Affino 7.1 is now out, and it’s a major release in every way. Whilst there are many aspects to this Affino release, the two key threads are improved scaling and greater engagement. Affino 7.1 has been significantly re-architected to scale with new search and analytics engines. With the release of Affino 7.1 we will also be migrating sites to our new super-scaling cloud.

We’ve rolled out big updates to many core Affino services including Messaging, Search, Analysis, Customer Ladder and Relationships. We’ve also introduced great features such as Store Credits for incentivising customers, and Design Panels for creating great popups.

The combined improvements in the Customer Ladder (engagement), Messaging and Analysis add up to a breakthrough for sales and marketing automation. The new Messaging Campaigns for bulk premium, personal and SMS messages, come with advanced targeting, filtering and triggering options and great analytics.

Site Search has been completely re-engineered around Solr which gives Affino greatly improved performance on searches, and allows for much smarter searching. Core management elements such as relating content have also seen big updates focused on making editorial teams much more productive.

Altogether there are nearly 400 great new updates in this release, many of which will be transformative when fully rolled out on existing Affino sites.

We have also fixed most of the identified low-level issues which arose from the Affino 7 launch, and which are inevitable with the introduction of such a significant new platform.

Upgrade Guidance

The Affino 7.1 release is a signifiant update, and unlike most Affino releases, this one takes some time to run as we’re completely restructuring all the analytics data and refreshing the search indices. Given how intense this update is on the infrastructure, and that your site will be moved to the new hosting cloud, it is essential that you co-ordinate your update with your account manager.

Also in this release is a significant change to how most images are presented as you can now set the margins around the main images using Design Styles / CSS. It is essential to review your pages to ensure that the images are presented as expected, and note that you can now optimise the layout.

It is essential that

If you want a closer sit-back look at Affino then here’s a video guide to some of the great new features in Affino 7.

It’s quite detailed, so grab a cup of tea first.

We’ll make shorter guides in the near future. Meanwhile we’ve updated all the Control Centre Video Guides to showcase Affino 7 so you can see the latest and greatest directly from your Affino Control Centre.

Let us know what you think.

Our priority for Affino 7 has been to make the most productive platform available for running your business online. The integrated nature of Affino means you only have to manage your community, content, products, design, , promotions and analytics in one place. This is by far the most effective approach for managing an online business. What we have done with Affino 7 is to improve in every way how how you manage your online business.

Affino 7 has a New Control Centre, with the pages delivered by a New Page Generation Engine, and it runs on a New Cloud Architecture, all with the intent to deliver the best Social Commerce platform on the market today.

New Look Affino

We’ve brought together great productivity ideas from the Affino user community and the Comrz team. It has meant re-styling, re-factoring and re-architecting Affino from the ground up to be more productive and easier to learn. Affino 7 also has a great new minimalist look, and now works great on tablets and mobile devices. With Affino 7 we’ve set a new baseline which means that every new element we roll out in Affino will be that much better.

Affino has a brand new Control Centre and Live Edit tools. It is now optimised whether you’re using it on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile device, so you can use it anywhere any time. We’ve really raised the bar for every management interface in Affino. You fill find almost every task easier to do, with great new short-cuts, lookups, help items, searches, lists, entry forms, and navigation elements.

Affino has been brought right up to the leading edge with it’s platform support. It now runs on the latest technology which means it is faster, more reliable and more scalable than ever before. It also means that the Comrz team will be able to accelerate the development of the Affino platform in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s a great new Design Centre. The Design Objects are now completely managed within native browsers with no Flash requirement. All the Design Control screens have seen significant updates and Affino now has better than ever custom CSS support. We’ve also introduced some much needed enhancements such as padding on Design Cells and full Font styling, along with a breakthrough ability for you to be able to secure each and every Design Element

Since it’s introduction in Affino in 2002, Design Centre has continued to blaze a trail of innovation for DIY site implementation. The only downside what that it was Flash based and therefore a technological dead end.

In Affino 7 the Design Centre has had to be re-written from the ground up, keeping all the elements which made it great and improving on it futher. The move to HTML 5 for the Object Designer means much more solid Design Object / Skin generation. Affino 7 has also made a more pervasive switch to CSS, this should mean experienced designers will have an easier time of achieving what they want with their custom CSS. The key changes are as follows:

Improved Interface
We have captured everything that you loved about the Flash Design Centre, and simplified it for a more instantly gratifying experience - the key elements are the same - in a new clearer, colour-coded look and feel.

Fully Customisable CSS

Design Styles can now be completely customisable. You can take the CSS code that Affino generates for the Design Styles and override it with any CSS you prefer.

Smarter Save
Now when you change things the ’Save’ but switches from greyed-out to green - if you see the Green Save button it means you have made changes to the Design Object and need to hit Save to retain those changes - of course Affino still auto-saves if you hit the Preview Button too.

