Posts Tagged ‘Release’

SkaDate Dating Software: New Build and Christmas Specials

Friday, December 17th, 2010

There are so many great things the Holiday season brings: Christmas tree, decorations, smell of spices and oranges, cozy family dinners and lovely gifts. And of course discounts and Christmas promotions we’ve been eagerly waiting for during the year.

SkaDate Team have prepared a special offer for you: New build of SkaDate Dating Software + Mobile Edition for only $350 (regular price – $500). The promotion will last until December 25′ 2010, so take your chance to start a successful business - order SkaDate now!

This is what you’ll find in the new SkaDate 8.0.2223:

  • Facebook connect and profile synchronization

The process of joining your site has never been easier. Your potential members can sign up (and then log in) using their Facebook account details… and who doesn’t have a Facebook account these days? The system will import data from a user’s Facebook account by synchronizing it with the native SkaDate profile fields. If your site member updates his Facebook account details, he can synchronize these changes with his profile info by a simple button click.

  • Multiplayer games

You will like the new games we have integrated. Because they are fun and easy to play, have eye-catching graphics and user-friendly interface, and allow your site members to play each other involving no third-party players from the game servers. No ads!

Here are the multiplayer games we have selected for you: Mine Sweeping Race, Backgammon, Checkers, Eight Ball, Five in a Row, Multiplayer Go, Rock Paper Scissors. Players can chat while playing in a special game messenger, which makes the process even more interactive.

Games can be enabled/disabled via the Admin Panel, and are membership- and credits-dependent.

  • New template

We have customized our most-loved DreamDate template to offer you another good-looking theme with the same components structure. We hope you will like the SweetDate just as much. And no worries – DreamDate is still there. Now you simply have more colorful options to choose from.

  • Shoutbox

This feature has been long-awaited by our customers. We have finally implemented it in SkaDate Dating Software to give your site visitors another fun way to express themselves.

Shoutbox is basically a general chat that can be available either to non-logged in visitors (Guests) on the Index page, or to registered site members on the Member Home page. The feature can be turned on/off in the Admin Panel and configured to be membership-dependent.

Not to let spammers abuse the Shoutbox, we have added a filter that prevents messages with unwanted content (indicated by the site administrator) from appearing in the chat.

  • Possibility to send mass-mailing by membership types

This feature will make life easier for Admins by allowing them to send mass-mailing to a certain membership type. For example, you can send promotional letters to free members describing the benefits of paid plans and offering seasonal discounts for subscriptions.

  • New mobile user-clients for SkaDate Mobile Edition

Now members can access your site from even more mobile devices, browsers and platforms. Such as:
phones – SonyEricsson, Motorolla, iPhone, Nexus One, HTC HD2, HTC Desire, HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Dream, HTC Touch PRO, HP iPAQ
platforms – Windows Phone, Windows CE, Windows Mobile v5
mobile browsers – Mobile Safari, Opera Mobi, Maemo Browser, Pocket Internet Explorer.
… and other less popular mobile clients.

  • Possibility to hide the Hotlist profiles from the Index page

We totally respect the privacy of your site members, and understand that Hotlist placement on the Index page is not always a good idea when it comes to closed communities. However, we don’t want you to disregard this great feature because of privacy issues. You can easily disable the Hotlist component for the Index page via the Admin Panel, and let your users enjoy Hotlist placement with no fear to be seen by non-members.

  • Mailto-type profile field

As usual, we have also performed critical and minor fixes, and worked on usability improvements.

Check out the Live Demo of SkaDate 8.0.2223, and enjoy the new opportunities it has to offer.

Happy Holidays from SkaDate Team!

New Build of SkaDate Dating Script: 8.2140

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

We have released a new build of SkaDate Dating Software8.2140

It features minor fixes and usability improvements.

Here is what you will find in SkaDate 8.2140:

  • Tips on payment providers setup in the Admin Panel

To make the process of payment providers activation easier for you, we have added links to the corresponding sections of online Admin Panel manual for each of the payment gateways. So if you want to setup PayPal, but don’t feel like leaving the Admin Panel to look for instructions, just click on the question icon against the payment provider’s title, and follow the detailed configuration guide.

