In early 2014, JFBConnect's 'Channel' feature was released to allow users to quickly post Joomla content from their site to a Facebook Page or Group, Twitter Stream or LinkedIn Company. Almost immediately we heard calls to make the process fully automatic. After a lot of development and refinement, that automation is coming in JFBConnect v7, along with numerous other improvements.
Every site admin has it: That ideal workflow where they have to do as little as possible to keep things running while still maintaining active engagement with their users. The problem is that it always feels like just a dream whenever you're going through the long process of actually creating new content, going to each social network to carefully curate the status update that will announce the new addition, monitoring those posts and keeping track of where you've posted what content.
It can be a mess and it's difficult to manage.
The original Channels feature in JFBConnect greatly helped that process by letting you push content from your site to multiple networks all at once. It was still a manual process in that you needed to go to the page, click a few buttons and the update would go out. Definitely easier, but not quite automated.
With the upcoming JFBConnect v7 release, new content from multiple extensions, can be set to automatically post right as they are published. It's taken a huge effort to get it to all work smoothly, and we're extremely excited to get it in your hands this April.
After months of development and testing, we think we've got it just right! Simply enable the included Open Graph plugins, which will detect your different content types. Then, it's a matter of selecting which social networks should be posted to automatically.
In the initial release, auto-posting functionality will be available for the following extensions:
We'll be adding integration for more content types based on user feedback with each new release.
While auto-posting is the largest new feature, there are plenty of new things and improvements coming for everyone. Other improvements to note:
We're updating our automated test suite and testing the new features thoroughly right now. The current plan is to have JFBConnect v7 out by the end of April. Of course, auto-posting builds on the existing features of JFBConnect Channels, Open Graph and social authentication. If you already have JFBConnect, you can start getting things setup and prepared now.
If you don't have JFBConnect, subscribe now so that you'll be ready when v7 is ready.
