Must Read New Features

Usernames and Profile Photos

I want to encourage all members to take a look at their usernames to see if there is a way to make them more personal and more descriptive to other members.

I also want to encourage members to consider shortening their username if it is more than 16-20 characters. Longer names (and there are some much longer ones) interfere with the formatting and display of some content. When I see that this is the case I will send a message - but I appreciate your taking a look.

Profile Quota groups

One great new change is Profile Quotas. You can select these by editing your Profile. By default, members are put into the Unassigned quota. You can select from a number of different quotas based on your primary interest for being a member of TheChocolateLife. I can assign different functionality to each group. For example, members in the Unassigned have very restricted capabilities to add new content until they choose a quota to belong to.

Among other things, I will be able to send targeted member emails to profile groups so don't miss out and make sure to move out of the Unassigned quota ASAP.

1. Hover over your name in the top nav.
2. Select Account Settings from the drop-down menu.
3. Click on the Profile tab.
4. Scroll down and select the Quota group you want to belong to.
5. While you are on this page you can add a short bio, select a privacy option, and decide whether you want to approve followers or not. (These work more like Facebook. If you want to be able to exchange Private Notes you can only send notes to someone who follows you.)

Improved Search within Forums (and elsewhere)

There is now a search at the top of the Forums page. This will search for a word or phrase in every Forum category. Within a Forum, the search scope is limited to that Forum. If you click on Images and then search (try " pods "), you will see every image with the word pods in the title or description.

Tags

Tags can be added to any item. Tags are words or short phrases (1, 2, or 3 words) that do NOT appear in the title or description. Tags appear in your profile's tag cloud as well as in the Community tag cloud on the home page. If you see an image with pods in it (for example) and the word pod(s) does not appear in the title or description. Tag it " pods " so people can find them all with a single click!

Profile Shortcuts

Wherever you see a membername with an @ in front of it - @clay for example - it is a live link to that members profile page.

Multiple profiles per account

The most powerful use of this is when the account belongs to a company and the company would like to have a number of profiles be able to add and update the content. The feature arose because Jamroom was created to support bands. The band would be the main account and the profiles would be the band members, managers, and trusted others. I have this turned off by default, but if you want to set it up for you account please ask. If your company or group already has two or more members on TheChocolateLife and you'd like to link them to the same account, please let me know and I will link them.

Smileys 

It's a small thing, but the text editor now enables you to add Smileys. There's only a small set now, but I may be adding more over time.

Image Galleries with "Lightbox" viewing

The old Ning had the ability to put images into albums. This has been replaced with the Jamroom Image Gallery feature. Jamroom makes it much easier to create multi-image galleries and provides the ability to view galleries in a lightbox overlay without having to leave the page you're on. If you don't see the Lightbox icon it means that the image you are looking at is in a gallery all by itself.

I encourage members to edit their images and galleries and to spend a few moments editing the titles and descriptions of the images because there is now context-specific searching. To see how this works, click on Images in the top nav and then search for " pods " (without the quote marks). This will return all of the images that contain pods in the title or description.

For more information on Images and Galleries, visit the >> Images and Galleries FAQ  << .

Publishing Dates

You can schedule a post for a future date and time in the editor.

New Capability - Image Editing (not just Data editing) from within The Image Editor

Added Saturday, January 17th.

On the image editor page there is now an "Edit Image" button. Clicking on this button now loads the image inside a photo editor window. The editor used to be called Aviary (for those of you who might have it on your smartphone) but it's now a part of the Adobe Creative Suite. There are many things you can do to images so I encourge you to explore the possibilities.

One thing that still remains in place is an upper limit of the size of image that can be uploaded - 2MB (if you are still in the Unassigned member quota it's 1MB. If you have an image that is larger than 2MB you must resize it before uploading it to TheChocolateLife. Once it is uploaded you can edit the image online.