Over the past year, I’ve been working on ways to improve our social network product and provide our customers with a better experience and to have confidence when dealing with us. We’ve experimented over the past few years with different ways of product support and how we deploy the product. Based on our very own experience, and with what I know we need in order to take our company to the next level, we needed the addition of both financial and human resources.
I’m pleased to announce that with the recent post about our new addition to our development team, we have brought in additional funding that can now take our product and company to the vision we have been working towards. So Production is a Go!
Our first priority with the recent addition of developers was to speed up our product deployment of bug fixes and new features to our flagship product. Many of our current clients that have been with us for years are still running on phpFox v3 (Nebula) and in 2016 we will cease development and the sale of v3. However, over the next few weeks, we are going to be working closely with clients that have large phpFox v3 social network communities and fix any ongoing problems that are part of running a large community with our platform. We are going to focus on providing the things that were removed in v4 from v3 that are keeping our current clients from upgrading to v4. In addition to that, our upcoming version, 4.2, will introduce a new way to install both apps/modules and from the perspective of a client, it will be the same one-click install process. We are going to focus on making sure that v3 modules will work in v4 with very little work on the 3rd party developers. We will provide detailed documentation on how developers can port their v3 modules to v4. The main changes will be updating their HTML/CSS to match our new site design.
Quality control has also been something we have been lacking in the past as we focused on just deployment and relied on customer feedback for any issues. This has changed with the recent addition of developers as we have a dedicated team and a new development process when it comes to developing new features and fixing any bugs. Anything we release, whether it’s a bug fix or a new feature, will have to first pass the tests provided by our QC team. When our developers create new features, we will create detailed documentation on how to use these features and directly add them to the knowledge base.
In the first quarter of 2016, we will be bringing back a ticketing system for our clients in order to provide the one-on-one support with one of our new support technicians. This support area will also include areas where clients can access our product and invoices. We are working on migrating all our product licenses, clients, and orders into one unified system making it easier for our clients and our staff to better serve our clients in a timely manner.
The first quarter will also bring light to a new knowledge base that we are currently working on, and we have a team of technicians that will constantly update it with useful information based on common questions that we find in our community and ticketing system. This knowledge base will also be tied into your AdminCP where you can get useful tips on how to manage your community with ease.