We know from your comments that all of you have been very excited about the development of our SocialAds extension for JomSocial & everyone is dying to hear news about its development. So we have decided to start a short series of blogs that will not only tell you how the development is going but also introduce you to some new features we have sneaked in ;) .
This blog is the first of the series. As you might know we delayed the beta by about 2 weeks. The reason was to get in some more features into the build. Read on for the full update & Sneak preview on some features.
What are we doing now ?
The extra time we got by delaying the Beta, was spent in improving the quality of the release & adding some news features to the core. Another major improvement was a bettered Ad matching engine which means the Beta the users will be able to deliver ads with more accuracy.
We have added Ad Approval ( note that this is not part of the first beta though), which means you can now switch on Admin Approval for ads. Another small change is the ability to set a minimum order amount so that you can control size of ad purchase.
Ability to Ignore Ads & give feedback has also been included in the release plan for the Public release.
Sneaks into the first Beta
A. Payment Gateway plugins
The first beta shall be released to the betas with only a test gateway plugin. This does not actually do any payment , lets you buy the ad for free. Beta 2 will include a plugin for Paypal & Beta 3 will follow up with a plugin for either 2Checkout or Authorize.net . Between them they will satisfy the initial requirement of your suggestions for ability to pay via credit card . Future public releases will follow with support for more payment gateways as well as Buy with JomSocial points etc type Plugins.
B. Better Reporting with Google Charts
One cool feature we thought would be nice was a reporting dashboard for letting the user see how his ad is faring . A Clicks vs impressions Pie chart & a line chart showing Clicks & impressions on a time line are included as of now.
C. Bettered Ads matching engine
Not that any of the Beta s will notice this. But the improved engine is a huge leap from the one in our internal Alpha. All Multi select, select, check box & radio fields are treated as must have matches while general text fields are matched in a general way now. This has improved matching performance in a big way.
Some Screen Shots of whats coming soon are given below ! Stay tuned for more updates !
Screenshots
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