Today we are excited to announce the launch Beta 1 of our Mobile Activeboard application. You need to have a gold ActiveBoard subscription to use the mobile site.

We are excited to support the following devices

• Apple iOS 3.2-5.0 beta
• Android 2.1-2.3:
• Android Honeycomb
• Windows Phone 7
• Blackberry 6.0
• Blackberry Playbook
• Palm WebOS (1.4-2.0)
• Palm WebOS 3.0
• Firebox Mobile (Beta)
• Opera Mobile 11.0
• Kindle 3

To launch the mobile site, simply visit your favourite ActiveBoard from any mobile browser.

You can always visit the Standard ActiveBoard site by clicking the "Full Site" Button from the Mobile ActiveBoard menu. This will load the standard site by default on your phone. (You can switch back to the mobile site by clicking on the "Mobile Site" link at the bottom of any ActiveBoard).

You can also test out the mobile interface from any browser by appending mobile.spark to the URL.

For example, if the URL to your forum is http://adbutler.activeboard.com, you can visit the mobile site by visiting http://adbutler.activeboard.com/mobile.spark

While the standard ActiveBoard interface currently has more features, mobile ActiveBoard is a great way to engage with users online from a mobile device -- our developers are continuing to add more features to the mobile version.

One of the new features we're excited to unveil for ActiveBoard is the new Emoticon Management Console! From here, you can track your custom emoticon usage, and access the new ordering feature we've made available. 

Usage Statistics

 First off, lets dig into the usage statistics. Each time a post or private message uses a certain emoticon, the use is recorded and added to the total uses. The total number of uses to date can be seen under the Forum/Private Message Uses column. Additionally, each time an emoticon is used in a chat message, the use is recorded and can be seen under the Chat Uses column.

So what do you do with all this information? Well, once you get a sense of which emoticons are the most popular, then you might decide to order them in a specific way. This brings us to the next big feature: "favorite" emoticons!

Favorite Emoticons & Ordering

Each custom emoticon now falls under one of two categories: favorite or regular. Favorite emoticons will be displayed before regular ones whenever they're split into multiple pages. Lets take a look at how this can be set up.

First, lets get to the management console. Open up the administration panel from your ActiveBoard, and go to Settings->Posting->Custom Emoticons and click configure. Now click on the "Manage" tab to open up the management console. Adding emoticons to your favorites is very straight forward! Simply select the emoticons you wish to add, and click the "Add to Favorites" button (see screenshot).

Now, once you have several emoticons set to favorite, you can further order them by specifying an internal order. To change this, simply enter new values into the "Order" field, and click "Save". Your custom emoticons will now be displayed according to the order specified (1 = first, 2 = second etc). You can use this feature to push popular emoticons to the front of the list, to avoid unnecessary searching through page after page of unused emoticons. The following screenshot show's the admin panel settings.

 Finally, the result! The favorite emoticons have been pushed to the front of the list so that they're easy for users to get at.

 We're currently working on a ton of great stuff, but we're always looking for other ways to improve our products! So please don't hesitate to submit a feature request via email (general@sparklit.com), support request, or through the "Make a Suggestion" link in the tabs at the top on your Administration Panel.

The much anticipated forum theme & template system for ActiveBoard has arrived!

On March 8th, we will be migrating all ActiveBoards to use the theme system. This will not affect your general forum usage, and may be enabled at any time at your own discretion prior to the migration.

The theme system will provide you with an improvements to the way you change the style on your forum through an on-the-fly visual style editor, individual page template editing, and theme management for keep old styles, for example, a seasonal Christmas style.

If you have any questions, or run into any problems along the way, please submit a support request or email our general[at]sparklit.com inbox and let us know! We'll have it fixed as quickly as possible.

Up and coming in the wide world of ActiveBoard are some significant changes to the way that themes work, and the addition of both an on-the-fly style editing system, and a template editing back-end for the power user. Clients will be able to completely customize the way their forum looks and feels.

An overview of the new features includes:

• Updated Administration Panel Sections
• New Themes & Theme Selection
• Easier-to-use Style Editor & Preview System
• Theme Template Editor
• Theme Backup and Storage Manager

Administration Panel

We took a good look at the options available in the Administration Panel with regard to the style of your ActiveBoard, and the options which govern how much of what displays, and the custom HTML options. The end result was a split from "Style & Appearance" into two new sections, "Theme & Style", and "Display".

