myfamily.com 2.0 blog

Comment Permissions

• Site administrators can now determine who can add comments to their site by using the Administrator Settings page, found under Site Settings.
• The following options are available:
  • Administrators and members can comment.
  • Administrators, members, and guests can comment.

Search Results Page

• You can save your search criteria and share it with others by clicking on the ‘Link to this page’ link. It will generate a URL that you can post anywhere on your site.
• Search results can now be viewed in either a List or Thumbnail view. You can also select the size of the thumbnails.

Personal Info/Settings Screen

• Prior to this release, when you joined a site, your personal preferences were automatically set to the default settings (i.e. Display personal information, Daily Site Notifications, etc.). To change the settings, you would have to go to the My Memberships page.
• Now, when you visit a myfamily.com site for the first time, a screen will appear that allows you to set your nickname, choose your notification preferences and determine whether or not to display your email address, mailing address, phone number or birth date.

“Remove Me”

• Before, only site administrators could remove people from sites. You can now remove yourself from a myfamily.com site by going to the My Memberships page and clicking on the “Remove me from this site” link for the site you’d like to be removed from.
• Before, if you were the last site administrator of a free myfamily.com site, you could not remove yourself from that site. Now you can, and removing yourself from the site will also delete that site.

Albums

• When you view a single photo from an album of photos, you’ll now get additional album details. This includes the album name and links to start the slideshow, set the photo as the album cover and remove the photo from the album.
• You can now add a photo to an album straight from the single photo view page by clicking on the “Add to album” link under Photo Options. Before, you could only add photos to an album from the All Photos page.
• All site administrators and members can now add photos to any album on the site. Before, the only people who could add a photo to an album were site administrators and the person who created the album.

Single Item Views

• The options that used to appear below an item on the single item view page have been moved to the right side of the screen to increase their visibility to users.
• When viewing a single item, the avatar of the person who added it is now also displayed. If you click on that avatar or name, you’ll be taken to a search results page that shows you all the items of that type added by that person. This works for photos, videos, discussions, SnapGenies and files.

Upload Button Always Active

• When adding photos, videos and files to your myfamily.com site, the ‘Upload’ button is now always active. Before, this button was disabled until the user had chosen content to upload. Periodically, the button would remain disabled even after content was selected, so we changed it to always keep it active. If you click on the active ‘Upload’ button without selecting anything to upload, you’ll simply get a message telling you that no content has been selected.

What’s New Updates

• If you click on a comment in the What’s New section, you will be taken directly to that comment’s location in the comment list, rather than top. If that item has a lot of comments, it was often difficult to find the one you clicked on in the What’s New section.
• When you visit the What’s New page, the ‘Show All’ filter is now the default, rather than ‘Show New’ because most users were switching to ‘Show All’ upon landing on the What’s New page.

Previous/Next

• Improved performance and accuracy of the previous/next links when viewing single items

Today we added the following new features to myfamily 2.0:

1. Invitation Permissions - Site admins can now select what types of users can invite people to their site. To try it out, login to your site and go to Site Settings then to the Administrator Settings tab. (Of course only admins will be able to try this out)

2. Finding Tagged Items on Your Site - Click on a tag, and you’ll be taken to a “search result” page that displays all items on that site with the same tag. You can filter your search results by clicking on the ‘edit search’ link and selecting the item types and members that you’d like to see. You can also add to or change your search results by entering new tags in the ‘with these tags field’. Keep in mind that right now we’re only returning search results that are exact matches. We’ll be beefing up our search capabilities in a future release.

3. Login Help - We hear from a lot of users who are having trouble logging in to their sites. We’ve released two small changes today that should help fix some of those issues.

The first one is the ability to request a list of usernames that are associated with your email address. We’ve learned that a lot of users don’t realize when they have more than one username associated with the same email address (e.g. mom & dad sharing an email address, or someone creates a unique username to join a site, but uses the same email address that is already attached to a different username on one of their other sites). Next time you login, you’ll notice that we’ve added a message to the top of your personal start page that tells you what email address is on your account, and how many usernames are associated with it. It also provides a link to request a list of all usernames and sites associated with your email address. Once you receive the list, you’ll hopefully be able to find the site you’re looking for, and know how to access it.

The second small enhancement that we hope will help with site accessibility is a simple ‘Remember Me’ check box on the login page. If you want the site to automatically log you in next time you visit, check the box. If you’re using a shared computer (whether in your home or in a public place), and you don’t want to log in automatically, make sure the box is unchecked when you log in.

I know these login enhancements are relatively small, and they certainly don’t address all of the login issues that folks are facing. If you have others that you’d like to add to the list, please let us know.

