Steempress January update: Community blog, google login, profile settings page and more!

in #steempress4 years ago

2020 is already well underway and we hope you have all enjoyed a pleasant start to the new year! Although it's been a while since our last update, we've made some major strides towards delivering the objectives detailed in our public growth strategy.

We also took a bit of a detour in order to add a feature highly requested from one of the larger websites currently using SteemPress. While this has delayed our progress on the roadmap goals, it has nevertheless made an important addition to our plugin and helped us grow current engagement across our websites by 10x since the summer.

We expect to continue to make changes to our short term priorities based on user feedback and requests and highly appreciate the effort you all make to provide feedback and suggestions! With that being said, we're looking forward to what we expect to be our most exciting year yet.

Google signup and login for guests

Our biggest addition before Christmas was the option for guest commenters to log in with a Google account to engage with content through our comment sections. In addition, we made general improvements to the appearance of the signup and login pages as can be seen below:


The new login forms found across all Steempress comment sections.

Since the addition, we've already seen a steep increase in the number of guest commenters signing up and leaving comments on posts. This is of course great news both for the authors who don't lose out on engagement due to the barrier of entry otherwise presented by needing a blockchain account, as well as for us who get more users to onboard to Steem over time.

Profile settings dashboard

Another made before Christmas was a new profile settings page in the dashboard on steempress.io. With the growing number of guest accounts and users independent of the normal Steem ecosystem, it became increasingly necessary to have our own page for account profile settings. Similar to Steemit.com, it allows users to set or change the account profile information otherwise found on Steem.

This includes:

  • profile picture
  • display name
  • biography / description
  • location
  • website

howo.png

The current profile settings page found on steempress.io

Thanks to the changes included in HF21, these account profile settings can now be changed without the need for an Active key.

The profile information options are the same for Guest users, who will get the options to update their Steem account to include the same information once they connect a Steem account.

Community blog

We are also about to launch our new community blog on steempress.io. This is a big deal for us, as the community blog will be a live demo of the long-awaited SteemPress Pro website version! Here, visitors will be able to log in with a WordPress account and submit an article similar to other websites accepting community or guest writers. Where our product stands out is that the guest can sign the article with their own Steem account, and have it posted to their account if it is approved by the site owner!

We look forward to showcasing how this can be of tremendous benefit to websites looking to do content marketing and using Steem as a way to both incentivize authors to come and write on their site as well as to reach new audiences through the blockchain.

Call for content

To encourage participation in the community blog, we will begin a series of "invitations to contribute" where we will be providing periodic rewards to quality articles. What we're looking for in particular are SEO friendly articles, posts providing tips & tricks that other SteemPress users can use to improve their WordPress blogs and the reach of their posts, any content teaching new users about Steem and blockchain in general, as well as other community activities promoting growth.

Before launching our full blog, we will be inviting those interested in writing featured guest articles to submit their entries. We expect the topics for the first round will most likely to be:

  • WordPress recommendations for 2020, including plugins, SEO tips or trends, social media strategy or other new trends worth considering for the new year.
  • "#mysteemblog", a new monthly invitation for users to present their Steem-powered website, ideally emphasizing how they integrate Steem to improve engagement or provide unique value to their visitors.

We will follow up with a new post soon to provide more instructions on the post criteria. For now, we just wanted to share that this will be coming very soon so that those who might be interested can start to prepare some thoughts already.

Blog submit full.png

We've set up a dedicated page for interested writers looking to feature on our new blog as guest writers

Other changes

  • Fixes a problem where the profile picture would sometimes not display correctly in the field for new comments.
  • Made an improvement so that when a new comment was made it would automatically delete the text in the comment field, making it more clear that the comment was made successfully.

Witness status

The @steempress witness enjoyed a short spell in the top 20 during the last two months of 2019. This allowed us to look around for additional talent to join our team interested in taking on tasks in exchange for STEEM (as opposed to us needing to sell in order to pay for work in fiat). However, with a few new large votes being cast shortly after the new year, we're currently back ranked #26 on the witness list.

While we consider our witness mostly as a technical witness capable of carrying out tests of new forks, including our tests of HF21 and @howo's work on the upcoming SMT hardfork, as well as making open-sourced contributions to condenser, our witness is still crucial to help further develop SteemPress.

We thus hope that you will take the time to consider the contributions that we make to Steem overall and vote for our witness if you consider it valuable to you.

