We’ve been quite on the blog recently but that’s not all due to our lazyness. Lots of work being done in the Filmaster code repository. Today, we present a few new long-expected features. Read on!

External reviews and trailers

We have added an option to add links to external reviews and film news that are displayed on specific film pages. Films can be also assigned videos like trailers and other film-related video content (interviews with producers, directors, etc).

The links and videos are first-class citizens on Filmaster. They appear as activities on Planet Filmaster as well on personal blogs of the editors that add them.

Adding external links is obviously an option that spammers would enjoy. That’s why you need to be part of the Editors group in order to be able to add those. If you requre such permissions, just contact us aand if we know who you are (e.g. you have recently submitted somre movie reviews or comments), you’re likely to get those rights.

Two examples of films with links and video content are: James’s Camerons long-awaited Avatar and Tommy Wiseau’s loved and hated The Room.

And yes, you can nicely switch between the videos on film pages using the array buttions (in case there is more than one).

If you are an editor (i.e. you can modify tags, English film titles and add film synopses), you should have the permissions to add links and videos. Please do so!

Clickable Tags

Tags assigned to movies are now clickable! We have prepared special tag pages that list all recent activities connected with films tagged with the given tag as well as rankings of such films.

For instance, going to tag: comedy shows you the list of recent comedy reviews and an all-time top 25 of film comedies.

When you click the “more acttivies »” link you’ll be transported to the Comedy Planet, where you can browse through all reviews and forum posts tagged “comedy”.

You can subscribe tags as well! There is an RSS feed for each tag so now you’ll never gonna skip any of the horror reviews or reviews of films about abortion, or communism or Japan.

Filttering rankings, recommendations and your ratings

You asked for it and we delivered. All film lists can be now filtered also by:

• number of ratings
• actors playing

For example, now you can check my favorite flicks with Robert De Niro or find out the all time bests (rated by at least 200 Filmasters).

Additionally, more for Google than for you guys (sorry for that), rankings got more telling titles, e.g. when you’re looking for best Woody Allen dramas before 2000 it will change the browser title accordingly.

Easier publishing of reviews

New Publish button on the new review page. It will publish the blog post so that it’s available for everyone to see (before you had to manually change the status on the select list, which was confusing). The Save button now only saves the review into drafts so that you can work on it later. There is also an Unpublish button in case you published something by mistake.

What’s next?

We’re not done yet. Lots of other new features are coming soon. One of the highlights is the new film recommendation engine (described here). We’re expecting to deliver the new set of updates during the week between the Christmas and the New Year.

And remember! You can also contribute to Filmaster by implementing some features (Filmaster is open source software!), translating the site into another language or just telling us what to do on the Filmaster forum.

Adam and Borys
The Two Filmasters