Release notes: Dialogue v1.7.2

This release announcement covers a number of upgrades made to Dialogue over the past few months. We've made significant changes to the administration side of things to make it easier for you to manage your discussions and get to where you need to go.

What's new

Brand new discussion dashboards and management page

Let's start with your new Discussion Management page:

This is now a much simpler beast to make it clearer for you to see headline stats and your list of discussions.

The first thing you'll see are top-line stats for your whole site and the ability to take your site-wide exports, followed by your list of discussions.

From your list of discussions you can click into each discussion's very own dashboard. This allows you to perform all the tasks you could previously, but editing and exporting for individual discussions as well as opening and closing just got a lot easier to see and do!

User exports

You'll also now find your user export data in the Users section, which we think makes much more sense.

Private and public discussions now toggleable

You can now switch your discussions between public and private and back again. This enables you to use private discussions as a draft mode if you wish and then make them public when you are ready.

If your discussion is meant for some eyes only, keep it private and it will be hidden from the homepage, the search functions and won't have any social media sharing widgets attached.

More than five ideas visible on your discussion homepages

It used to be that only five ideas would show on your discussion homepages - not any more!

If you ask us, we can change the number of ideas visible on the initial page of your discussions. This will be a site-wide setting, so make sure other users are happy with the number you'd like it set to if you have multiple discussions across your Dialogue.

What else?

Along with all that wonderful stuff, we've fixed a few bugs, tidied some bits and amended things you have spoken with us about, such as:

Embeddable media in discussions

The WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get!) toolbar for discussions now also has the little rich media feature added to make it easier for those of you not comfortable with HTML to add in videos and other rich media embeds to your discussions.

Removing jsmith

One of those suggested changes was to remove the example 'jsmith' username instructions we had provided on the registration form. If you have your own preferred naming-convention then this will ensure we haven't given an example which may contravene it.

Closed discussions got styled

For clarity, closed discussions now just have a 'Read' button, rather than the same 'Get involved' button as open discussions.

Also...

Amongst other things, loads of behind the scenes work to make it easier to upgrade you all, some improvements for phone users, social media sharing widgets and passwords.