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Muut 1.3 – Subchannels & Sticky Posts

Muut Inc • 2013-05-28

Muut 1.3 is a third major update with subchannels, sticky posts, vastly improved documentation, 4 new languages and custom domain for search engines.

Custom navigation

Now you can replace the default navigation with HTML code that you can format in the way you like.

Muut 1.3 lets you customize the forum navigation in any way you want.

Using custom html, you can now setup subchannels, sticky posts, ads, banners, images, polls, or forms, to name a few possibilities.

Setting up channels is now a matter of typing them into the html. Want to start an Electronic Music Forum with a sub-channel for each and every electronic music genre out there? Well, all you need is to type in the genre names inside <a> tags, save and reload. Your genre channels are now in place, waiting for electronic music fans to start discussing them.

Adding channels, renaming, nesting, reordering — it’s all about editing html on your webpage.

Paths magic

If you haven’t yet learned about paths in Muut, now’s a great time. They’re a very powerful (and not just cool!) feature in Muut; they allow you to organize the discussions on your site in the way you like.

Let’s take our imaginary Electronic Music Forum. In the forums navigation you’ll have a channel for Ambient, under which you have numerous subchannels, like this:

- *Ambient*
   - Ambient house
   - Illbient
   - Isolationism

- *Breakbeat*
   - Big beat
   - Broken beat
   - Florida breaks

All posts under the channel “/ambient/ambient-house” can also be found under its parent channel “/ambient”. There’s no limit to how many levels of subchannels there can be. Just use a path hierarchy that fits your particular forum and use an html layout to either show the hierarchy or hide it.

You can now use paths under the hosted version of your forum under muut.com/[forumname]. Just type path on the URL such as

  • muut.com/[forumname]/some/path
  • muut.com/[forumname]/some/other/path

and you’ll see hierarchical commenting. Or you can type

  • muut.com/[forumname]/some/path:some-key

for flat commenting. Learn more about paths.

Unlisted channels

Now you can create unlisted channels that won’t show up in the “All posts” view. This is great for things like e.g. “Issues” channel, the posts in which you might not want to be the first thing the visitors see when landing on your forum.

Sticky posts

You can now insert links to individual threads inside the Muut container. These are threads that you specifically want users to see first when they come to your forums. When the link is clicked, the content is loaded inside the forum, and the link is selected.

For more flexible css styling the links are placed inside <p> tags. Try it for the welcome post right now! You can also use it to post news items or FAQ’s.

Learn more about sticky posts

You can insert pictures at the bottom of the custom navigation, and when the screen goes smaller, the footer moves to the bottom of the page. This is a typical place to add advertising, polls, or forms, to name just a few possibilities.

Revamped documentation

Our documentation has gone through a complete overhaul. Now divided in separate channels, it offers a detailed overview of Muut’s features, the technologies behind Muut, as well as guides to embedding and customizing it on your own site. Maybe you want to know why we prefer a service model instead of a self-hosted version? Or perhaps you want to configure a custom domain for search engines.

We will keep updating the documentation continuously as new subjects and features emerge, of course.

4 new languages

We now have four new languages:

And we have a separate language documentation.

Branded links

Links to many major sites in Muut posts are now shortened into a nicer format, with a logo replacing the site name.

The complete list of changes in v1.3 can be found on the Muut updates page.


Thank you.

The Muut Team

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