Active Social 1.1.2 includes several bug fixes, some performance improvements and a couple new features. The biggest performance improvement is in the Messaging area. Previously, users with large quantities of messages in their inbox would experience SQL timeout problems. We addressed this issue in two ways. First, we optimized the database queries. In previous releases, the query to retrieve 300 messages for a user would take over 5 seconds. Now the query will execute in less than 1 second whether the user has 20 messages or several thousand. The next step was to improve the user experience. This was done by simply adding a paging option for users to browse messages. I expect we will be adding a search option in the near future.
We also took some time to add some minor improvements based upon customer feedback. For instance, making sure the "Add Friend" pop-up is always visible without having to scroll. Another item is in the control panel where the admin can assign users to a group. We added an option so that you can browse by the first letter of the display name, similar to how you can browse the member list. A search option will be added soon.
The biggest improvement for this release is with image handling. First, we added an option for you to specify how you would like to convert images. This will be a big benefit to those that are limited on disk space. The new option to convert to JPG will greatly reduce image size. The image conversion option applies to all images throughout Active Social. We also wanted to improve page rendering within Active Social. The problem we had was that each profile picture was being assigned a random number with each page render. This was intended to prevent the browser from caching the image so that when the user changed their picture the change would appear immediately. We have replaced the random number with a value based upon the actual date the file was created. This allows for the image to be cached and also replaced immediately when the user changes the picture.