Numbers! New Statistics in your mixxt-Communities
Today’s update will certainly delight our mixxt community creators: mixxt has launched detailed statistics to give administrators a deeper insight into the activity and the utilisation of their networks.
Member Stats
We have added a new menu to the network settings of the administration panel called – guess what – “Statistics”. In addition to some general network information (name, domain, launch date, creator), this page provides a detailed membership analysis. The number of members – split into their their different roles (members, admins, mods) – is supplemented by it’s increase over the last week and the last month. As a further indication for activity in the community, it also shows the number of pin board entries on member profiles.
Features – Utilisation & Activity
The main screen shows different values for each active feature in the community (as a reminder: you may choose from Blogs, Videos, Forums, Images, Groups, Wiki, Events, Files, Polls, Content Management and News):
- Number of posts/content plus the number of collections/albums/main categories
- Number of new posts/content by x different members over the last 7 days
- Number of new posts/content of x different members over the last 30 days
- Number of comments
- Recent edits
Disk space & traffic
On top of that, the network statistics provide information on available and used space and traffic:
And now: Go ahead and have a look at your community’s numbers! As always, your feedback is highly appreciated!
@mixxt looks great on Twitter
In addition to our help pages* and direct support via email, the mixxt team is using (and loving) the microblogging service Twitter to answer questions and requests from the mixxt universe. Twitter allows us to communicate with our audience and react very quickly, almost in real time.
In April 2007, Oliver sent our very first tweet (the short messages send via twitter) from @mixxt to the twittersphere:
Since that day, @mixxt has tweeted more than 300 times, won 500 followers and appears in 16 lists. mixxt uses Twitter for rapid response to support requests, announcements of events and updates as well as news from the mixxt office. Besides that, we pass on interesting links and information from various mixxt communities.
We can hardly imagine our Community Management without using Twitter and we really cherish this direct connection to our customers, users and partners. In addition to our English @mixxt, we’re running the very active account @mixxt_de for our German friends & followers. Our Polish support uses the Polish equivalent of Twitter named “blip”, while @mixxt_pl is not that active.
As the Twitter bio only allows you to provide a very limited amount of information, our media designer Sebastian created a fancy new background image. The image provides more detailed information about mixxt and also shows who’s twittering here. Including Photos!
Oliver (ou) and I (ne) mark our Tweets with our initials to avoid any misunderstandings and to inform our readers who they are talking to right now.
What do you think of the new background on our Twitter profile? Are you satisfied with our support via Twitter? Is there anything we can improve? Just drop us a line or a tweet!
*BTW: In the not too distant future, we will launch a new FAQ section on mixxt.com and improve our help pages to improve our user support.
Update: Global Search, Wiki Editor, Shoutbox
In all the excitement about our new global friends, let’s not forget the other great new features that we recently added:
Global Search
Previously, mixxt users were able to search terms and keywords in some single modules, like the forum, members or content management. The new global search allows users to expand their search from one module to the entire community. In the search results, choosing “search the whole network” next to the search box leads the user to community-wide results. Users can show or hide the results from the modules ( members, forums, images, wiki, events, blogs, files, videos, content management, polls, groups) by clicking the respective icons:
Search operators:
Some operators are available to improve the results:
mixxt & Community – finds any content containg the term mixxt AND the term Community
mixxt | Community – finds any content which either contains the term mixxt OR the term community or both
mixxt -Community – finds any content containing the term mixxt but NOT the term Community
Wiki Editor
The wiki editor now offers a toolbar with formatting options. This makes the handling of wiki pages much easier for non-techie users and helps them with font sizes, bullet points, headlines, links or anchors. Read more »
Global friendships for mixxt-Fans
According to the announcement in last week’s blogpost, mixxt has added global friendships to it’s communities! All mixxt users may now automatically become friends with all members they added as friends in other networks before. By implementing this feature, the flood of friendship requests and confirmations going along with joining a new network will be reduced to a minimum.
