The Praized Media Product Blog

We’ve just released version 2.0 of our plugins for Wordpress. This new release improves on many elements that used to take place on Praized.com and that are now happening on your site. We also deployed Facebook Connect.

Praized Community v2.0: (download here)

• Deployed a simplified (lightbox-based) sign-up/log-in process to avoid sending users to Praized.com and back to your site. This feature is optional but you need to activate it in your Wordpress back-office  (go in Settings – Praized Community to enable/disable)

• We’ve  also deployed Facebook Connect to log-in to the Praized Network using your Facebook username and password. This is available when using the new lightbox log-in (see above).  It will also be available in the standard log-in flow shortly.
• Implemented full user account management functionality within your own Web site.  People can now update their Praized account information (password, avatar, social media broadcast settings, etc.) right from within your pages, without ever leaving your site.
• We’ve implemented the concept of “display name” where appropriate.
• We’ve improved the user experience of the place and user profile pages by introducing a tabbed interface for activities  (votes, favorites, comments, etc.).  SEO and accessibility is not affected since the information is still  all in the page. The screen is simply reformatted on the fly via css and javascript.
• We’ve added geo meta and RDF tags to single merchant views for increased semantic and SEO value.
• Plug-in now comes bundled with full French translation if running WordPress in French.

You can also download our Praized Editorial Tools plugin v2.0 here.

These have been tested to be fully compatible with the latest WordPress release as well as WordPress MU and BuddyPress.

Hope you like these new features!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to ping us at help AT praizedmedia.com.

We just released a new version of our Wordpress plugins (version 1.7 for people tracking our versioning!) and here are some of the new features:

• We moved the search brick to the top of most of our platform templates. Experience shows that users prefer having the search brick on top as opposed to the side. For example, you can see it on the Top Places page or the Local Buzz page.  In a search result page, the number of results is now displayed.  At the same time, we’ve modified the search form widget so that it is automatically hidden when the same form is shown in the main content area.

• We also decided to split our “Praized Session” widget to introduce a new “Praized Section” widget.  We felt it was better to separate the Log-in/Join/Manage Profile/Logout functions from navigation functions like Top Places, Local Buzz and our new Questions & Answers section
• We exposed the place tagging and commenting functionalities for non-logged in users and made it so that the submitted data (tags, comment) is preserved and processed at the end of the login process if required (like we did for votes and such in v1.6)
• We added a new help section for the our platform. Note that the content we display in this page is actually stored on our server (but cached on yours), so you will get any updates we make automatically as we release them
• We added an upgrade notification mechanism so you don’t miss out on important new changes when upgrading to a new version of the plugin
• We added support for sponsored images in the sponsored links block
• Finally, we updated to praized-php-1.7 and to praized-wp-core-1.7.

Download our plugins here and here.

If you have any questions, comments or even suggestions to improve our plugins, don’t hesitate to contact us at help AT praizedmedia.com

We’ve just released a new version of our plugins for Wordpress.

Praized Community v1.6: (download here)

• We’ve implemented the Questions & Answers features! Now, any community using our Praized community plug-in can have its own Praized Answers service on its Web site.  See it on the Praized blog.
• We’ve also added the ability to select the Questions & Answers section as the default page for your Praized section
• We’ve added user avatar support where appropriate (user profile, comments, etc).
• We’re now supporting Google Maps up to 640×640px (from a previous max of 512×512px).

Praized Tools plugin v1.6: (download here)

• The Praized Tools plugin now comes with a default read-only API key that will link back to the Praized Hub (http://praized.com/) so you can be up and running within seconds. You can now placeblog and link back to Praized.com or your own intall on your blog.

These have been tested to be fully compatible with the latest WordPress release 2.7 as well as WordPress MU.

Hope you like these new features!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to ping us at help AT praized.com.

It could be that you’re stuck at an airport and need to know where you can find a place to lie your head for the night. Maybe you’re looking for a new watering hole where nobody knows your name or perhaps you need to find a vase to replace the one that your kids broke with a hockey stick while they were playing indoors against mom’s wishes.

We’ve got you covered with Praized Answers.

Praized Answers is a way for you to submit a question about local stuff and harness the power of community to find the answers you are looking for. Simply use the helpful search form to ask a structured question or go solo and use a blank box to phrase your question as you wish.

