We spent the last month implementing a couple of major features, that may not look that major but are so from the coding point of view: new filters on Planet Filmaster and configurable e-mail notifications.
E-mail notifications
E-mail notifications about new buddy requests or private messages are nothing new. What is new is a notification about responses to our posts on Filmaster and the ability to configure the notifications adjusting them to our needs.
- Now you’re going to receive all responses in threads you either started or left a comment in via e-mail. One e-mail will be sent for each answer listed in Responses tab (which you can subscribe via RSS as well).
- You now have an interface to manage your notifications where you can set up the notices you want to receive via e-mail (or generally turn the feature of if you don’t need it).
Dashboard->Data->Manage notifications
We also added a nice little new feature: you can also turn off the notifications for any thread you followed before, as well as you can follow any thread that you have never left a comment in but still want to be notified of new comments. You do this by pressing the e-mail icon next to the star icon at the top of each thread (review, short or a forum post):
By the way, if you haven’t provided your e-mail address when signing up (it’s not mandatory) but would like to receive notifications now, you can easily set your e-mail address on the profile edit page in dashboard.
Filtering Planet Filmaster
New filters
The second major feature that we added is the ability to filter Planet Filmaster in a way it was not possible before.
You can for instance list only the activities by your comrades or by people with a similar movie taste, narrow down this selection only to shorts or reviews or show only those the starred activities.
Thanks to the generic way we implemented this new feature, it will be easier in the future to add more filters, i.e. to show all activities concerning a movie, a director or specific to a movie genre (filtering by tags).
The looks of the filters is still under discussion. If you have a better idea on where the filters should be placed (currently they are displayed on Planet Filmaster in the right sidebar) or whether or not they should be visible or hidden by default, please let us know in the comments.
Favorites and other minor details
We have also finally fixed the favorites!
- Adam fixed the problem with starring an activity on Planet Filmaster. It used to select not only the activity in question but also visually select all the other activities that were underneath. This is working properly now.
- Also, the “add-to-favorites” stars appear now on top of all threads (reviews, shorts, forum posts) so that you can easily mark the thread as favorite when you visit it.
We hope that the enhancements here, together with the Planet Filmaster filtering capabilities, will allow you to use the “favorites” more effectively.
Release Notes
Warning: Skip this paragraph if you are not a programmer (danger of irreversible brain damage).
According to a new tradition, we have prepared a Release Notes page for version 1.0.1 in our issue tracker. There, you can check the completed tasks in detail as well as go deep down into the code as most of the tasks have links to our bitbucket code repository in comments. You can play with it, tell us how bad we are or re-use if you want to.
What’s next?
We came up with an ambitious plan to release a new version of code every 2 weeks (we were only 2 weeks late this time!) so you can expect more frequent updates in the future. This is what we have in plans for the nearest weeks:
- Private notes for movies — so that you can write something personal next to each film, that is not going to be published anywhere.
- New recommendations engine – we hope to eventually switch to it soon.
- More stuff that we have specified in jira — still to be discussed what goes first.
That’s it for now, stay tuned and feel free to comment on the changes!
Borys & Adam
The
Two
Filmasters
