Attention all vBSEO customers and friends,

I'm happy to announce that vBSEO 3.6 Beta 1 is now available to Pre-Release Team members for testing. If you are interested in joining our Pre-Release team, please PM Brian Cummiskey, or find more information here.


vBSEO 3.6 Beta 1 Highlights

1. A full featured "Likes" system: A "Social Graph" for your community
Made popular by Facebook, and now making its way to forums and social web applications everywhere, a "Likes" system allows your users to effortlessly provide feedback to one another on the content they find most useful. Most importantly, this activity creates an underlying layer of data that works as a "Social Graph" for your community, opening the doors to a myriad of USEFUL features that have the potential to alter the way we interact with forums in different ways. One of them is enabling people to find the site's most useful content, more efficiently (see our "Likes Tree" feature below). Another powerful use for this data is the ability to surface the most popular and/or relevant content for search engines, be it via Search Engine Friendly pages that list this content (coming in vBSEO 3.6.0 Final), or by using it as priority multipliers for your Search Engine XML sitemaps (coming in vBSEO Search Engine XML Sitemaps 3.1).

2. The vBSEO "Likes Tree": Redefining the way people interact with forums
It gives you (and your users) an instant "birds-eye-view" of the "Likes" distribution in a thread, allowing you to *quickly* identify the most useful/important content, no matter how long the conversation is. This new feature represents a new paradigm as it allows people to extract more value out of forums in less time.

3. MaxCDN Integration: Faster Sites = Better SEO
Search Engines will love you and your users will love you too. It has been proved that sites that load FASTER, rank HIGHER. vBSEO has partnered with MaxCDN to bring faster load speeds to our clients. *New licensees* will receive an account at MaxCDN, valid for 1TB of bandwidth or 1 year of usage (whichever comes first). The package is valued at $39.95 and is being made FREE for vBSEO users who *purchase* a new license or *renew* an existing license (limited to ONE 1TB account per-customer). vBSEO 3.6.0 Beta 1 features MaxCDN integration via our dashboard.

Note: MaxCDN has agreed to provide this benefit to *all* pre-release team members during the beta period! Pre-release team members will find more information on how to claim their FREE MaxCDN 1TB account via our private Pre-Release team forums.

A CDN is a Content Delivery Network. CDN's host static files like images, CSS, JavaScript and other static content. A CDN solution is one of the best ways to speed up your site and increase your server capacity.

4. Other Enhancements

• Social Bookmark Support on CMS
• Relevant Replacements Support for CMS
• Bug Fixes

Beta 1 Installation Tips and Important Notes

1. No vBSEO CP option do disable the "Likes" functionality
The "Likes" feature and it's associated controls ("Likes Tree" for example) are still not enabled via the vBSEO CP in vBSEO 3.6.0 Beta 1. These features are turned 'ON' by default. If you would like to disable them, you must manually edit your vBSEO configuration file (vbseo/resources/xml/config.xml) and change "1" to "0" for the specific content areas you wish to deactivate.
Code:

VBSEO_LIKE_POST
1


VBSEO_LIKE_BLOG
0


VBSEO_LIKE_CMS
0

2. Update to the Social Bookmarking ("Share") functionality
The "Share" functionality, now listed as a link besides the "Like" link in postbit, requires an update. For a cleaner display, we suggest you change all your *custom* Social Bookmark icons to *remove* the descriptions (extra text). See the following example:

Old Format
Code:
http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=...book.gif,Share on Facebook,Share on Facebook

New Format
Code:
http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=...book.gif,Share on Facebook,Facebook
As you can see, the second part of the Bookmark text (bolded text) includes *only* the Social Site name.

Availability and Download Location

Beta 1 available NOW to the Pre-Release team *only*
We are making version 3.6.0 Beta 1 available to the Pre-Release Team only at this time. We expect to release "3.6.0 Gold" before the end of the year to all customers.

Download Location
Pre-Release team members may download the NEW vBSEO 3.6 Beta 1 from the new Pre-Release forums.

Installation & Upgrade
Find detailed installation and upgrade instructions within the readme.html file included in 'docs' folder of the installation package.


Posted on vBSEO.com