We've got some exciting enhancements coming in our first platform update for 2021.
This upgrade is now available on all platforms
In this release, we're focusing on delivering your most requested upgrades to the Activity Feed widget, designed to increase engagement between users on your platform.
The Activity Feed Widget will now allow users to:
- Sort posts in the Activity Feed by Trending or Most Recent
- Control the number of posts that appear in the Activity Feed
- See posts made by users on someone else's profile page
This blog will give you a sneak peek of these upgrades and show you how to get started with the new features.
New Activity Feed widget settings
A new settings menu has been added to the Activity Feed widget, allowing each user to set their preferences for sorting posts, and the maximum number of posts to display in their widget.
To find the Activity Feed Settings menu:
- Go to the Dashboard
- Select Customise (located in the top right of the page)
- Find the Activity Feed widget
- Select the Settings cogwheel (located in the top right of the widget)
Choose how to sort posts
The team has developed two new ways for sorting the Activity Feed, thanks to feedback from our Brands and research into what users love to use in the most popular social platforms. Users will now be able to sort posts by:
- Trending: This new option is now the default method for sorting posts. It sorts based on the age of each post and the number of likes it receives. This ensures that the newest and most popular posts appear towards the top of the feed, and slowly move down as new content gets added. Posts within the last 24 hours will always appear towards the top to ensure the Activity Feed shows the latest posts.
- Most Recent: As the name suggests, this option sorts posts in the Activity Feed by newest to oldest, without using the new Trending system. This method allows the user to see the latest posts in their country, regardless of how many likes they receive.
In the example below, we can see that the posts sorted by Trending give slightly older posts higher priority depending on how popular they are, while the posts sorted by Most Recent ignore popularity entirely and show the newest posts first.
Set the maximum number of posts
The Number of posts option allows users to set the maximum number of posts that the Activity Feed widget can load at any one time.
By default, the widget loads up to 100 posts. Users can now customise this and choose to see 5, 10, 25, 50 or 100 posts at a time.
See posts made between users
In addition to the new Activity Feed widget settings, we've also improved the Activity Feed to show posts made by any user on someone else's profile page. This upgrade helps you keep track of conversations between two other people when the original message was not a self-post – great for keeping track of birthday messages!
Posts made by one user on another user's page will look similar to self-posts that already appear on the Activity Feed, but will show the name of the author as well as the name of the profile page owner to show that the post was made on their page.
Each user's name still contains a link to their profile page, and selecting Reply continues to take the user to the post to read replies, drop some likes and write a reply of their own.
Customise Activity Feed phrases
The header/name portion of each post in the Activity Feed is now fully customisable as a phrase in the Languages tool. This allows you to change the formatting to suit your requirements – whether it's changing the sentence to match you r language structure, or adding a bit of your Brand's flair.
Platform administrators can change the Activity Widget phrase using the following steps:
- In the Toolbox, navigate to System ➔ Languages.
- Select your desired language.
- Choose the section named Social.
- Search for the following description: "Label for header displaying the author and recipient of a post".
- Edit the phrase accordingly, then scroll to the bottom of the page and select Update.
For more information, see Updating a Phrase.
Should you have any questions around these changes, feel free to get in touch with our Support Team at wmsupport@franconnect.com.