woopra

Happy Friday everyone! While most of us are just waiting for the weekend so we can get started with the fun, the Woopra team decided to start the party early! For those brave souls determined to help us make Woopra better, we’re announcing the release of the new Desktop Client version 1.4, Release Candidate (RC1).

For months, we’ve been making a lot of improvements under the hood based upon your feedback, and now it’s time to test the final results with the installed version of Woopra. If you are ready to spend the weekend joining our Woopra RC testing party, check out the download details below.

Here’s a sneak preview of what will be arriving on your computer very soon.

New Features and Improvements

This release adds several important new features:

• Inbound Web Chat: Yes, this is the big one folks! We’re enabling your sites to offer inbound Web chat to visitors. We’re not just talking about a single inbound chat session. We are talking about allowing every person you’ve shared your stats with to appear online as available for chat complete with their own names, avatars, and everything else that goes along with it. You’ll be able to enable it from within the Member’s Area when we launch it. We’ll have a blog post about this feature soon.
  Keep an eye on the blog in the next day or two so you can get started with our souped up new Live Chat.
• Live Visitor Info Panel During Web Chat: You’ve been wanting improvements in the Woopra Live Chat functionality, and we’ve given it to you! You can now watch visitors move from page to page while you chat with them! Imagine directing a client to a particular page by pasting the URL into the chat, and then watching them follow through on the link.
  
• Updated Notifications System: For those who enjoy setting them up, you’ll notice that the new notifications window has more flexibility and options. Rather than popping up and disappearing the notifications window remains and displays a scrollable list for review, even if you are away from your desktop. Each notification can be selected for more detail, and the list can be cleared, hidden, or both.
  
• Monthly Usage Meter: We know its been hard to track monthly quota for your Woopra Plans, so we built a little meter right into the top of the desktop application to make it quick and easy to see if (or when) you need to upgrade. The meter will grow, and as you are approaching the limit turn yellow and eventually red. If you see red, you must upgrade or lose stats!
  
  
  
  
  
  In addition to the usage indicator, you will also notice a little blue bar that gives a visual representation of time until the counter resets. Generally speaking, as long as your main usage indicator is not longer than the reset line you should not run out of pageviews.
  
  We’ve also added your website date and easy access to your Woopra Members settings through your browser.
• Improved Connection Behind Firewalls: For those who’ve had difficulty in the past connecting to Woopra due to a strict firewall policy (maybe at your office), we have added a new feature that automatically connects to a Woopra a proxy server to let you through without headaches. Technically speaking, this allows the desktop application to connect to Woopra through the standard Web port 80, although Woopra actually requires port 11228. What’s not included is a warning to alert you your boss is coming around the corner!
• Dramatically Improved Calendar Functionality: If you’re a fan of the calendar, like me, you’re going to really love this update! The calendar now displays hourly graphs for each day, and the really cool thing is the way the days line up side by side so you can see a continuous trend for the entire week or month.
  
• REAL Advertisements For Free Subscribers: As those of you who have been with us for a long time know, we’ve been looking for non-intrusive ways to help monetize the service so we can keep bringing it to you.
  I think we finally found it! Elie has done a great job of implementing a non-intrusive banner ad in the application’s right sidebar. These ads will only appear for sites on the Basic (free) plan. So if you have upgraded you won’t see them. Our intention is to allow banner advertising from people with messages relevant to our community. By the way, these will be available for purchase directly from our Ad partner BuySellAds.com.
  
• IP Range Filtering Improvements. For those of you looking to exclude complete ranges of IPs to hide visitors and bots we’ve now added wildcard filtering. You can block an entire class C for example by using the standard asterisk as a wildcard such as: 192.168.1.*
  
• Single Simultaneous Login Enforcement. We’ve seen quite a bit of abuse of the system with individual logins being used in multiple locations simultaneously. This is a cause for security concerns and also puts tremendous load on the Woopra systems. As a result we are now enforcing single simultaneous logins. This means that if you log in on a second machine, the initial machine will log off to save resources. This change will free up otherwise wasted resources to keep Woopra running faster for everyone!

There are several other small changes in this build, such as new themes and other goodies. We’ll be talking about these all in more detail over the next few weeks. So, rather than going on and on we’ll let you get right to enjoying the new builds!

The Downloads

These are the current builds for Woopra’s 1.4 RC for three operating systems. We recommend you install these into their own directory and not over the previous version. When we are ready to release the new version, you can uninstall the RC and start the old version to automatically upgrade. If you choose to install the RC over the previous version, you can always revert back to the older version.

Note: Please check to see you have updated your Woopra JavaScript to the latest version before testing Woopra 1.4 RC.

• Woopra 1.4 RC1 for Mac
• Woopra 1.4 RC1 for Windows
• Woopra 1.4 RC1 for Linux

Please report feedback, bugs, and feature requests over on the 1.4 RC1 discussion thread in the forums.

Thanks for joining the Woopra RC testing party and we’ll see you in the forums!