3 new modules were made available for the Community website at http://community.linuxmint.com

Messaging

If you’re logged in, you can now send a message to other people. They will receive a notification by email. They can reply to you, in which case you’ll get a notification as well. There’s a new “inbox” for your messages and an indication of how many unread messages you have on the left hand side of the website, just beside your avatar.

From your inbox you can also click on “View Outbox” to see the status of the messages you sent. Now, don’t think of this as your usual “sent mail”. This is not an email system. After you send a message, it becomes visible to your recipient in his/her inbox, and to you in your outbox. The title appears in bold characters until your recipient reads the message, and it disappears both from the recipient’s inbox and your outbox once deleted by the recipient.

The reason this behaves like this is to minimise the resources used by the module and to give you the ability to check if your message was read by the person you sent it to.

Notifications

You’ll receive notifications when something requires your attention or when something might be of interest to you. Notifications are not urgent and they do not require an answer from you, so they don’t appear in your “inbox” and you don’t get emails about them.

At the moment, only one module uses notifications: the Idea module. If you find an idea interesting and you’d like to follow its development, you can click on the “Subscribe” button on the top-right corner of the page. You’ll then receive notifications when this idea is edited by its author, when a user comments the idea or when an administrator changes its status.

A visual indicator on the left side of the page, beside your inbox and your avatar shows you if you’ve got unread notifications. Clicking on it brings you to your notifications box where you can see all your notifications. Note that notifications relate to a particular item (for instance, a particular idea) and that accessing that item, whether it is from a notification or by other means, automatically deletes all notifications you have about this item.

Friends

You can add people to your friends list by clicking the “Add as friend” button on their profile. And you can remove them from it either from their profile or directly from your friends list (click on My Places -> My Friends to access your friends list).

Note that people get notified by email when you add them as a friend.

At the moment, being friends on the Community site doesn’t mean much. It just gives you quick access to them when you want to compose a message. Friends list will become more important as we introduce new modules in the future, especially in regards to social networking, groups and rankings.

Other changes

The website is now accessible to visitors in read-only mode. This means you can point to ideas, hardware, software, users profiles… to people who aren’t registered on the website.

The layout of the profile page was changed so you can now look at someone’s profile and see his ideas, his hardware, his favourite software, his friends… all on the same page.

What’s coming next?

I personally would like to code the blog module next. This module’s purpose is to let you have your own blog on the website, to let people subscribe to it, comment and vote your articles and for them to have dynamic feeds of their subscribed blogs. I’m also planning on adding tutorial and FAQ modules and hopefully to come up with a way for users to easily share their knowledge and to publish howtos.