  • Optional ‘Location’ matching field for Speed Dating events

Base Speed Dating matching fields are age, sex, location. If you don’t have that many members in your community yet, but still want each of the Speed Dating event participants to find a match to talk to – ease the matching criteria by disabling the ‘location’ field. This will let the system find more Speed Dating matches for each user.

  • Advance Speed Dating event notification

For your members not to miss the Speed Dating event they have signed up to, and be online on the site at the appropriate time -  the system is configured to send out automatic reminders about the upcoming event 24 hours before it takes place.

  • DreamDate template improvements

A few more improvements to fonts, and component names of the so-loved-by-customers DreamDate template.

  • Unsubscribed profile details

Before, if your site member decided to unsubscribe his profile, you received a notification that someone has left your site, which didn’t contain any of the member’s personal details. So you could only guess who quited using your site, and why. Having received multiple requests from our customers to make the ‘Unsubscribe notification’ more informative , we have added more details to it by including the member’s username and email.

  • Possibility to access site Admin Panel via SkaDate Mobile Edition.

Now not only site members can experience all benefits of mobile online dating, but also site owners can access the Administration Panel and make necessary settings right from their mobile device.

  • Updated database of IP range for geo-targeted ads

To always keep the IP range database up-to-date, thus making your geo-targeted ad campaign as efficient as possible, we are updating it with every new software build.

You can download the new SkaDate Dating Software build and update manuals for free in your Customer Area.

SkaDate 8 Engage: New Version of SkaDate Dating Software

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

We are glad to announce launching a new version of SkaDate Dating SoftwareSkaDate 8 Engage.

This time our goal was to make SkaDate a platform for an interactive dating/social networking site with a number of ways to communicate and have fun. The new version features games, speed-dating, new templates and usability improvements.

We have not made any global changes to the software core. This is good news for the existing SkaDate customers who can upgrade to SkaDate 8 Engage without having to restore site modifications from scratch. That’s also a matter of stability – SkaDate 7.5 platform has been polished up, major and most of the minor bugs have been eliminated, so right now we are talking about stable and robust dating software that promises flawless web site operation along with a bunch of exciting features.

Here is what you will find in in the new SkaDate Community and Dating Script:

New dating and community templates.

We’ve prepared two more attractive themes for your web site, because we want you to be able to choose something great for any concept. We hope you will like Moonlight and Bubbles – despite being very different they both are stylish and eye-catching. Yet more colorful themes to come, so stay tuned.

Games

We do keep up with dating software industry trends, because that is something our customers’ success depends on. Lately we have been receiving a number of requests from our potential and existing clients to make SkaDate Dating Script more interactive by integrating multiplayer games. We could not object the urge of this feature suggestion, because these days one can hardly find an Internet user who wouldn’t have a farm or a fish tank on Facebook.

We have added a few games into SkaDate (can be enabled/disabled via the Admin Panel): PentHouse Pool Single Player, Domino Multiplayer, PokerStar, Learn Texas Holdem, Domino Singleplayer, Texas Hold’em Multiplayer. Now users have even more reasons to come back to your site, and have fun together.

Speed-Dating

This long-awaited feature is now available to all the SkaDate Dating Script owners and their members. It allows to get your site users to a new level of online dating experience.

The series of short online dates gives your users a chance to get to know each other better in casual atmosphere. This is a fun and easy way to meet a bunch of new people and make friends.

Here is a brief description of SkaDate speed-dating feature: A site moderator creates a speed-dating event that appears in a special events section. The users willing to participate should mark themselves as ‘attending’, and be online on the site on the date and time of the speed-dating event. An attendee gets randomly connected to each of the online event participants, who meet his particular matching criteria, for a time-limited conversation. Each chat session lasts just long enough for members to make a first impression, and decide if they want to meet again after the event is over. A user-friendly interface allows your members to bookmark the noteworthy profiles during the speed-dating session, and get back to them later on.

Speed-dating feature can be used with our default Ajax text chat, or with audio/video chat add-ons. You can configure the feature access to be membership-dependent.

Possibility to modify the MemberHome page content via SkaDate Admin Panel

One of the most demanded features that makes site customization easier for those not having explicit coding skills (but still, be advised that basic coding knowledge is required to perform code modifications). Until now, this feature had been available for the Index page only.

The Admin Panel interface allows you to add/delete/move the MemberHome components, and play with HTML and styles without accessing the server and going through the software files.

