Blog Posts

We just rolled out a new VMware Communities platform release that fixes some of the top feature issues identified by the community:

• Threaded display mode for discussions. On My Content -> Preferences, you can set either threaded or flat view. Your default is the setting you had in the old VMTN forums; guests always see flat view. In threaded view, all posts display on a single page; in flat view, 15, 30, or 50 messages display per page (see Set Posts Per Page below). In addition, if threaded discussions go more than 20 levels deep, all threads at level 20 and beyond display at level 20.

• View all posts from a user. If you go to on any community member's profile -> Discussions tab, you will see all messages the member posted. Each member's Overview tab still displays just the threads the member started. And we did discover a bug too late to fix: the links in the Discussions tab point to the top of each thread, not to the individual message within the thread. We will fix this next week.

• Set posts per page. On My Content -> Preferences, you can set 15, 30, or 50 posts per page. Your default is the setting you had in the old VMTN forums. This one setting determines both the number of discussions or documents that display on a community homepage and the number of messages that display in a thread (in flat view only).

• Search in this community. The search box will by default search just within the current community (and child communities, if there are any) as it did in the old VMTN forums. Once you've done a search, the results page displays with the advanced options open and the appropriate community and its children selected to remind you where the results are from. If you wish to broaden the search, you can then specify other communities and rerun the search. Tip for Windows: use shift-click or control-click to select multiple communities.

• Legibility tweaks. We tweaked the UI to make community pages and threads easier to scan. Note: To see this fix, you may need to refresh your browser so it loads the new CSS.

• Mark as read. If you click 'Mark as read' in a parent community, it marks the message as read in all child communities as well.

• Blog permalinks. Blog permalinks for guests now link to the proper blog post. Blog permalink pages now display with proper width.

I've updated the VMware Communities Known Issues with today's fixes.

We continue to spec out additional functional and u/i improvements, and we will blog about them here later. Search improvements are at the top of the list.

Meanwhile, we continue to work on reducing the system slowdowns and restarts, which we believe is a key source of the browser and text editor issues some of you are experiencing.