Author Archive
Watched Pages have been merged with Subscriptions
You might have noticed that the Watched Pages link in your “More” menu. As I mentioned in a previous post, that’s intentional. There has been confusion between page subscriptions (where you can subscribe for notifications to page/site changes) and Watched Pages (where you can see what pages you’re watching and subscribe to them via RSS, for example) for some time now. Obviously, this was causing great confusion among new users so we decided to merge the functionality of the two services. Now, instead of having a watched pages page, you just have a Subscriptions page located here: http://developer.mindtouch.com/Special:Subscriptions
As a result, the watched pages you were watching have automatically been converted to Subscribed pages. You can manage subscriptions more easily now as well. Learn more here: http://help.mindtouch.us/kb/Managing_Notifications
Note: the Subscriptions link is missing from the Tools menu on Developer.MindTouch.com. This is a known error in the skin being used here. We will likely push a fix live today. In the meantime, you can directly navigate to the subscriptions page by using the link above.
New 10.1 Feature: Advanced Search
UPDATE: Please accept our sincerest apologies for any miscommunication, though the new Advanced Search feature is currently only available within our TCS Cloud offering. We are looking to include this functionality in a future release of MindTouch Platform v 10.1.
MindTouch Core, Platform and TCS all ship with a new advanced search feature that takes a normal query and gives you a dedicated UI for going into further detail about what you want. Advanced search allows you to refine your queries by including “all of these words” “exact phrase” “any of these words” or “been tagged with.” You can also filter results by “do not have these words” “by author” “by type:pages, images, comments, or documents.” If you are a TCS customer, these results are going to feed into your search analytics as well.
You can read more about advanced search and see some screenshots over on help.mindtouch.us.
New 10.1 Feature: Spell-Check
We’re not all great spellers. Let’s face it, most of us are pretty bad spellers. We’re also not great at grammar. When you ask for collaboration amongst your community, you have to take the bad with the good – spelling and grammar included. Wouldn’t it be nice if your collaboration platform had a spell-check and grammar-check built into the editor?
In the 10.1 release of Core, Platform and TCS, MindTouch now ships with that capability out of the box. Look for the ABC button at the top of your editor window and click it. Wait a sec while the spell-check reads your content and then start to click on the items it highlights for you to correct them.
The service is based on After the Deadline and is available for free. If you upgrade to 10.1 there is nothing to do to set it up. We’ve pre-package the connection to that service for you.
New 10.1 Feature: Auto-Save
One of the most requested features we have had is a way for MindTouch to automatically save content users are in the process of creating. Murphy’s Law teaches us that when you are hard at work on something for a very long time and you forget to save your progress, that’s when your computer will fail you. Now, in the event your browser crashes, when you get back to your MindTouch site, and navigate to the page you were working on, it will ask you if you want to continue editing the page you were working on or abandon those changes and work with some previous version.
The auto-save feature produces a notification in the editor dialog (top right corner) every time it saves. Look for it after you upgrade and start editing.
This feature is available in Core, Platform and TCS versions of 10.1 and 11.
Watched Pages
We’re going to be deprecating Watched Pages soon. This has been one of the most consistently requested changes in our product. It was a good idea that ended up creating confusion when notifications were added along side it. In this development iteration, we’re going to be eliminating the confusion by choosing one. Notifications won.
There are a number of members of the Developer Community who have already spent time cultivating a watchlist. Don’t panic. Your watched list will still be available. We’re going to migrate it to a page where we’re tracking your notifications. That’s the good news. The bad news – unless you get in and unsubscribe – is that you’re going to be receiving notifications for pages that you’re watching (but only when they change).
When the feature goes live on MindTouch.us we’ll cross-post here since we keep developer.mindtouch.com current with those bits.