More Speed
Without a Flash and Flex display layer - Affino now processes Design Object arrays much more quickly and efficiently - which means that building Design Objects in Affino 7 should be a far quicker and more elegant process than ever before.

More Consistency
In Affino 6 we had clusters of buttons in different areas of the interface - now all the essential buttons are in the Live Edit Bar as for the rest of the system. Design Centre is still a fairly unique experience, although it now operates om much closer lines to the rest of Control Centre.

More Robust
We have re-worked how we store Design Objects and they are now less likely to error out and are much more robust.

Cell Padding
An essential requirement for Mobile Skin - Horizontal and Vertical Padding can now be applied on every single Design Object Cell.

Along with the numerous innovations in look, feel and function, Affino sees some clever introductions in pretty much all areas of the day-to-day site-management experience.

We’ve always billed Affino as the most productive environment for full-featured site management, and even though some of these innovations are merely in the field of graphics or animation - they make for significant improvements to the overall satisfaction you get from using Affino. Here follow 7 highlights of what’s coming in the new release:

New Live Edit Switch | Bar

The new Live Edit Bar visibly pings in from the left of the screen as you switch from ’Off’ to ’On’ mode - all icons have been made clearer and more refined too

Design Style Preview

Enhanced Design Style Preview conveying exactly the different font sizes, formats and colours in their onscreen appearance, and featuring newly introduced Line Height, Word Spacing and Letter Spacing options

Mobile Format

Affino has a dedicated smart interface for Mobile Format - specifically Smartphones - where everything has been sized up and simplified for Affino control on the move

’My’ Filtering

Control Centre Panels are now reduced into singular displays where users can filter out their own content for all the different relevant content categories - taking you from overview to granular detail in just one click!

Cell Padding

An essential for Mobile Format skins - where cell spanning is a no-go and you don’t want text butting up against the screen edge - all Design Object Cells now have Horizontal and Vertical Padding options

Category Sorting

All Control Screen Category Selections now include a Sort mode where you can arrange listings to your own preferences via Grouped, A-Z or Most Used options

View Selection Button

Every Content Selection now has an additional button where you can pop-up a contextual screen - to view, organise or add further categories, if what you require is not currently available for selection - this hugely simplifies the admin process for newbies

The Affino 7 Control Centre will build on familiar metaphors. Behind the scenes it’s all change though with every single screen having been updated.

You will be more productive at doing almost any management task, whatever the context.

New Look

Expect a great new look. It’s a natural evolution for Affino, and is better suited to the mix of desktop and mobile environments Affino is used in. It will also be faster.

No Screen Left Behind

We have been on a year-long process of updating every Control screen to be more effective at delivering what is needed. We will complete that process in Affino 7, with dozens of interfaces becoming much more useful.

Frameless

One of the biggest compromises we made with the Affino Control Centre was using frames to display the navigation elements. This was essential at the time to allow for dynamic drill-down navigation, but it meant that the URLs were no longer representative of what you were doing.

Frames are deprecated, they’re on the way out. Although they’re still supported by browsers they are no longer the best way to do things. HTML 5 offers us better alternatives. This will mean though that you will need a modern browser to manage Affino sites. IE7 doesn’t cut it any more.

Control/Promotion

You will be able to directly link through to any management screen using simple URLs. No more clicking around required.

Also when you share a URL, it will be exactly the screen you’re referring to. Something which will be particularly useful for support.

There is a massive benefit for Affino development with this approach in that we can now run a great deal more automated tests on the Control Centre, which should ensure higher quality levels all round.

Security

We’re working through every control screen again to ensure that the highest level of security is in place for each one. Since nothing is more important.

Less Flashy

Since Flash simply doesn’t work on mobile devices any more (and never really did) we’ve been busy removing it for the past year and a half. Affino 7 sees the removal of all but two Flash control elements (Dashboards and the Media Editor) which will be converted to HTML 5 in the following release.

Design Centre

We’ve been meaning to do this for a while, and it actually turned out to be a lot less painful than I had originally envisaged - but here it is! - a comprehensive ’Affino Design Elements Overview’ - featuring 76 of the 81 Design Elements currently available in Affino - including the 2 new Recruitment ones (’Job Search’ and ’Member Profile’).

I have managed to squeeze them all onto a single screen - and placed them in the position you would likely encounter / utilise those elements - Left Column, Middle Column or Right Column - with some overlapping / spanning.

To further help you Designers and Site Implementers, I have completed the ’Design Elements Feature’ - which lists out every single Design Element by name. While you’re at it you can check out Affino’s other 50 key Features!

Both of these are best used together, and are essential reference guides for designing and implementing an Affino site - you are of course best off logging in, as more Design Elements appear for you when logged in. It is though also useful to compare the logged-in and logged-out states to get a fuller understanding / picture of exactly how some of Affino’s Design Elements work.