As always, if you have any questions then please visit us on our discord channel!
To download SteemPress, find our plug-in at https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress/

All the best,

@Howo and @Fredrikaa


You can vote for our witness directly using Steemconnect here.

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Any plans to improve comment display? Or make them more easily modifiable into WP themes so I don't have two comment boxes showing? It seems they appear at the end of posts now which is kind of odd.

Why not have it replace the WP comments like Disqus does?

The goal is indeed to be a complete substitute for any other comment section. Some users still prefer to keep their normal WordPress comments in order to get the emails from commentators to their email list (we're working on a solution for this).

But you can already let our comment section replace the old one by disabling it while enabling ours. Does your blog still include both?

Yeah I have SP comments removed now. I was having trouble figuring out how to move them and get them to play nicely w my theme.

Any way you could help me with this? I'm using Disqus right now, but I'd like to use SP if possible.

https://tothemoon.blog/trading/primexbt-review-leverage-trade-bitcoin-gold-silver-and-30-assets/

You can see how my comments are currently displayed there.

You can already disable the wp comments and have the steempress comments be the only comment souce.

Yeah. But it displays in the post and looks wonky

I do hope support for your witness grows and see Steempress as having the potential to advertise and grow the network over the coming months and years.

........ an important addition to our plugin and helped us grow current engagement across our websites by 10x since the summer.

Nice!

Looking forward to seeing what you do with SMT and the plug in.

The potential of Steempress as a way to onboard more creators and people to Steem is one thing. But we've been the only witness carrying out serious tests of any of the last two forks so far, I hope users also see value in that and demands other witnesses to take part.

As for SMTs, there's both the option of us doing our own, and the morel likely alternative that we'll provide consulting on our Pro users to create and implement their own. It's crazy to think that in just a few months, we can allow any WordPress website to have an out-of-the-box blog on their website with an integrated token made just for them.

I have my blog running a few days ago with your plugin, we will see how it goes, I am remodeling my site, your updates are noted and we see that the project continues, congratulations

Cool! Don't hesitate to ask me or howo if you have any questions or visit our Discord to ask the community there at any time!

Any plans for the affiliate program?

We're constantly analyzing how well it works and where those who are attempted referred are lost in the sign-up process. I want to launch a referral competition where we offer some liquid STEEM rewards and delegations for the top referrers once we have fixed some issues and made certain improvements.

Anything in particular that you had in mind ?

last time I checked there was no referral link anymore... and no stats etc.

There should be an affiliate link at the bottom of your profile information page on steempress.io

Hello everyone.. I have joined this community one year ago but i believe that i couldn't understand the idea behind the Steeemit and i just leave it. But in last one week i have started to learn some of important things and got connected back with the Steemit.

Now i am meeting with SteemPress and it is also impressing me..
As far as i read SteemPress teaching me about their roadmaps, growth strategy, user experiences, referral programs and policies so far.. Now i am reading osmething about wordpress which i have a blog there.. I think this kind of blogs would guide me in big time.. I am reading all SteemPress post one by one to understand fully. I also making searches about improving posts which i really need it right now..

That's why i am starting to publish my own articles again in here Steemit. I think this is the biggest, strongest and most trusted platform for everyone..

Thank you for reading🙏

Great new innovations, thank you @fredrikaa and @howo. Will be popping over to check them out.

Thanks! Looking forward to hearing what you think :)

I am gonna have to check this out, I have been saying we need all these changes in order for me to bring my audience over and now they are here. Well done.

Sounds great! If you have your own website, then I would hope this will allow you to connect it to Steem and benefit from all it has to offer! Don't hesitate to ask me if you have any questions :)

Wow, it's great to read an update from you guys! One moment I thought you were gone for good.

Glad that you're busy on making Steempress better!

Together - we can make this year great for both Steem and Steempress!

Amazing news my friends. 2020 is the year of Steem

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Grateful for your information, friends of @SteemPress. I would like to know how I link my posts from WordPress to other media on the web: Twitter, Facebook... Greetings.

@josemalavem - on each post, you will see in the top right corner, and where you press publish, a list of other options. Publicize is where you link to the other social media. See below.

Hope this helps!

Right! Thank you for your attention and help, @fionasfavourites.

You're welcome!
That part is easy, there are plenty of widgets out there that lets you display options for visitors on your posts to share it to other media platforms of your choice out there. Or you can just copy the link to the post yourself if you want to share it on your own accounts :)

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Thank you for your attention, @fredrikaa.

This is great update

Cool news

Intereesantísimo...

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Good

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Thanks for the post.