New LibGuides Features Announced

Our tech guys have been busy cranking out code so we have another batch of new features to announce. They all come as a direct result of the suggestions and ideas from our customers, so keep up the great work and continue providing us constructive feedback.

The new features we are announcing today are:

1. Enhanced user profiles. The system administrators can now define up to 5 additional fields for user profiles. For example “What I do in the libraries”, “What I’m reading now”, “Favorite Website”, etc. (you get the idea). Creating these additional fields will enable you (the librarians) to provide a bit more information about yourself that may be interesting to patrons. Sys-admins can define these questions in the “Custom Fields” screen, under the System Settings tab.
   Once these optional questions are defined, they will show up in the Customize Profile screen for individual librarians
2. Friendly URLs that do not redirect in the user’s browser bar. Most of you know that you can define a “friendly URL” for your guides, but when the user typed the friendly URL in the browser bar, the system would redirect them to the real url, which ends with content.php?pid=xxxx. We have figured out a way to keep the friendly URLs in the user’s browser bar, without redirecting to the internal url. For example, check out http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/srop and notice that the friendly URL now stays in your browser bar.
3. Friendly URLs for profile pages. Just like you can define a friendly URL for your guides, now you can also define a friendly URL shortcut for your LibGuides profile pages. The format of the URL will be http://yourdomain/profile/shortcut. The shortcut is defined in the “Customize Profile” option on the main admin page.
   
   Check out an example of the profile shortcut http://demo.libguides.com/profile/slaven
4. The ability for guide owners to associate their guides with more than one category. You asked for it – we delivered.
5. The ability for guide owners to define more than 3 editors. Note that when you create a new guide the form still limits you to 3 editors, but then on the guide admin page, under “Add/change editors” drop-down option you can add as many more editors as you’d like.
6. Links and Lists content box type. We renamed “Web Links with more information” content box into “Links and Lists” and made the URLs optional, so now you can mix and match links with non-link items when creating lists.
7. Introduction of “Google Search Box” content box. This is an important new feature so we will do a separate blog post about it. In short, it enables your users to search Google directly from inside the content box. Also, you can define a “default search term” whose results will show inside the box when the user first loads the page.