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myfamily.com 2.0 beta

Here are the latest improvements to myfamily.com:
We just released an update to 2.0 that’s chock full of great new features and enhancements. Go to your myfamily.com site now to check them out. We hope you’re as excited about them as we are. There’s so much yet to come over the coming months, but for September, here’s our list:


Themes!
One of our most requested features is the ability to change the design or theme of the site. Though some of you like the simple palette, many would prefer something with some color or style.

So, today we’re excited to announce our themes feature, starting with 3 new themes:

1. Mosaic
2. Charcoal
3. Butterfly

But these themes are just the start. We’re even more excited about the future of this feature. We’re planning more themes and tools to help you style your site to your liking.

Account and Profile Updates
We’ve made many changes and refinements to the way you manage your Account and Site Profiles. We have plans for even more features, Admin controls and refinements in coming sprints too.

1. Nickname: If you’ve added a nickname to your profile, we now display it across most of the site and for shared content.
2. Centralized profile management: If you have more than one site, your address, email address, phone and other profile information are now available in one central spot under My Account.
3. My Site Settings Page: Under My Account, you now have a My Site Settings page where you can control what and how other members of your sites see your personal information, including if and how your birthday is displayed and if your email, address or phone are displayed. Here you can also add or change your nickname, update your Notification settings and access your Voice News PIN information.
4. Avatars: You can now add an avatar to your profile from your profile page, not just from the single photo page.
5. By popular request: Administrators now have the ability to change another site member’s nickname and avatar. This will help Admins help their less tech-savvy members.


Contacts
Contacts is your site address book. Use contact cards to store personal information such as phone number, address, email and birthday of people who aren’t members of your site. Once you’ve created a contact, you can easily use that Contact Card to invite the person to join your site.

Messages
Messages is a simple application that works like email for site members. Now you can communicate directly with your site members, and they can reply directly to you. It’s great for times when you need a little more privacy or simply don’t want to bother everyone on your site with a News post.

Messages feature list:

1. Send personal messages to one or more members of your site.
2. Reply to messages sent by other site members.
3. Include attachments with your message.
4. Easy to use formatting and HTML styles (bold, italics, fonts).
5. Easily embed images into your message using image links from the web link to other sites.


Start Page
We’ve created the “Start” page, which is available by clicking on our logo once you’ve signed in. Let us know what you think, and whether you’d prefer it be the page you see first when you sign in.

Why did we create this page?

1. We wanted a place to keep you informed of the latest news and updates to the service.
2. The “my sites” menu is convenient but inconspicuous, and members would benefit from a more obvious listing of their sites (including myfamily.com 1.0 sites if you have them).
3. Many people have told us that it’s not obvious where or how to create a new site.


What’s New, simplified
We’ve really simplified this feature by eliminating the dual-pane interface, thereby reducing the number of clicks it takes to see everything in What’s New. It is now a single scrolling ‘feed’ of new and recent activity on your site. We think this simplified What’s New page provides an even faster way to get an overview of your site activity, and with a single click, you’re brought right to your content.

Discussions: News + Family History, Recipes, Reviews, Other (4 new categories)
We’ve moved News under a new tab named Discussions, and we’ve added 4 new categories:

• Family History
• Recipes
• Reviews
• Other

Of course you can still record Voice News as well.

These changes allow us to support our myfamily.com 1.0 members’ migrated content. This also represents just the first step in the plans for these categories, so stay tuned.

Migration Update
Admins of 1.0 sites who have plans to migrate their 1.0 site(s) now have access to Migration Center, a great resource loaded with migration FAQs, news and information. We’ve also provided an early signup form for Admins who want to be in the first wave of migration notices. We’ll continue to post updates about migration to our blog, but the Migration Center is where all the goods will reside from here on out.

Help and FAQs
We have an all-new Help section that has a very handy search feature to help answer questions and resolve problems you’re experiencing with the service. We will continually add content to support you and your members.

Demo Site
The new demo site is filled with photos, videos, SnapGenie stories, discussions and other content to help people who are new to myfamily.com see what a working site looks.

Video Uploads
We increased the file size limit of a video file from 25Mb to 100Mb. Yeah!

Additional HTML Support (for you HTML-lovers out there)
We expanded our list of HTML markup that you can use in posts and comments, which now includes: img, a, br, li, ul, strong, em, b, i, u, p, table, tr, th, td, tbody, span, blockquote and hr among others!


We hope you’re as excited about these new capabilities as we are. There’s much yet to come over the next few months so please keep checking back.


Have fun!
The myfamily.com team

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