Better search, more posters, Facebook & Jabber!

Full-text search covering film synopses, blog posts and comments, possibility of adding/replacing film posters and new integration options: sending activities to Facebook and Jabber (yes, GTalk as well) integration – these are the four new features on Fimaster.com as part of the 1.0.9 release. Read on to learn more!

Full-text search

Has it ever driven you really mad when you tried finding some old review or forum post on Filmaster.com but had to switch to Google search because our internal engine was not strong enough for that? If so, this is now history! We’re introducing new, enhanced full-text search on Filmaster that indexes: blog posts (including full reviews), short reviews, forum and blog comments, film synopses, film titles, film people’s names and Filmaster users. In a nutshell: everything that matters.
There is still a lot of room for improvement obviously, but please test it and let us know what you think about it!

The search engine was implemented by our contributor Lech Twaróg using solr and haystack open source projects. Filmaster is open source itself and you can learn what it means to you on our dev portal.

Adding new posters

Some films have no posters assigned. This sucks as it looks bad and it’s harder to catch the right movie on recommedations screen or in search results. We’ve implemented thumb fetchers that automatically get posters from TheMovieDB or IMDB, but that was still not enough. Now we give you, Filmaster users, the option to suggest posters manually! And it’s dead simple. Just go to the film page, click “Add poster” or “Replace poster” (if the current one is incorrect for some reason) and you will be given an option to either upload an image from your hard rive or directly from an external site. What’s even more cool, you don’t need to know GIMP or Photoshop to do that. Filmaster automatically resizes the images to the required size (71×102 pixels). Just make sure the width/height ratio of the image is more or less allright – otherwise it’s gonna look rather bad when resized.

If you are already an editor, you don’t need anyone to accept your uploads, they will be online the moment you upload them. Editors can also (and should!) approve/disapprove new posters uploaded by regular users on the specially prepared poster admin panel (RSS with recently suggested and accepted posters is coming in the next release).

Better Facebook integration

We have integrated Facebook Connect before to let you log in using your Facebook credentials. We have also added Facebook Like buttons on movie pages to let you share Filmaster links with your friends. Now we’re going one step further with the integration: Filmaster can automatically publish all your new blog posts and short reviews directly to Facebook! All you need to do it to log out from Filmaster, log in againg using the Facebook LOGIN button and accept the terms.

What Filmaster should and should not post to Facebook you can configure on the notification management screen in your settings.
If you don’t see a “Facebook Wall” column there, it means you need to log out and log in to Filmaster with Facebook again. It should request your permissions to publish on your wall as the first thing after log in.

Test feature: Jabber integration

If you use Jabber (e.g. when you say you use Google Talk you’re actually using XMPP which is commonly known as Jabber), you should enter your Jabber ID on the profile editing page and then add this guy to your friends: filmaster@xmpp-test.appspotchat.com. All notifications (like comments to your reviews) will be sent directly to your instant messenger. How cool is that? Well pretty cool, unless, of course, it doesn’t work. It’s a test feature for now so you never know

What’s next?

You’ve probably already noticed some new options in the notification settings, namely a “check-in” feature. This is something we’ll be speaking very loud about in January, but to give you an idea…
We’re working hard on Filmaster Mobile. One of its main features will be an option to check into local cinema screenings and tell your friends you’re going to watch this or that film. That’s what the check-in option is for. You’ll be also able to see who else (or your friends or total strangers using Filmaster) checked in. And peraphs even socialize with them using the mobile app. Sounds interesting? Check our blog in a couple of weeks and follow us on Twitter, we’ll be writing a lot about those things soon. And yes, you can sign up for best testing already!
But for now, please tell us what you think of these new features and… simply start using them!
The Filmaster Team
(Borys, Adam, Mariusz, Lech, Jakub)