For anyone considering buying into Affino or about to embark on a site implementation - this is a good starting point - don’t try to shoe-horn it all in on one screen like us though - this is just a reference and showcase, and you can see by how long it take the page to load up, how impractical it would be to cram everything onto a single page...

NOTE - One word of warning - the MP3 Player currently has the annoying habit of auto-playing, so make sure you have your computer / laptop muted in advance - or on low volume!

This project is the culmination of a year’s work (for the Graphics!), in some ways it could be said to be the culmination of Affino’s 15 years of development. We have long wanted an elegant means of showcasing the extensive Affino Features Set - and we have takled it a number of ways previously - trying to do a complete features listing (100’s of individual elements - now archived for being too large), and the much celebrates ’Periodic Table of Affino Elements’ - which has 128 listed features - yet still needs further essential additions.

This time it was going to be simpler, yet more detailed, more illustrative at the same time, and punctuated with some lovely iconographic and obviously meaningful pictures and screencaptures. We hand-picked a list of 50 key features as we saw them; alas ’Affino Messenger’ still remains to be re-developed in HTML5 (some way off), but the other 49 can now be found listed on the pictured Affino Features screen; they are as follows:

The intention is that they serve as a great reference for all of us, customers new and old - in getting a full and proper picture of Affino, and reminding us of useful features, functions and utilities that we were thinking of making use of but never quite got round to implementing on our site/s.

Markus was not happy with how our News pages looked on Comrz, and I was set the task to devise a new presentation template to showcase the very best of news delivery currently available on the web. I spent several days trawling all the major news sites, and was particularly impressed with several of these, largely - BBC , CNN and The Guardian . The idea was to produce the Ultimate Topical News Resource - where you could easily seek out, list and review key news stories by key criteria.

The make-up of the main listing template is as follows: RSS and Content Subscription appear with Section Header, as well as at base Articles can be listed out by time range - Latest | Most Viewed | Most Liked | Most Commented | Most Shared You can click through to the Public Profile of the Author Click on the Date to list out all articles within that Section published on the same date Click to add / view Comments Number of Views - also clicks through to article Most recent Article is highlighted with Larger Image and Teaser Text Article Topics are only revealed on mouse-over Facebook ’Like’ is revealed on mouse-over Share icons / function is revaled on mouse-over The following articles are listed in summary format - mouse-over reveals Topics, Like and Share

We may still have a couple more tweaks to do, but so far it’s working pretty well. The ’Detail’ presentation utilises the ’Info Box’ for ’Article Highlights’, we also list Topics in a left hand column, and we include a new ’Quotation’ field.

All the new icons are enabled via additional fields / settings on the Design Style. Some of these icons / elments may find their way onto other existing templates in the fairly near future ...

Affino websites can be evolved continuously with ease. The powerful Design Centre and Live Design Mode allow designers and editors to roll out entirely new looks on Affino sites and more importantly allow the designs to be continuously evolved so that they provide the most engaging experience for site visitors.

This video is one of a new series of Affino videos which gives a brief introduction into specific aspects of Affino and touches on:

  Affino Application Bar Live Design Mode Design Objects Skins Design Styles Design Menus Design Elements Design Previews Smart Images Smart Copy If you enjoyed this video or found it useful, and would like to see more Affino videos, then please post back on the comments below.

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Well, it’s finally happened ... Comrz.com is now sufficiently shiny and refined to be shared with the rest of the world.

It is certainly the most refined build of Affino currently in existence - featuring lots of little design details which are only likely to be discovered by those who take their time to review the entirety of every design page, possibly with the aid of a magnifying glass!

We’ve honed our approach to brand reinforcement with lots of brand echoes assigned to menus and frameworks. This has undoubtedly been an enormous undertaking, and still has some way to go. We still have Magazine, News, Partners and Store Skins to complete - but we are well on the way with those.

The build stats to date are as follows - in volume order!  Design Objects = 227 Design Styles = 65 Skins = 42 Design Menus = 19 Form Styles = 3 Dynamic Menus = 1 Main Menus = 1

Almost 1,000 new Icons have been designed and added to the system for this site!

More to come on Structure and Content ...

Throwing up a site quickly with Affino really isn’t problem. The difficulty comes when you want to use and deploy everything at your disposal in as high quality a fashion as is practically possible.

I am in the process of building an enormous site - wholly from scratch - this involves originating hundreds of icons and dozens of Profiles, Channels and Skins.

We deemed that communication was the key factor, and as a result this is where I have concentrated my efforts in rolling out all the different Community aspects of Affino. I’ve been working on the site for a week now, and there is still a while to go - of course sales and marketing content needs to be populated and more imagery sourced.

In the meantime - please enjoy getting yourself acquainted with a new level of website refinement - we hope you enjoy the experience ...