Simplified interface for converting your site into a social network

We call SkaDate Community and Dating Software because its templates, and amazing range of social networking and dating features allows you to build a professional competitive web site for either concept. We can see that the world is changing, and so do the networking trends. This is why we want you to offer your members a little more than they anticipate. We believe that a hybrid of traditional dating and overwhelmingly popular social networking is the most potentially successful site conception.

However, we do understand that you know better what’s right for your online business. And so we’ve made it possible for you to choose whether your want your site to be purely dating-oriented, provide both social and dating features, or be a feature-rich social network. Now the Admin Panel interface allows you to easily disable the major dating features, such as:

Matchmaking

Quick Search

Advanced Search

Speed-Dating

Hot list

Photo verification

Bookmark Profile

No need to modify the code by yourself, or go for support team assistance. Now changing your site concept is a matter of a few simple clicks.

Possibility to sign up with mobile site version

SkaDate ME (Mobile Edition) has been gaining popularity among our customers, because these days almost everyone is carrying a smartphone or a PPC, and it means freedom of access and communication for your site members. SkaDate 8 Engage has come up with another significant ME improvement – possibility to register on your site right from a mobile device. A simplified registration form will make a sign-up process fast and easy. And we hope this will encourage even more people to join your SkaDate-powered community.

Option to choose European or US date format on the site

Good news for our European customers – now you can choose a date format that’s best for your site target audience.

Categories for Virtual Gifts

A site Administrator can now create categories for Virtual Gifts to make it easier for site members to choose just the right gift for any special or casual occasion.

Password protection for Photo Albums

Now instead of setting a password for every photo a member wishes to keep private, one can password protect a whole album. This saves time, and surely adds usability.

Option to delete a profile along with member content

We were asked to add this option by our customers who have to deal with spammer profiles on a daily basis. Usually, it’s not enough to unregister the malicious profile itself. A site moderator should also go through a user’s content and manually delete all the messages, forum and blog posts the spammer added to the site. If it’s not appropriate for you to have to approve every piece of added content before it becomes available to other site members – you can selectively delete undesirable profiles (if they are obviously spamming, or violate your TOS in any other way) along with all of their content. We hope you will find that time-saving.

Don’t forget there is also an option to delete a profile, but keep their comments and blog posts.

Comments summary

Most of us like reading what others think of our profile, photos, uploaded videos and blog posts. Because every comment is important, we’ve made it possible to look through the comments overview in one place, not to miss a thing.

Photo tags

Tags are a great invention that makes content-browsing a lot easier. Now your site users can tag uploaded photos to sort them in the most efficient way.

Clickable links in forums, blogs and comments

No HTML – the links added by your members to forum, blog posts and comments will automatically become clickable.

New secure image (captcha)

We hope you will love the new captcha, because it finally looks more user-friendly, which doesn’t make it less secure though.

A sound signal on incoming IM message

Now whenever your site users are having a private conversation in our text Ajax chat – they won’t miss a word from a person they are talking to thanks to a sound signal on every incoming message. Those who like piece and quiet can easily disable the IM sound.

Possibility for a site moderator to manage group content

Before we implemented this, no one but the group creator had a power to moderate the group content. But we all understand that sometimes what is posted within a group may conflict with the site TOS. A site moderator can now manage the group content without being a creator, which is definitely less drastic than deleting the group itself.

Besides adding the range of new exciting features, we also worked on making SkaDate Dating Software more stable and user-friendly, which resulted in a few fixes and significant usability improvements.

We are proud to watch SkaDate Dating Script become better with every build. We are proud to see it take the leading positions among the most advanced and robust dating and community software solutions. And we are proud to share our success with you, because we wouldn’t be able to make SkaDate what it is without your great ideas and feature suggestions.

Check out the Live Demo of SkaDate 8 Engage, and feel free to ask your questions from our support and pre-sale operators. We are always glad to assist.

Speed-Dating Script

Friday, October 1st, 2010

Speed-dating conception is quite simple, just like most worthy inventions. Equal number of men and women (seeking a

prospective spouse) gather in one place to go though a series of short meetings. They get a limited amount of time for a conversation with each participant, and then choose who they’d like to meet again based on the first impression.

