Improved Account and Social Interaction Features in Osho

Some of the key parts of Dolphin's social networking functionality were long overdue for a good overhaul. Now, we're finally presenting a whole new "My Account" and a set of refined social connection features. This upgrade alone should be enough for everyone to upgrade to Dolphin 7.1 as soon as it comes out, because it will significantly enhance user satisfaction and engagement on any Dolphin-based community. Have a look...

Account

The new Account page is now a lot more friendly and familiar for any new site member. It features a Friends Timeline, which essentially is the same thing as a typical "Feed" in large social networks, showing updates from your friends...

On the side you can see the new trimmed version of Account Control, Friend Requests and New Messages blocks. Together all Account blocks work as an overview of what needs to be done, and a quick doorway to the most important features - a dashboard of sorts.

Spy is still there, and should you want to keep using old blocks, like "Quick Links", they're still available for activation via Page Builder.

Subscriptions, Connections and Friend Requests 

Friend requests now work just as they should - once you get one, you can either accept it via alert in your Account or on Connections page, or when open the requester's profile you'd see this:

So, the system considers current connection state and adjusts the action buttons. Coupled with the new alert box in the account and more prominent display in "Connections" page friend requests are way more "understandable" now. Oh, and here's how the new "Connections" page looks:

 We've also cleaned-up "Subscriptions" page a little. It is now a lot easier to unsubscribe from multiple items and all the unnecessary "variations" of one subscription are removed:

Other Improvements 

Along with the big new additions, we continue fine-tuning modules and features that we've already announced - Timeline, Blogs, media-modules, Spy, etc. Default menu links have been revised, comments in Timeline synchronised with original content comments and Mailbox layout was updated. Many of those changes seem small, but they improve general experience quite a bit. 

Overall, we're about to proceed to "wrap up" stage of Dolphin 7.1 development. Just a couple of "big" things left to do. By "wrap up" I mean general layout review, bug-fixing, testing, upgrade script preparation and packaging. Ah, and by "a couple of big things" I mean a couple of big things that we'll soon tell you about. So, stay tuned!