Hey Everyone!

It's been quite a while since our last Blog post and I wanted to take some time to fill everyone in on what's been happening behind the scenes here with the Jamroom team. Although it may not be apparent (due to the lack of us blogging!) we've been very, very busy on this end.

Jamroom Core 6.3.0 is coming

If you already subscribe to the Beta Channel, you have seen the first few beta releases of Jamroom Core 6.2.1. There have been a number of NEW features and changes that have continued to pour in to this release, and we've decided to bump the version up to Jamroom Core 6.3.0. If you are on the Beta channel, you'll see the first beta of 6.3.0 is now available. Some of the bigger and more notable changes are:

• Table layouts have been overhauled for mobile devices. We've run into a number of situations where wide tables just aren't viewable correctly on the small mobile screen, so there is a NEW "vertical" table layout that makes it easier to see all table cells on a mobile device.
• The Core Global Config has been changed up. "Allowed Domains" has been removed, since Jamroom no longer uses Play Keys for tracking media plays - instead it uses a new cookie based approach for managing media streams.
• New "Log in to Stream" and "Log in to Download" options that are now supported by the Core.
• There is a new customizable template (db_error.tpl) that is shown to users if your site encounters an issue with connecting to the database - this is a bit more friendly than a plain text error dump.

There's also a ton of small updates, tweaks and bug fixes in place as well - the Jamroom Core 6.3 upgrade is shaping up really well and we think you're going to like the update.

Working with new Jamroom Clients

Over the last year we've started working on new projects with a few large Jamroom customers that are going fantastic. They are very supportive of the work we're doing on Jamroom, and a lot of new updates and development is being driven by the Jamroom team working on these new projects.

Some of these clients are very close to launching and our hope is to have a blog post or white paper featuring these projects so the Jamroom community can get an "inside look" at the work that goes in to taking an idea on paper to a complete product that can be shipped and sold to users.

We're excited they've chosen to build their product on Jamroom and can't wait to share.

Spring Special on Jamroom Professional and Jamroom Premium!

For a VERY limited time - only through March 31st! - we are having a "Spring Special" on the self hosted Jamroom Licenses.  Now through the end of the month you can get:

Jamroom Professional for $349 - save $150.  This gets you all Jamroom Premium items on up to 4 sites, 1 year of VIP support AND professional installation.

Jamroom Premium for $199 - save $100.  This gets you all Jamroom Premium items on up to 2 sites and 30 days of VIP Support.

These deals are only good through March 31st so grab it now if you've been waiting for a good deal

That's it for now - with spring right around the corner (finally!) I'm personally hoping for sunny skies and warmer temperatures.

Thanks everyone!

As you may know, Jamroom users can 'sponsor' the development of custom modules for their sites on the understanding that these modules, or variants of them, could be made available to all other Jamroom users. Over ther past couple of years this has resulted in quiet a few modules stacked up on the shelf that might well be useful to other Jamroom users. These are some of them, in no particular order -

• Background Creator - Creates a site Background
  
• Email Course - Users sign up to a course that is sent via email over a series of days
• Landing Pages - Create unique landing pages based on keyword sections
  
• Database Loader - Creates Users, Profiles and Profile Items for Load Testing
  
• User Link - Automatically Links User Accounts to newly created profiles
• Advanced Play Counts - Set minimum listen and view lengths for counting streamed audio and video plays
  
• Audio Watermark - Upload an audio watermark file that is merged with uploaded profile audio files
  
• User Import - Create User Accounts from imported email addresses
  
• Flag Item - Allow users to flag items they consider unsuitable or inappropriate
  
• Comment Delete - Adds a button to module item update forms that deletes all of that item's comments
  
• Mail Batcher - Intercepts and compiles user emails and sends them periodically as a single email

These will now be released, maybe one a week (so as not to swamp us with support questions ), the first one being Audio Watermark - https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/networkmarket/484/audio-watermark - Many thanks to user @dm for originally sponsoring this module.

Maybe let us know which ones would be most useful to you so that we can prioritise subsequent releases?

Thanks

Paul

For most of our Jamroom Hosted customers, the one thing they can never get enough of is disk space - with an active system it is really easy to eat up a ton of disk space with audio, video, images, etc.  Jamroom includes several tools to try to limit the amount of disk space used for items, but it's always a trade off between quality and space.

We're excited to announce that all Jamroom Hosted customer are getting free disk space upgrades on their servers - even the existing 12G server gets a free upgrade We're rolling out all new plans that incorporate the larger disk space.  For those of you on higher end plans, the disk space is going up A LOT - this allows you to grow for much longer on your existing Hosted plan as well as keep higher quality versions of many of your media items.

Here's the new Hosted Plans with their cost per month as well as Disk Space / CPU Count / RAM:

15G / 1 CPU / 1G RAM - $39 - current 12G users get free upgrade to 15G disk space
25G / 1 CPU / 1G RAM - $49 new plan
40G / 1 CPU / 2G RAM - $59 - current 24G users get free upgrade
80G / 2 CPU / 4G RAM - $69 - current 48G users get free upgrade
160G / 4 CPU / 8G RAM - $89 - current 96G users get free upgrade
320G / 6 CPU / 16G RAM - $149 - current 192G users get free upgrade
640G / 8 CPU / 32G RAM - $249 - current 384G users get free upgrade
1280G /16 CPU / 64G RAM - $499 - new plan

So for example - if you currently have a 192G plan you are getting a FREE upgrade to 320G Disk space - that's almost double!

Upgrading is easy - just open a ticket with us and we can take care of it for you.  Note that it will require some downtime for your server - your existing server data will be migrated to a new server that has the larger disk space. This usually only takes a few minutes on the small servers, but can take up to 30 minutes or so on the larger servers.  So let us know a good time you'd like it to be done at and we will do our best to accommodate the request.  If we don't hear from you within 30 days we will upgrade your server on your behalf.

You can find more details on all the new plans on our SSD Hosting Plans page:

https://www.jamroom.net/hosting

We hope you enjoy the new plans and the free upgrades - if you have any feedback, comments or concerns please post in the comments below and we can help.

Thanks!

- The Jamroom Team

Today a new feature was added to the Site Builder Uploaded Images widget, the ability to change the size and aspect ratio of the image you use.

The main purpose this was added was for users uploading images as full page headers.  The default setting for the uploaded image was to be set to 'xxlarge' which is 512px, but because the width of a page is usually wider than that the result would be grainy images that were less than ideal especially when the banner is the main theme for the page.

This new system allows a larger image size to be selected so a better quality image results.  Check out the BEFORE and AFTER images below.

The BEFORE image was blurry because it was a small image stretched into a large container.  The AFTER image is close to the correct size for the container so is much clearer.

A small new feature, but useful for anyone using the Upload Images widget for the Site Builder system.