This month we have an obvious in hindsight feature and one that should help discovery.
#Country Lists
First, the discovery one as it is the smaller one. When you create Locations or Organizations, the Country field is now a drop-down rather than a text box. This way, searching is easier as you don't need to worry if it is USA, U.S.A, United States, Unitesd States of America when searching. And as with a lot of forms like this, when you select Canada or the US, the State/Province field switches to a drop-down as well with the appropriate content.
#Event Page Overhaul
The big news is that the dedicated map page has been removed. It has been moved to the Events and Organizations pages! Arguably, where it should have been all along. They behave slightly differently so let's deal with them one-by-one.
When going to the Events page you will see the familiar filtering controls for events, but will see a map with them as pins. Or clusters, which is also new. It was a little ridiculous how many things had pins, so clustering had to be introduces. Zooming in, or clicking the cluster will expand the pins.
The pin content has changed as well. If there is more than one event happening at a location in your results, it will list them all in the pin content. If there are more than 3 events sharing a space, then the first 3 will be listed and a link to go to the Location page which lists everything.
The Location page also got a bit of attention and the times of events are listed there too now since it has been upgraded to a first class destination target.
The list view of the Event page is still available too by clicking the toggle. The map view shows you where events are, but the list view shows them chronologically.
#Organizer Page Overhaul
Sometimes you want to see what groups are active in a place you are going to visit so you can Subscribe to their event feed. As a result, the Organizations page has had the same treatment as Events with the map being the default view and the list view available.
The necessitated a small change on how Organizations are created as they now require a City and Country. There were only 2 or 3 Organizations that didn't have that in the database so this feels like a safe rule change.
Pins behave slightly different for Organizations as well. Pins are at the city level, not 'something happens here.' So if you have a continent-wide community, you could end up with multiple organizations in the same city. Clustering happens again when zoomed out, but when you get to the city level it fans out letting you see all the pins.
#Bug Fixes and Other Things
- Renamed 'Dashboard' to 'Home' since it made more sense
#This Week
- Finish testing the 'custom ad' feature for the Pro tier
- Fight with Google about getting approved for ads?