Activating global friendships
We have added a new menu to the mixxt-settings to activate or deactivate “global friendships”. If both users have activated this feature, they will automatically become friends in the networks (only for realname and public nickname networks) they join in the future. Of course, members will always be able to end friendships manually.
Bonus: User A has enabled global friendships and joins a network. User B, an “old” friend of A, already is a member but has not activated global friendships yet. User B then automatically receives a friend request from A, which contains a hint to activate global friendships. This helps us to communicate this new feature more quickly and minimises the amount of friend requests and confirmations for each user very fast.
BarCamp Power-User
As we have already pointed out the pros and cons of global friendships in the latest blogpost: Most of our users and admins hold a membership in only one network which means that this feature appears to be needless or might even irritate them. The desire for global friendships mainly arose from barcampers and webworkers, who actively participate in many of our networks. This feature has been a hot topic in many internal discussions and we finally decided to pay tribute and respect to the whole BarCamp and web2.0 scene by making their wishes come true ;)
Become a mixxt fan
mixxt would like to take this opportunity to ask our users, customers, readers, friends and supporters to become a fan of mixxt. We have set up a Facebook page to collect and organise various information about mixxt and the mixxt team. Do you like mixxt? Then click here and become a fan: mixxt page at Facebook. Thank you very much! Your Feedback is highly appreciated.
Global friendships in mixxt Communities
Some of our users have been waiting for this announcement for months: We will be adding “global friendships” to your communities! When joining a network, users will automatically become friends with all members they added as friends in other networks before. By implementing this feature, the flood of friendship requests and confirmations going along with joining a new network will be reduced to a minimum.
The desire for these global friendships mainly arose from barcampers and webworkers, who actively participate in many of our networks. But since the majority of our users hold a membership in only one network, we have postponed this topic several times.
BarCamp Power Users
One of our goals is to keep mixxt with it’s multiple features as simple as possible to use, even for non-techie users. On the one hand, both the administrator and the members of a single (non-barcamp) community would most probably not catch the importance of “global friendships”. For them, they appear to be just needless. On the other hand, feedback and wishes from the BarCamp scene are very important to us, we see ourselves and our software as part of this scene and have grown with it. That’s why we were looking for a solution which satisfies our power users, but is not too complex to build or to use.
Our “Global Friendship” Solution
After discussing different scenarios, we have decided to go for a system which we can implement with reasonable effort and that will surely make our barcampers happy: Read more »
New: Lifestream Administration & Shoutbox
The lifestream on the main page is the eye-catcher of many mixxt communities. It shows teasers of the latest events and recent changes and leads the visitor to the respective entries or member profiles. Until now – depending on the privacy settings of each community – it automatically displayed new content (like images, forum or blog/posts or wiki pages) as well as new members, friendships or member profile updates from a period of 14 days.
Since last week’s update, the new “Lifestream Administration” allows all admins who have created their own community with mixxt for free to determine what content (selected by content modules) and how many entries and/or days should be displayed. The “Lifestream” entry in the community administration leads to the following view:
Shoutbox
In addition to this configuration, we have added a feature which virtually revolutionizes our lifestream: We set up a “Shoutbox” for the administrator, who is now able to post urgent news, comments or instructions straight into the lifestream. This gives the community manager the chance to distribute targeted information to all members in a comfortable but unobtrusive way. Read more »
Organise your communities into groups
With today’s update to mixxt version “boogie”, we proudly present our new and often longed-for “groups module”. When you create your own community with mixxt, the implementation of this module provides entirely new ways of collaboration and organisation in the individual networks.
A community within your community
Within the privacy and rights management of each community, admins were given the opportunity to decide which users – “simple” members, moderators or administrators – are allowed to view or edit certain content. From now on, mixxt offers a module to create groups within these communities. Imagine many sub-communities within one greater community, where e.g. content and modules are visible and editable by group members only.
Configuration and employment of the groups module
Since configuration and privacy settings are based on the general network administration, mixxt users and community hosts will surely get on well with setting up a group.
Read more »
