User Guide - Message Manager
Contents
- The Message System: An overview of the HitEmHi messaging system.
- The Message Manager: An explaination of the interface.
The Message System
The HitEmHi messaging system involves a number of different components and will be implemented in phases.
The features that are currently active are:
- System Notification: These messages are from us, the HitEmHi admin staff. We will use this mostly to notify users of new
features and other concepts.
- User Comments: You can add a comments module to your page and if you enable it other users can submit comments to you. All
comments can be viewed from the message manager and set to be public, private or delete. Public comments will display
in your comments module for any user to see. Private comments are kept but not displayed publicly. Comments set
to Delete will be deleted periodically.
- For more on the comments module click
here.
The following features will be added over the coming weeks:
- Fan Requests: As part of our fan management system, fan (aka "friends") requests will be handled as a message and return requests can
also be sent back using the message manager.
- User Messages: Any fan of yours will be added to you avaliable address book and you can send them messages in the same way that you might
email them.
- Mass Mailouts: For certain member accounts you will have the ability to mass mail all of your fans about upcoming concerts or other
events. The fans will have the option to disable this sort of message though.
- Auto Notifications: You will also be able to toggle autonotifications for certain modules like blogs and song lists so that you
can get notified when another user adds a new song or blog etc.
- Custom Folders: You will be able to create your own folders for some message types to better organize them. For example you could
create a folder for concert comments and another for general comments. You could then specify which comment type will display in a given module.
The Message Manager
|
Accessing the Message Manager: You should see the link for the message manager from your User Settings,
as always you must be logged in to access this page.
Additionally you will see a notification of any new messages from here.
|
New messages will be indicated next to the link.
|
|
The General Interface: The message manager is broken into three panes as shown in the picture to the right.
- The folder list pane (shown in blue): This pane will be where you select a folder to view it's contents.
Most folders have sub-folders which you can see when you click the plus symbol to the left of a folder.
It is very similar to most email interfaces except that you cannot move messages of one type to another type. For example you can't
move a notification to a comment.
At the bottom of the pane you can also see the total number of messages in each folder.
- The folder contents pane: (shown in green): Depending on which folder you click
you will see the contents in this pane. You can sort the list of messages by clicking the headers and you can drag them to change the order.
- The message pane: (shown in red): If you select a message from the contents pane, it
will load into the message pane. There are controls here to move the message and change its priority (more below).
|
There are three main parts to the message manager.
|
|
Viewing Folder Lists: The controls are the same regardless of what folder you are viewing.
- Select a message To select a message just click the read button located on the right side of the screen. The message
should display at the bottom.
|
Selected messages are yellow, notice the new mail icon is different.
|
- Page the list The list only shows 10 messages at a time, if there are more than that in a folder you should see paging
controls at the bottom to navigate from page to page.
|
The paging controls are located at the bottom-left.
|
|
Reading Messages: Once you select a message it should appear in the message pane.
- Move a message: To move a message into a folder just click the dropdown and select the new folder.
The Root folder is the base of the folder.
- Change the priority: The priority of the message specifically affects some modules like the comments module where
you can set the sort order be priority. For example if you want certain comments to appear first you can give them a higher priority.
The priority can also be useful to find messages in a folder if you have a allot as you can sort the list by priority.
To set the priority just type (of click the up/down arrows) a priority between 1 and 5 and then click the
Update button.
|
The move and priority controls are on the right
You can also click the link to see the user's page.
|