If you click on 'Forum Admin' you'll see a brand new Admin Panel that we've been working on for many months. A lot of research and hard work went into this new interface.
What did we research?
We talked to people who ran community sites, from forums to blogs and asked them what they do on a daily basis on the backend of their site. From this we came up with a list of tasks that you do pretty often, and a list of tasks that you only do a few times (such as setting your forum's description).
So what's new in the admin panel?
- Completely New Look & Feel - we hope you'll enjoy it better then the last one.
- Summary page - helps you get to where you want to go.
- Recommendations page - We'll be adding more here in the future, but these are suggested recommendations to help you run a successful forum.
- Spam Page telling you how much spam we've killed, for instance, on support, we've automatically removed 20,036 spam posts in the past year!
- Sidebar page (this was the 'Widgets' page and we think this name is a bit more straight forward).
- Privacy Page - to make it easier to find your forum's privacy settings
- Categories page - a cleaner interface for adding and moving categories around.
- Content Importer - previously known as the Blog Importer, this allows you to import any RSS content, from your personal blog to Yahoo News.
- You'll also see the avatars of you co-admins in the top right of your forum.
Many of your old pages, such as the Memberships page and Theme Selector are just the way they were. We'll be adding improvements to the admin panel over the next few months, but expect to see new major changes to other areas of Lefora over the next few months.
What are some of the things we are working on?
- Finishing touches on the Directory we just launched
- A new Invite system that plugs directly into your email
- Search Engine Optimization - making sure your forum is found by google searches.
- Translations into other languages - We NEED your help!
- Bi-Weekly Newsletters to members of your forum
- Email Notifications to members who have been approved to join a forum.
- A better forum importer
As always, if you find a bug, please let us know by posting in support. Start a new Topic with a descriptive title when appropriate. We constantly making upgrades, so we like it when you report bugs to us - it helps us make releases sooner and we fix them promptly, sometimes within minutes.
