Blogs" snippets that you see on the right side received updated avatar display style, plus we removed "Description" word to save some space (a subtle change that somehow made a big difference).

Pagination system now has a new set of default "Per page" settings that just make more sense - it's "10, 20, 50, 100, 200" now instead of "5, 10, 15, 25".

Next Up

There are some other things coming to blogs (social sharing and "liking" buttons and some cosmetic improvements), but we'll cover them in more detail later - they're not blogs-exclusive, anyway.

That's that... we will be sharing more details about specific changes that we make in 7.1 to make sure you're not caught by surprise when updated version becomes available, and also to explain rationale behind everything we add, change or remove. Next up, we'll be talking about "Photos". Stay tuned!

UPDATE:

And just a couple of hours after this note was posted we added a new little feature - a new block with a "compact" calendar, that you can use on side column in different pages. We expect to use it in different modules, too.

 Dates with large number links show that that number of posts was posted. Simple, and looks great!

Plug

Dolphin 7.1 is a "near-term" update that should be available relatively soon. It is being designed to be highly compatible with Dolphin 7.0.9 and upgrade script will be provided. Dolphin licenses will work just as well with Dolphin 7.1 as they do with 7.0.9, because they are permanent and not version-specific. We recommend to make a buying decision about Dolphin license ASAP, since we may have to increase Dolphin license when 7.1 is released.