Last week development on BeeHeard which may be released as version 1.4.4 began. There are a few enhancements that have been implemented from users’ feedback that were suggested in the Feature Request category and others that were sent in via email. Last week we finished the free version of BeeHeard called BeeHeard Lite which has limited functionality so that users and administrators interested in testing out BeeHeard on their site can install the Lite version and see it’s how easy it is to administer from the front-end as well as finally see the back-end and it’s features.

The Lite version has the following limitations:

* Up to five categories
* Subcategories NOT featured
* 10 suggestions per category
* 15 comments per suggestion
* Three votes for guests per category
* Five votes for registered users per category

What is now being called BeeHeard Full Version due to it not having the above mentioned limitations and to differentiate from the Lite version has had the following improvements implemented and will be featured in the next release:

* Added functionality to display user’s name or username depending on the format specified in the configurations for either Jom Social or Community Builder. Now if you don’t use any of those great social networking components then you still of the option to display the user’s name or username.
* Option to display or hide the copyright in the footer of the component.
* Added the “Rejected” status label for suggestions.
* Added the feature to display the number of categories and the number of suggestions for the Top, New, Accepted, Work in Progress, Rejected, and Completed items in the top navigation menu if enabled.
* Added a little bit of CSS to make the top navigation tab display the current tab by making it pop up a little bit.
* Fixed the Allow Suggestions when creating a new category in the back-end to default to ‘Yes’.
* And finally a major improvement that has been in the pipeline from the beginning of this component but has not been implemented until the release of the Lite version to differentiate it in a major way is the ability to allow the users to vote and report while filtering the suggestions by the different status labels. Also, front-end moderators are allowed to edit and delete suggestions while filtering as well.

Lastly, we changed some of the parameters for the Javascript for the voting box that was causing an issue due to some conflict with some developers’ templates that heavily used Javascript. The issue was able to be reproduced on a few of RocketTheme’s templates. That being said, the voting pop up box now appears to the right of the vote count and link.

BeeHeard Lite has been submitted to the JED and hopefully it gets published soon so that many people who have been wanting to test out BeeHeard but haven’t wanted to purchase it can now try it. BeeHeard Lite may work for many small sites and for those who are happy with its limited features and don’t mind pruning the suggestions and comments to keep allowing visitors to post suggestions and comments.

We appreciate your feedback so feel free to post feature requests and bugs for BeeHeard.

The issue regarding rows not appearing when a previous table in a previous view was sorted resulted in the filter order variable keeping the value from the previous view. Therefore, if that filter order for the table in the newly selected view didn’t exist, then of course it woudn’t sort anything. The solution was to check if the filter order even existed once in the new view. If not, then it would turn to the default sort by id.

Today I attended a free Google workshop presented by Market My Biz Online for business owners to see if I can learn anything new that I haven’t learned already on my own by performing research in trying to gain more traffic to my sites and earn more money.

The audience seemed to be of an older and less technically inclined than I had expected. Nonetheless, I did learn a few things. Here is a list of what I took notes on as tasks for me to accomplish:

- Submit URL to smaller market search engines as well (ie, AOL and Ask). I already hit up the bigger ones, Google, Bing and Yahoo.
- Submit business to maps to attract local business.
- Claim local business on Google, Bing and Yahoo and have it verified.
- Have Gmail account specifically for my business to tie all analytics, webmaster tool, etc. Currently using my personal email. How did I not do something as elementary as this from the beginning?
- Look into what robot.txt actually does and if useful then apply to sites.
- Utilize keyword searches to add keywords to sites.
- Be more descriptive for page titles.
- Omit click here’s as the link and make the title the actual link.
- Investigate what syntax for naming images is best and name images and alt tags for all images on my sites. I am guilty of having titles such as logo.jpg or cmst_logo.png. This will help on image search results.

The rest of the content that was discussed was targeted to educate business owners that are looking into creating websites or currently have websites to take advantage of the tools that Google offers. These tools include Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Keyword Search, etc. This workshop was driven to obtain business for this marketing company since many people would rather pay someone to perform these tasks and possibly purchase ads from these search engines to promote their business but it did supply valuable information to those who weren’t aware of how crucial this can be to promote your business or site.