– UPDATE –
(I can’t believe I forgot this in my original post!)

4. Updated Text Editor - We upgraded the software that we use for our text editor in discussions, comments, etc. So far, it seems like many of the previously reported issues have gone away. Looking forward to hearing whether or not the update makes text entry and edits easier for you.

Hey everyone, we just found out that myfamily.com has been
selected from over 10,000 entrants as a finalist for a 2008 Webby Award!

As a nominee, our site is now competing against 4 other nominees in the
Family/Parenting category for the 2008 Webby Award, and the 2008 Webby
People’s Voice Award.

While the Webby Award is selected by the International Academy of
Digital Arts & Sciences, the Webby People’s Voice Award is selected by
the online public - so we need your help!

Please take a few minutes to go to the Webby Awards site and vote for
myfamily.com in the Family/Parenting category.

To cast your vote:
1. Go to: http://pv.webbyawards.com/
2. Complete your voter registration
3. When you return to the Webby Award’s site, click on ‘Website - vote
now!’
4. Scroll down to the ‘Living’ section and open the ‘Family/Parenting’
section
5. Cast your vote for myfamily.com!

Remember: voting ends on May 1st

Thanks!

A little over a year ago we announced that we were building a new version of myfamily.com (dubbed “myfamily.com 2.0″). We talked about why we were doing this and outlined our goals. And while we have been building 2.0, we have learned some very important things from you about the value of 1.0, and why we should not shut it down.

We are happy to announce that as of today, we will continue support for myfamily.com 1.0 and have no plans to require migration of 1.0 sites to 2.0.

What does this mean for me?
That depends on your circumstance. Chances are, you are in one of the following groups:

A. You haven’t heard about myfamily.com 2.0 or this migration thing, and aren’t interested at all.
B. You have heard about 2.0 and migration, and may have even checked it out, but have not requested your site be migrated.
C. You have heard about 2.0 and have requested that your 1.0 site(s) be migrated to 2.0 or actually have a site that has already been migrated.

If you’re in group A above, feel free to disregard this post as your site isn’t affected.

If you are in group B or C, and want to continue using your 1.0 site(s) as you always have, please do! If you now, or at some point in the future, want to migrate your 1.0 site to 2.0, stay tuned. Over the next few weeks we’ll be updating the information in our Migration Help Center with complete details on what these new changes mean for your situation. We’ll also send you a new email with the details when they’re ready.

Why the change now?
Over the last year we have received lots of feedback about a mandatory migration. We have heard three primary arguments for keeping 1.0 running:

1. 1.0 just works - “It meets our needs. Why change?”
2. Change is painful - “No matter how great this new thing may be, or may become, my members have spent years on 1.0 and they know how to use it. Learning a new system is just something they and I don’t want to have to go through again.”
3. Not ready yet - “2.0 lacks the feature or features we need, or isn’t user-friendly enough that I want to make a switch.”

Well, in the words of poet and author Nikki Giovanni, “Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts” Please consider this our response.

Does this change our plans for 2.0?
Not at all. Our mission for myfamily 2.0 remains the same. For hundreds of thousands of people, myfamily.com 2.0 is their preferred choice. So we are more committed than ever to provide families the best way to connect, coordinate, share and preserve life’s events.

The last twelve months have been incredible, and we truly are thankful to have such passionate members like you. We also would like to thank you for your feedback and patience as we work through this process. And we hope to continue hearing from you as we focus even more energy on the next generation myfamily.com.

Obviously it’s been a while since we’ve had a fresh post here on the blog. We’ve been working very hard for the past few months to improve our planning and development processes, and I think we’re finally starting to hit our stride. I’m not trying to say that we don’t still have a lot of work to do – because we have a ton – but I am feeling much better about our ability to get things done quickly and efficiently.

To that end, we’re focusing intently on improving the usability and performance of the 2.0 service. The feedback we’ve received here, and from your emails, has been incredibly helpful in creating our product backlog (our official ‘to-do’ list).

Today we released new functionality and improvements that help address a couple of the pain-points that you’ve mentioned most often – user orientation and site organization.

New Start Page
Next time you visit your site, you’ll be greeted by a fresh new ‘start page’. The start page will clearly indicate who you’re signed in as, and provide a list of all your sites. It’s the first step towards our broader goal of helping folks understand where they are, and how they can get to the places they’re looking for, each time they visit myfamily.com.