The Theme & Style section encompases the browsing and selection of themes, style editing and previewing, header text and logo, forum icons, template editing and lastly theme management.

The Display section consists of the options which handle how many topics and comments per page show up, their default order, the SEO and meta configuration, and both your inline and custom HTML fields.

Themes & Selection

We've been aware that our theme selection has been a little dated for some time now, and wanted to do something about it. My colleague Willem was set to the task of devising a quick and snazzy way of selecting themes for your ActiveBoard, and he's come up with a slick system to accomplish the task.

Style Editing

Modifying the style of your forum has been a thorn in everyone's sides for a long time -- how to accomplish this in an usable way which is completely dynamic. A problem? I think not!

The new ActiveBoard style editor allows you to change the look and feel of your board on the fly, without leaving the page. You can view the forum, and navigate around with your changes visible even before you actually apply them to make sure they're just the way you want them.

Template Editor

For a long time, we've wanted to offer additional customizations to ActiveBoard on a per-client basis, but technically speaking this is difficult when you're using an internal framework and only the content is dynamically created by the clients and the members of their boards.

As a result, we've come up with a template parsing system which will allow you to modify the layout and display of the majority of your ActiveBoard.

This is actually related to my post from a little while ago, Templates & Layout Customization, which outlined template parsing in BlogBaker. The template parser in ActiveBoard has been expanded, so technically speaking it is more powerful than the options available in BlogBaker. We'll be bringing BlogBaker up to speed in this regard soon!

Theme Manager

If you can create, modify, and save themes... you had best be able to manage them too! We're not letting anyone down in this regard, and will be providing a theme management system to keep track of your saved themes. You will be able to activate any theme from the manager, edit them, delete, and also preview the theme on your forum as if you had activated it. In other words, your users will never be impacted while you test!

Magic & Beyond

Well, unfortunately it isn't magic! Sparklit is keen to provide all of our clients with high quality, ingeniously designed software which both the geeky power user, and the happy-go-lucky casual user can use easily and painlessly!

I'll also include a little hint of two things to come:

Search Upgrades

We'll be adding an upgraded search system which will support some fancy additional options: such as + to indicate the word must exist, - to indicate the word must not exist, and " to indicate a string of text which must exist in a search. This new search application will be based off of an implementation of Sphinx Search.

Permalinks

For the SEO-interested folks out there, and anyone who would like to see some pretty URLs... they're on the way! Imagine your forums having their own pretty names... an example from our example ActiveBoard might look like: http://example.activeboard.com/forum/suggestions-and-feedback

Keep your eyes out for these upgrades and more! Also, we're always open to feature suggestions and are also often able to do custom programming jobs for our clients as per their needs. SO! Don't hesitate to submit a feature request via email (general@sparklit.com), support request, or through the "Make a Suggestion" link in the tabs at the top on your Administration Panel.

(o``)--o

While ActiveBoard's default text is in English, it also offers a multitude of translated versions of the language which our clients may use, and even contribute to. In addition to English, the languages supported include: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Croatian and Greek.

For each supported language, we keep track of a version of the text in that language. Users are encouraged to submit their own translations to individual pieces of the language, or vote existing translations up or down according to their accuracy.

Over time, the translations become more and more complete, and require less attention.

To enable a language on your ActiveBoard, navigate to your Administration Panel and scroll to the bottom. There you will find an option called "Language Set" and a drop-down box consisting of all supported languages.

Select your desired language to view the specific translation details of that language, and then change the "Use Translation" drop-down box to "Yes". Presto, your forum will now be displayed with the selected language. Easy as pie!

Additionally, we give you a little visual cue for what's left to be translated for clarity!~

In this example, 27 pieces of text from the Russian translation still need translating! This is likely due to the addition of new phrases or words to the overall list of translations.

To help contribute to the translations of your language, click on the link below the translation information: "Quickly help everyone by improving the Russian translation." This will take you a page which gives you a random selection of 10 untranslated pieces of text, with the option of translating additional pieces as desired!

Simply click on the Translate button (in Russian, "переведите"), and enter your translation into the text field that appears. Submit your translation (or translations, if you added several), and by the next day they will be active and show up on your forum!