Feature request: User Announcement Section on Homepage

jfriend

I just put this in uservoice. Discuss it here or vote for it there if you like it.

http://smugmug.uservoice.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/910161-create-user-announcement-section-on-homepage

Create User Announcement Section on Homepage

Make an announcement section on the homepage to make it easy for us to "announce" a new gallery. Further, anyone who comes to visit your homepage can more easily see what you've recently put up and see a short description of each one.

I find that when I put up a new gallery, it's great to announce it on Facebook with a short description of what's in the gallery and enough info so someone can decide whether they want to view it. But, this only works for people that use FB and are already friends of mine on FB.
When someone just discovers my Smugmug site for the first time, they don't see any chronological history of descriptions that helps guide them to what has been posted recently and might be of interest to them.

The idea would be that you make short little posts kind of like a tweet or FB post, but each one goes in a scrolling list on your homepage. There would be an RSS feed for it and someone else could probably connect it to FB and Twitter, but it really has a slightly different purpose than those. Then, each time you add a gallery, you add a short post to your homepage describing the new gallery.

When someone comes to your homepage, they can see what has been recently added and what might be of interest to them. Much more helpful and descriptive than just a list of galleries or categories.

Given that's it's a pretty generic list of posts, users would probably find all sorts of other things it could be used for too (announcing promotions, discounts, etc...).

Andy

Good stuff, as we're looking at some things re: the homepage, even as we speak. Thanks John!

jfriend

Other ideas related to this. When you create a new gallery, it could be automatically announced in the announcements section if you added an announcement comment when creating the gallery.

Public and password protected galleries could be announced. I don't think it makes sense to publicly announce an unlisted gallery, though a user could do so by simply typing their own text.

You could support automatically echoing announcements to the user's FB or Twitter account so they would be in both places.

mbrady

I'll vote for this too. I've been using the Bio box for that sort of thing, but it's a bit cumbersome to do manually edit the HTML for the links and stuff, especially if there are frequent updates (fortunately I don't update that often). See http://www.ruama.com for an example of how I've been doing that.

Malte

Good one John, gave it two.

Malte