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Recent Updates to Aptuitiv Studio

It's been a while since I wrote a post about the latest developments in Aptuitiv Studio.  It's not for a lack of updates.  We've been pushing out updates nearly everyday.  The large gap in posts has been because we've been so busy.   We do a lot of service work with some of our partners and clients that use Aptuitiv Studio and with all the deadlines it's been tough to find time to breathe, let alone write a blog post. 

Well, I now have time so here goes.

Below are some of the recent updates, additions and improvements that we've added to Aptuitiv Studio over the last couple of months.

New YouTube Attribute

For those of you who like to pull in YouTube videos into your website we've made it a little easier to do that.  There is a new attribute that can be added to the different apps where you can simply enter the URL to the YouTube video and it'll provide the information to embed the video, show the video in a lightbox or link to the video. The attribute also allows the site editors to preview the video in the administration and customize settings for the videos.  It also works with the new YouTube URL format.

New Apps

We've developed three new apps: Members, Contacts and Social.

Members

The Members app is designed for membership organizations like chambers of commerce or clubs. Below is an overview of some of the features.

• Store member information including custom attributes.
• Display members on the public website.
• Keep track of different membership levels and the dues.
• Organize members by categories.
• Get reports on new members, overdue members, members by location and more.
• Allow members to sign-up through the website and renew their membership. That includes taking payment for membership dues.

Contacts

Contacts started out by taking Accounts and changing the name to Contacts. The reason for this is that it could be used as a light-weight CRM or contact manager and not just for setting up login accounts. We also expanded it to allow assigning a contact to one or more Login Groups so that you can create different levels of login privileges for site visitors.

We then took it to a whole new level.

An add-on to Contacts is now available to send out email campaigns to your customers. Kinda like Campaign Monitor or Mail Chimp. Granted we don't have nearly as many features as they do, but it's a start.  Customers can subscribe to different mailing lists and you can send your nice email campaigns to them to sell them more of whatever you or your clients are selling.

Even though we don't yet have the same functionality as the big guys we feel that we still have a strong selling point for Contacts and that's integration.

Your customers never have to leave your site to sign up for your mailing lists.  The big one is that you can continue to use the same familiar administration to market to your clients as you do to update your website.

Social

This app is the beginning of more social networking with Aptuitiv Studio.   This app will be full of mini-apps that provide more ways for you to promote your site to your customers with social networking. 

What we've done so far is allow your customers to email a page to 10 of their friends.  It's really simple to use. Once you've setup the email form you simply need to place the tag {#apSocialEmailUrl} in site templates to pull in the correct URL to the "Email This Page" form.

In the near future we plan on adding support for sharing content on Twitter and Facebook.

The Social app is included at no extra charge for anyone on Aptuitiv Studio Plus or higher.

Other Updates

There has also been some minor updates to the administration user interface in some apps.  We've added pagination and filtering to a few apps that really needed it.  And of course no series of updates would be complete without a few bug fixes here and there.