Albums & Tags
Photo albums have been available to help you organize photos on your site for quite some time, but we’ve received a ton of feedback telling us that they’re just too hard to find once they’re created. In today’s release, you’ll find that if you have albums on your site, they will be the first place you go when you click on the ‘photos’ tab. From there, you’ll be able to switch to the ‘all photos’ view by clicking on the album named ‘all photos’. If you don’t have albums on your site, ‘all photos’ will continue to be your main view in the photos section.

Speaking of organizing your site, today we released a new feature called ‘tags’. Tags are basically labels or categories that you can add to items on your site. For example, if you want to mark all of the photos, videos, and discussions related to this year’s reunion, you can do it by ‘tagging’ them all as ‘2008 reunion’. We’ll provide search and filtering functionality on your tagged items in a later release, but in the meantime, today’s release of tags enables you and your site members to begin organizing your site right away.

We’ve also been working on revisions to our migration plans, and we’ll be posting a new migration update here soon. We know it’s long overdue, but hopefully the good news will be worth the wait.

Well, January is here already and we haven’t migrated all sites yet.  However, we have made some really good progress and, thanks to those of you who have had a chance to review and use a migrated site, we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback and insights into how to we can improve the migration process, so that’s what we’re doing now.

We are also fixing some of the migration related bugs we’ve uncovered and providing support for additional content types (such as files, albums, trees) in addition to new features to help round out the 2.0 service. Finally, we are making changes that will improve service speed and reliability.

As a result, we will not be expanding migration beyond the current set of migrated sites for the next few weeks while we address many of these items.

Regular updates will continue for sites that have already been migrated.

The Transition Period where we continue to operate the 1.0 and 2.0 sites will of course be extended accordingly, and we continue to be committed to providing you with ample time to transition once you’ve migrated your site(s).

Progress to date: What Has Been Migrated?

We’ve migrated several thousand sites that were either selected for early migration based on the type and amount of content contained on the site, or asked for early migration. We’ve processed all early migration requests received thru the first week of December and will process the remainder of the requests once we are ready to expand migration.

Migrated sites contain the following content from 1.0:

• Basic Member Profile Information
• Photos
• News
• Recipes
• Family History
• Reviews
• All comments and replies associated with these items

For these migrated sites, all of the information we’ve copied over is being updated on a regular basis. So, if you add or remove something from your 1.0 site, that change will be reflected on your 2.0 site. Changes made on the 2.0 version of your site will NOT be copied over to your 1.0 site.

Our goal is to update the content on migrated sites daily, though there may be times when we need to turn updating off in order to fix a bug or improve the speed of the updating process.

How Do I Know if My Site was Migrated?

Sites with migrated content are initially only visible to site administrators and can be accessed from the My Sites area or the start page of the 2.0 service.

Each administrator should also receive an email from myfamily.com when the content on their migrated site is available for viewing. Site administrators then have the option to review the site and determine whether they want to make it available to their members.

What’s Left to Migrate?

There are still thousands of sites with content to be migrated. These sites will continue to operate as they always have.

We also need to copy over additional content types and are working on the copying process for:

• Files
• Albums
• Trees
• Events
• Attachments to posts
• Email

Sites that have already had content migrated will automatically get these additional content types as they become available.

We also need to migrate subscription information and support for custom domains.

Any Known Issues with Migrated Sites?

During the migration process we’ve uncovered a few bugs:

• Changes to a photo description on 1.0 are not being copied over to 2.0
• Contact information for some members is out of date
• Sites with very large member lists have difficulty displaying the entire member list

Fixing these bugs is a high priority and we will fix them before moving on to supporting additional content types.

What’s the Impact on the Transition Period?

Migrating all of the content from 1.0 to 2.0 is one of the tasks that must be completed before we end the transition period. This means that the Transition Period will extend further into 2008. We are listening to your feedback and plan to address the issues above before setting any specific end date for the original myfamily.com 1.0 service.

Where can I learn more?

Additional information on migration can be found at our help center

Just in time for the holidays comes a new release. In no particular order, here are the highlights of our newest changes:

1. We’ve added a new winter theme (okay, this one might have been in a particular order because it is pretty slick)!

2. Custom Theme Builder Supports Graphics

• Administrators can now add a background image to the pages on your site.
• They can also change the background image behind their site title and set its alignment.
• Import and Export of your custom themes now include links to your graphics.
• For you theme hunters out there, we’ve also put a few extra themes on our demo site, the McKinney Family Web Site. You can grab them for your own use in the McKinney file cabinet.

3. What’s New Changes

• Comments now show up as new items on the What’s New page.
• Items in the What’s New page area on the home page don’t disappear when you’ve viewed them. We just remove the “New” tag.

