As you most likely already know, we upgraded Ignite Realtime to use the latest Clearspace pending release, version 2.5!  We also upgraded a few things on the rest of the site, but they were primarily backend things.  I'm very excited to finally get Ignite Realtime up to a recent version!  I've been using this for a while internally and also on one of my own sites, and have been eagerly awaiting it's arrival at Ignite!  So with the new site, I wanted to go over some of the new features of Clearspace 2.5, and also a few plans we have coming up!  First of all, 2.5 has a number of cool new features that I wanted to go over, those are as follows:

Social Groups

Ever wished you could set up arbitrarily groups of community members who share a similar interest?  Maybe you wanted to coordinate on a project or just have a little space to chat about something you all find interesting?  With the new Social Groups feature, you can create whatever groups you want, complete with their own discussion spaces, documents, etc!  You can browse all of the available groups under Browse -> Groups in your user toolbar, join ones you find interesting, create new ones from the New menu.  It's completely up to you what you might want to put together!  It's all separate from the primary spaces so you won't interfere with anything going on in the primary site.  I'm highly interested to see what you all come up with!  Want to create a group that no one knows about but you and other members?  You can also set up private groups!

Custom Views

Don't like the layout we've chosen for the main page?  Tired of our layout dictatorship?    Well with this version you can set up your very own "Your View".  You'll see a tab for this when you go to the main Community page, and from there can customize to your heart's content!  Completely messed up your view?  Please post in the forums so we can laugh at you!  Kidding.    Seriously, there's a "Default" button you can press to return yourself to the original setup.  Plus at any time you can view the regular view by simply selecting the All Content tab.

Rich Text Editor

The new version boasts a rich text editor that actually works great!  We received a number of complaints about the previous rich text editor and it's numerous issues and made sure to provide something that folk can actually use!  Part of the problem with the previous editor was trying to support both rich text and wiki markup and plain text and... you get the picture.. you end up having to cobble together things that aren't meant to work that way.  The rich text editor wanted to do regular HTML in the background, but that conflicted with wiki macro.  Now, I know a few of you have brought up wanting some of the wiki macros back, and I have relayed this back to the developers of the editor, so stay tuned!  I will say this though, I thought I would never like a rich text editor, I always felt they messed something up for me, and this one is the first one I've actually enjoyed using.  There's a couple of kinks we are still working out though, so please bear with us!

Regular Updates

Since we are now running the latest code, we can start performing regular updates again!  That means faster fixes for issues you all report and hopefully a lot of cool improvements along the way!  We are effectively running a beta right now, so updates will be fairly often for now.  Your reports will be invaluable in helping make sure this community runs super smooth!  And since we're not running a release right now, bugs should get fixed quite soon after being reported! 

So That's Great, What's Coming Up

One of the things we've been working on heavily lately has been integrating real time chat wih Clearspace.  In the near future, we will be adding the chat plugin to Ignite Realtime, which will provide a number of cool things such as real time chat in spaces and social groups, automatic chat transcript recording, and scheduled chat events (similar to our weekly developer chat that you are probably familiar with).  In fact, we may be migrating the weekly chat to a room provided by the plugin!  Does this mean you can't connect from an external server?  Of course not!  The JID might just be different.  =)  Gato been making a lot of posts about the new functionality in the Jivespace community, you can read more about them in the following posts:

• Connecting a chat client to Clearspace
• Scheduling chats in Clearspace
• Chats in spaces, projects, and social groups

I Found A Bug, What Do I Do?

Your help in reporting bugs you find in the new site is invaluable!  I am monitoring site bug reports regularly and am passing any feedback back to the Clearspace developers.  Please report any bugs, concerns, or thoughts in the Jive Lounge, or even as a comment here if you'd like.  I want to thank all of you for your assistance in helping not only Ignite Realtime be the best it can be, but Clearspace as well!  Don't be afraid to nitpick.  We'd love to hear anything at all that you have to say!  I can't guarantee that every single issue will be taken care of, but we'll sure consider anything we hear!  Also if you don't feel comfortable with posting publically, you are welcome to private message me directly.  Thanks everyone!