Social Igniter

Apologies for being a few days late with this blog post. Fear not dear fans and followers, as i've been putting in a ton of work in the last 1.5 weeks and this blog post offers a glimpse of what some of those exciting things are.

Widgets

What is a widget? In the land of Social Igniter, widgets are regions of a layout which constitutes a how viewing a single page looks. This current page your are reading this post on is a the "sidebar" layout which has a main content region, a sidebar region, and a wide region that spans the width of both. The signup page uses the "wide" layout" and the user profile page uses the "profile" layout. The final touch with the widget editor is that widgets are exclusive to layouts, so therefore a widget (of my personal tweets) in the sidebar region of the profile layout will not show up on the main sites sidebar region. This is a very good thing!

Themes

Themes control a much larger aspect of how a site looks. Most people who've installed Wordpress or Drupal or other quality cms' are familiar with how themes work- normally they display your content in a myriad of stylish ways and allow for ease of visual customization. My one gripe with those platforms is the dashboard (or user signed in area) is usually not a theme and requires some hackage to customize it. Social-Igniter has been designed supporting dashboard themes as well as the public external site theme, we've also baked in basic mobile detection and the ability to do custom mobile themes as well.

We've also made a pact with a swell designer gal named Alicia Nagel who has offered to do 5 custom site themes for Social-Igniter and help with the branding and user experience of this website. We are super excited to have Alicia on board as she is quite talented and excited to be a part of the SI team!

Apps

We've hopped on the band wagon- what used to be "Modules" are now "Apps" but why the sudden name change? Have we jumped the shark and slapped ourselves silly? Nah, the word Apps just makes more sense for what these modules actually do- they are little micro applications within the core application of Social-Igniter. For instance- if you have a cool web app out there like GeoLoqi and want to interact with it from your Social-igniter install get the GeoLoqi app. That makes sense right? Also everyone understands the word "app" these days while module is still confusing, even to me, and it can mean too many things. Considering, we aim to be understood by the common folk, apps it is :)