As soon as you ask your question, it gets published to Praized’s Local Buzz newsfeed, our home page. You can also select other social media services to broadcast your questions (currently Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, Friendfeed and Ping.fm). Choose how you wish to be notified of responses (email, Twitter, RSS).

Oh, but Praized Answers isn’t all about take, take, take. We encourage you to use Praized Answers to lend a hand by sharing your knowledge. When you see a question that you are obviously knowledgeable on, please post an answer and help a Praizer out. You can use our search tool to identify the perfect recommended merchant for your friends. They’ll love you for it!

Find it at answers.praized.com

We’d love to hear your feedback on our latest feature so please send your comments to help@praizedmedia.com or visit us on Get Satisfatction.

Every tribe needs some tribal markings and the Praized Tribe is no different.

Give your WordPress blog some facepaint by downloading the new “WordPraized” WordPress theme which matches the Praized.com interface and compliments our local search plugins (not mandatory).

The WordPraized theme comes bundled with 10 color schemes, support for iPhone and French localization is included. By using the Praized WordPress plugin with the WordPraized template, you are able to create a site that harnesses the power of ‘local search in a box’.

You can get it fresh from the WordPress Themes Directory, grab it from the Downloads section of our Google Code Resources site or find an SVN checked at http://praized.googlecode.com/svn/

Check out a screen shot here.

We’d love to hear your feedback either at via our Help Desk (help@praizedmedia.com) or via our Get Satisfaction page

We’re so happy to announce that the two Praized Plugins (Praized Community & Praized Tools) have been added to the Wordpress Plugin Directory and join over 3000 plugins available to the WordPress community.

The Praized Community plugin allows you to deploy a complete local search section including over 17 million North American place listings, social tools and search functionality within your WordPress blog.

The Praized Tools plugin enables new editorial tools within your WordPress installation to allow users to blog about places and link this back to your Praized-powered community.

This announcement comes in advance of Praized’s attendance at WordCamp Toronto 2008 this October 4th-5th at the Progress Campus Student Centre. WordCamp is defined as “A group of WordPress and blogging enthusiasts committed to putting on a fabulous weekend of learning, meeting and exploring all things WordPress and blogging.” Speakers include:

Matt Mullenweg - founder of WordPress
Joseph Thornley – CEO of Thornley Fallis
Tim Shore- Founder and Publisher of Freshdaily
Mark McKay – Videoblogger and host of “Happy Hour with Mark McKay”
Jonathan Dekel - Nightlife Magazine

We’re really looking forward to spending the weekend learning more from WordPress masters, showing our WordPress plugins and adding more members to the Praized Tribe.

Sebastien Provencher, Praized’s VP of Product Development is an avid blogger with a focus on providing readers of The Praized Blog with his take on Local 2.0 (defined as: local + social).

Seb also attends and speaks at many conferences on this topic and by reading his blog and following his twitter messages you’ll be able to find out where he’ll be next.

So how does a busy guy like Seb use Praized to help him save time in getting the word out to his social network that he’s ‘on the road again’?

He’s installed the Praized plug-in on his WordPress-powered blog and uses the Praized Tools embedded within his blogging dashboard to quickly attribute locations he’s blogging about with the relevant geolocation information associated with it.

Above – The resulting blog post:

But wait! It doesn’t end there. Seb asks his network where he should go to eat while he’s in sometimes unfamiliar territory. In this case, he got to enjoy tasty mini-burgers before a steak dinner (which seems a bit like a meat-overdose if you ask me!?!).

Happy with his experience, he left a breadcrumb (or meatcrumb?) trail for others by Praizing the steakhouse so that they’ll be able to validate that it is indeed a spot worth visiting.

And the circle of Praized is complete.

We realize most people spend their online lives in many social sites. To further our mission to enable conversations about places in the social media world, we’ve now added enhanced ‘Sharing Power’ to our “Share” button and you are now able to choose from a full smorgasbord of social media tools to post your Praizes to or you can just clip the embedded code we provide for each listing to use elsewhere.

You are now able to add details about a location directly to Blogger, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google Bookmarks, Movable Type, MySpace, Ping.fm, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, TypePad, Vox, WordPress.com as well as self-hosted WordPress blogs and WordPress MU.