When we first put together a comment reply page, we knew we were far from finished. We had plans to ultimately build a complete private messaging system for soLinkable. And throughout the past week we’ve been working diligently to get our new and improved messaging system up-and-running… Who am I kidding – We threw a bunch of code together at the last minute and hoped for the best.

The new messaging system offers a few improvements to soLinkable:

1. Private messaging. You can now send a private message to any user through soLinkable. This will make it even easier to communicate with the admins (or anyone else for that matter).
2. Display all messages and replies. The first page in your message center displays a collection of all messages and replies you’ve received, ordered by descending date. This includes replies to your comments, top level comments on stories you’ve submitted, and private messages (both sent and received).
3. A new eye-catching envelope link. Do you know when you have a new message or reply? Probably not. A blue envelope on a blue theme just isn’t very noticeable. So we’ve redone the image to make it stand out a little better, which will (hopefully) allow for more conversation.
4. Much faster page loads with fewer queries. We’ve done some serious optimization to the comment and messaging systems. You won’t notice a huge improvement right away, but as soLinkable continues to grow these improvements will go a long way (If you want to get a little technical, we drastically reduced our database calls, cutting the execution time by 33%).

So… How Do I Use It?

Look at the top right corner of soLinkable. Are you signed in? Do you see that envelope? Good. That’s the link to your message center. For the most part, the envelope will appear blue. However, when you have unread items in your message center, the envelope will alert you by turning a sort of orange-red:

Clicking on the envelope will bring you to the main page of the new soLinkable message center, which lists the 25 previous conversations you’ve had on soLinkable. A conversation includes any private messages, replies to your comments, or first-level comments made to a story you’ve submitted. The basic setup of the page is as follows:

• Menu Items: Easily navigate through the different screens within the soLinkable message center.
• Type Of Message: Displays information regarding the type of message. Can be either a private message, post reply, or comment reply.
• Title Bar: The who, what, and when. This information bar will indicate the username, subject (if applicable), and date of the message or comment.
• Message Body: The actual content.

Next, let’s move to the “Compose” page. This is where you’ll go to write a private message. The layout and input textboxes are pretty self-explanatory. To, Subject, Message… All basic stuff.

The error checking at this point in time is pretty basic, it just checks to ensure you’ve entered a subject, message body, and valid username – No fancy jQuery validation engines yet. However, there is some simple AJAX going on in the background to help ensure the person you’re trying to contact exists. When you move the focus away from the “To:” field, it will contact the soLinkable servers and return whether the user exits or not. Simple but handy.

The Indox/Sent folder contains a list of all messages, beginning with the newest first:

And finally, clicking the subject will open it up in the view message template:

More improvements to come

It’s still in a beta phase, so expect some minor changes in the next few days as we try to work out the kinks. And if you’ve never played the role of a beta tester but always wanted to, here’s your chance. Play around with it and let us know what you think: Are there any bugs? Is it intuitive and easy-to-use? What would you do differently?

So get on it – Check out the soLinkable message center!

comment, feature, messaging, solinkable