You may have noticed some new features on spraci.

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Blogs are now themeable

(you can change the look of your blog easily - go to "blog design" to change your blog settings).

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New admin page

There is a new "Dashboard" page to help you manage your own content on spraci which shows your most recent blog posts, events and forum posts with links to all the forms where you can post and edit your content.

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User Groups have been added.

You can now create a group which other people can join with its own forum and a combined blog of all group members' blogs. (with rss feed)

If you are the moderator of a group (you are the moderator of any group you create), you can set the forum to be "open" (anyone can view it, users who are logged in can post, like on the other forums)
or "closed" (only people who have joined your group can view its forum or post to it)

Look for the "Groups" link in the forums section or go to http://www.spraci.com/groups to start your own group or joing a group.

coming soon - group calendar (showing events added by group members)�

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More "Tag" (category) fields on forms.

Freetagging is nothing new here on spraci - internally it has worked that way for many years, but now it is being opened up more giving you more places where you can enter tags of your own choice to describe what your post is about.

("Tags" are just keywords you can use - try to use common names for things such as music genres)�

Some tags that are synonymnous are mapped to a single tag (and sometimes also to an existing spraci keyword - to make it easier for you to find things or get your news seen by people)�

You can see what events/news/blog items/forum posts match a tag by going to

http://www.spraci.com/tag/yourtag (replace "yourtag" with your chosen keyword)�

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wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editing in more places.

Easy to use rich-text editing on blog and forum posting forms.�

You can edit/cut/copy/paste just like in a word processor.�

Image links are integrated with "My Files" so you can easily use any images you have uploaded in your posts.�

To use wysiwyg editing when posting to the forums use the "topic" view and click on the "WYSIWYG" link on the posting form.

This will also set a cookie so next time you go to post to the forums it will go straight to the wysiwyg version of the form. (to set it back to the bbcode version just click the "BBCODE" link)

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Latitude/longitude fields added to some forms. (more soon)

If you are adding information about a place or venue it is recommended that you enter the latitude and longitude (and also the postcode) if you know it. This will make it possible to provide future services like showing a street map of the area, and more local searches (eg. whats near me?)

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Bulk event upload form�

If you want to add events and already have them in a file, page or feed you may be able to use the bulk upload form to speed up entering them into spraci.

Formats supported:

hCalendar (see microformats.org for a good way to embed machine-readable data in html), iCal, Outlook and RSS+Event.�

The bulk-upload form can be found in "My Events" (yes you have to log in first :-)

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