4. Paging and performance on view all photos page

• You’ve shared your problems with performance when viewing a large collection of photos. With this release, performance on the view all photos page should be notably better.
• We’ve added a member filter to make it easier to find photos contributed by a particular site member.

5. New “My Memberships” Tab under My Account

• We have spent some time cleaning up your membership area under My Account. This will make it much easier for you to add a profile pic, set your nickname, and decide what you want to display to other site members.

More features are under development now, and in the pipeline for 2008, so check back often in the New Year.

Last week we sent out an email to all Administrators of 1.0 sites with a brief update about migration. If you received the email, this is simply redundant. If not, well, here’s the scoop:

Since we first announced migration, we’ve received thousands of requests from folks who want to move their sites to the new 2.0 system, and we’re moving as quickly as we can to fulfill those requests! We’ve migrated hundreds of sites to the new 2.0 system and we’ll continue migrating more each week. If you completed our Migration Sign-up Form, but haven’t seen your site migrated yet, rest assured that your site is at the top of the list (above those who did not explicitly request), and we’ll get to yours as quickly as possible.

We’ve also continued to update 2.0 with more features and enhancements to better accommodate the migration of some very large 1.0 sites. And of course, more are on their way. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many of you have told us that the holiday season is one of the busiest times of year for your myfamily site, and requested that we don’t end the migration transition period and shut down 1.0 during this time. We heard you, and we’re doing just that. We’ve extended the transition period so that you can enjoy your 1.0 sites throughout the holidays, and rather than ending by December 31, 2007 as originally announced, the transition period will extend into the first few months of 2008. We’ll provide more details on transition timing in future migration news updates. 

Migration Recap

You may recall these details from our original announcement, but here is a quick refresh of some details of the migration plan so that you’ll know what to expect over the next few months: 

1. The migration of your myfamily 1.0 site to the new 2.0 system does not mean that your 1.0 site will be immediately shut down. Once your site is migrated to the new system, your transition period begins, and you’ll be able to access it on both the 1.0 and 2.0 systems. This transition period will give you and your site members an opportunity to become familiar with the new myfamily system.
2. We’ve created a back-up copy of your site, and we’ll continue to do so in order to ensure that nothing gets lost during the transition. Remember that you don’t have to copy anything by yourself!
3. We’ll notify you when your existing 1.0 site has been “migrated” to 2.0 so that you can become familiar with the new system before you show it to your site members. Once you’re on the migrated site, you’ll have a way to notify your site members when you’re ready for them to begin using the 2.0 version of your site.
4. We’ll make sure that your original 1.0 site is available during the transition period, so that you and your members can continue to use it while getting accustomed to the 2.0 system. And, once your 1.0 site has been migrated, the changes you make on your 1.0 site will be reflected on your 2.0 site, typically w/in a day. These updates include items added and deleted. So, during this time, if you delete a photo or a member from the site, that will carry over to the migrated site.

That’s it for now…

Another release came out yesterday, and of course a lot of you have already found the goods. For those who haven’t, Here is the list of new features and updates (in no particular order):

Significant Bug fixes:

1. Comments in What’s New is back!
2. “NEW” is working properly now

New Features:

1. Message Center
   • Now we will send you a Notification letting you know when someone has sent you a Message using the Message Center feature. This is separate from the site activity Notifications you normally receive.
2. Site activity Notifications
   • We’ve added a new option to the “Notify Me” frequency option called “as-it-happens”. If you select this option, Notifications on that site will be sent w/in the hour of the update.
3. Upload and copy-to multiple sites
   • Getting the same video or batch of photos on two, three or more sites just got a whole lot easier. Now you can upload once and post to any number of sites of which you’re an Administrator or Member.
4. Custom Themes (this feature is available for all sites during Beta, but will be available to paid sites only)
   • Administrators - now you can create your own theme using the shiny new Custom Theme Builder that allows you to select color, font and font size for your site
5. Rich Text Formatting
   • We’ve added Rich Text Formatting throughout the site!
   • Use our slick new “Text View” mode to format your posts and comments. Use it to change the font, font size, alignment, indenting, add links, add smiley’s and a while lot more!
   • Switch to “HTML View” to edit the HTML by hand, then flip back to “Text View” to see your entry formatted.
6. Pagination in What’s New and Discussion
   • Rather than showing a single page with every single item displayed on that page, now you can page through your What’s New and Discussions items. We don’t refresh the entire page, so this should result in a much faster and smoother experience overall.
   • coming soon - photos, videos, SnapGenies

We have more great stuff on the horizon, including an update on the no-ads subscription option and another migration update.