We can’t call speed-dating a new invention (the first event took place in 1998). Live speed-dating events have been popular for quite a while, because they: a) allow you to meet several new people within one date, which saves a bunch of time, and increases your chances to find somebody you’ll truly like; b) help you skip the nervous break-the-ice stage by creating relaxed social atmosphere; c) don’t make you feel uncomfortable telling your date that you don’t want to meet again; b) save you from having to spend hours on a date with a person you happen to dislike – each mini-date takes a few minutes, which is quite bearable.

This fun and easy date conception worked very well on dating sites, too. Instead of meeting in person people could exchange private text messages, or chat through web cam with a number of date candidates sitting at home with a cup of tea.

This way of online communication gets a dating/social networking site to a new level of interactivity, and can liven up traditional online dating experience.

SkaDate Dating Software developers are now making the speed-dating feature available in the upcoming script version.

Skadate Dating Script owners will have another great tool to make members stick to the site and recommend it to their friends. We hope you will enjoy the user-friendly interface of the speed-dating feature, and the opportunities it has to offer.

Speed-dating will be available for free download to all the SkaDate customers along with the new software version*.

*You will be notified by email once SkaDate 8 is available for download. If you are not a SkaDate customer yet – feel free to contact our pre-sale team.

SkaDate 7.5.1933: Minor Fixes

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

We have released another build of SkaDate Dating Software – 7.5.1933. It doesn’t include new features, and is aimed at eliminating all those little imperfections that caused you and your members any inconveniences while using the site.

Find the list of fixes and improvements below:

  • Possibility for members to turn off/on the Friend Request notifications.

Surely not everyone wants to receive Friend Request notifications to their email addresses. For different reasons. We feel obliged to give your site members the right to choose.

  • Ajax Chat and IM query optimization.

We have slightly increased the intervals between Ajax Chat and IM queries to ease your server load.

  • Ajax Chat and IM smile set fix.

We have put the smile set in order. Now it looks just the way it should :)

  • Adjustments for IE 8.

A few more improvements to make SkaDate Dating Script performance flawless in Internet Explorer 8.

  • Possibility for members to prolong their paid membership type before the expiration date.

If your site member wants to take care of prolonging his paid membership before it expires, he can easily do that in advance.

  • DreamDate template improvements.

We have made our beautiful template even better by adding an inventory line, language selection box for members, a few keys and components.

  • Deleted Members thumbnail fix.

If your members happen to look through their mailbox conversation with a deleted member, they will now see a special ‘Deleted Member’ icon instead of just nothing (in Frefox) or a not-so-attractive red cross (in Internet Explorer)

  • MailBox: New Message notification fix.

If a member’s message gets caught by a spam-filter, the intended receipient will not see a notification about it on the site. We thnk this will help the users avoid confusion.

  • ‘Virtual Gifts’ component on the Profile View page improvement.

If your site users want to keep their virtual gifts to themselves, they can easily remove the ‘Virtual Gifts’ component from the Profile View page.

  • Video Upload: configuration of the max_filesize fix.

Before, if you changed the maximum allowed file size for uploaded videos, the system could still not allow you to uoload the desired video, because cache did not clear automatically. Now it does after every max_filesize customization, so you will face no more throubles with this.

  • RSS cache lifetime fix.

Checks and renews the third-party RSS feeds on a constant basis, thus keeping your content fresh and up-to-date.

  • Search by miles from a certain city/zip fix.

Your members can search by miles from zip with no more issues.

  • Photo view comments fix.

A member can now view the comments to his photos even if they are password-protected or ‘friends only’. We find that more than reasonable.

  • Latest Activity component improvements.

Your latest activity will now display friendly URLs if you choose to enable them on your site.

  • OpenInviter optimization.

We have taken over all the issues with inviting friends from Yahoo!.

  • Sitemap optimization.

Now your site will become even more SEO-friendly, because your sitemap finally can include friendly URLs.

  • Mouse cursor over the Facebook button fix.

That is just to show your site members that the Facebook invite button is actually clickable. The mouse cursor will indicate that.

  • Status line fix.

We totally think that every member has a right to leave his status line empty.

We can’t call this build feature-oriented. But it still contributes to making SkaDate Dating Software more stable, robust and user-friendly.

We hope you enjoy using our platform!