Milyin | 3rd November 2021

Greetings of the day, Today Milyin completes 3.5 years of its existence, and we have got an update for you about everything happening at Milyin in the last 10 months.

We started Milyin on 3rd May 2018, and it’s hard to believe that we have completed 3.5 years so quickly.

Milyin’s milestones, achievements, new features, changes, and a lot more will be discussed in-depth, so get ready.

This is going to be our longest and the most in-depth update, (over 3000 words) so sit back and relax to know everything we have built for you.

Home Page

Milyin introduced a redesigned Home Page on 1st October 2021.

The previous home page was old (November 2019), slow, and poorly designed, and had a lot of things outdated.

Many necessary changes were made, including removing the section of our Admins from the Home, completely redesigning the Latest Creations section, using SVG Backgrounds, and minimizing the use of external JS Libraries.

Previous Carousels had ugly navigation buttons, the Latest Creation section had a poor design with the AJAX for loading more creations not working for many months. These issues made the task of Redesigning the Home Page pretty much necessary.

Earlier we were using 3 files for Owl Carousels, 2 from AOS (Animate on Scroll), and some more from ScrollMagic. Now we only use AOS and remove carousels at most places.

The only place where carousels exist is the “How it Works” section, where the carousel is made from custom code, containing swipe gestures for Touch and mouse, much beautifully designed Latest Creations.

The glowing effect on Pointer is taken from the Previous home page, but is now animated nicely, and improved from the choppy animation for glow since November 2019.

We Added a How it Works section that has images from Documentation Folder (this folder contains images for Help, Creation Guide, Improvement Guide, Monetization Guide, etc) Improved Connect with Us Section, by adding Email, Message, and Support buttons… Support now uses AJAX to load the form, this improves the loading time…

Milyin Chat

Milyin Chat got some major updates in March 2021.

The chat back then was just plain text-based messaging. This handicapped users from using Chat, and also made communications difficult.

There weren’t many features, and some areas looked unpolished.

A couple of weeks were spent completely reworking how Chat works.

Media Sharing

We added the ability to upload Media and send Images, Videos, and Documents (PDF, Word, etc) on Chat itself.

Images and Videos could be previewed before sending. All the media could be accompanied by a text caption too.

All uploading happens via AJAX, making the user experience better.

The media uploads are uncompressed, making them perfect for sharing important files.

The media files received on chat can be clicked to easily be viewed inside the browser itself.

Media uploads are kept in a folder and files are renamed to make it difficult to find files directly.

Chat Experience

The chatting experience in itself got a couple of nice upgrades too.

This includes a Typing Indicator showing an animation similar to Apple’s iMessage Typing animation whenever the other person starts typing.

The loading animation for loading any conversation used to be an ugly GIF.

It didn’t look nice and was increasing page size too.

It was replaced with Milyin’s loading animation used at various places such as Milyin Creation Editor.

Chat Experience

Messages Seen

We added support to mark messages as read in Milyin’s chat.

We now mark all the messages as read using AJAX.

We Added Icons similar to WhatsApp to mark Chat Messages as Seen.

We improved the marking of Chat messages as Read through SQL. Earlier the messages that were received while the chat thread was already open, would be considered as unread.

This was because the chat was marked as read-only at the opening of the conversation only.

Now, all such messages will be marked read using AJAX.

This largely improved the chatting experience.

We plan to add the ability to do Group Chat, and better notification support too. Though there is no timeline as of now.

Administration, Backend, and Forms

We built our systems to manage our statistics and keep a check on your income/overall statistics.

This makes your payment process much more streamlined.

Besides this, our changes to Monetization System made in January 2021, required us to make a few important changes too.

We now keep track of all the advertisement clicks to block repeated clicks and spammers.

This ensures a much better user experience.

On the admin side, we have been collecting basic yet important usage data from creators to improve systems, this includes setting the default preferences for Creation Interface and adding commonly used URLs as menu items, based on suggestions from Creators.

We added Dark Mode functionality and many UI changes, for the entire backend.

This is there to improve the working environment for our Admins.

Besides, there were design changes to make WordPress look similar to Milyin’s frontend.

We had tried to do this back in late 2018.

However, it was pretty much half-baked.

This time it is far more advanced and clean, the containers now have the same shadows as Milyin’s frontend containers. Link colors, Button Colors, and Dark Mode color scheme all are now aligned with our Frontend.

Our Contact Forms, Content reporting forms, and Verification form all them got significant improvements.

We Added Checkbox icons and had some Scroll Button UI improvements, Improved Class and ID naming that boost accessibility for the visually impaired.

As far as code is concerned, we cleaned all Variables in Milyin Plugin, Milyin Creations Plugin, and Milyin Theme. Completely switched to Pascal Case instead of using hyphens.

Design Changes

We had a couple of crucial design changes.

This includes our 404 page. Any URL that doesn’t exist on a website has a status code 404.

For a great user experience, we needed to make 404 pages look nice.

We added beautiful vector arts taken from undraw.co along with all the content of Header and Footer and the existing search form to in the 404 page.

Sitemaps

We also introduced long-overdue Image Sitemaps.

For a long time, we have had our Sitemaps, for Creations, however, they lacked image/video URLs.

The Image and Video URLs are now added together and put into another sitemap. You can check it here: Image Sitemap

We had some color changes too, particularly in Dark Mode.

URLs

We used the #fff for all URLs in sitewide dark mode. But it’s observed the white color makes the URL less eye-catchy, and sometimes people were unsure of whether it was just decorative text or it was an actual link.

Initial Idea was to use the link color from Light Mode, however, it was not having enough contrast with the background, making it a terrible user experience.

We used our Light Mode link color as a base added some Luminosity, and the result was that we changed from #2e3192 to #989BDF
Which is RGB(46,39,146) to RGB(152, 155, 223)

Fonts

One major change was that we removed the Google Fonts, as they contributed to TBT (Total Blocking Time) and were increasing page size. 

We put Poppins in Milyin’s uploads and loaded them locally from Milyin. Other fonts currently stand unavailable. Trying to figure out a way of loading fonts without costing a huge loading time.

Security and Utility

Some other changes included the addition of CSP (Content Security Policy) which improves site security and prevents creators with the wrong intention to insert malicious scripts/styles.

Content Security Policy is a very crucial best practice that makes Milyin a much better and safer environment for creators.

Another crucial update happened for Meta Descriptions. If Creator didn’t set Excerpt, we earlier used to use 155 characters as Meta Description.

This meant the last word could be incomplete and the sentence invalid. Now we check for Complete sentences, and use the maximum number of sentences to 205 characters, and set them as Meta Description.

Pingbacks

We are now Limiting Pingbacks to only Internal Pings, preventing Spam and making Milyin much more creator-friendly.

This includes coding to rejecting 3rd party pings and also reworking their saving to add fields like Creation ID, Creator Name, and Ping content. (these were left empty earlier, as 3rd party pings had no author ID)

Fields like Creator Name had the Creation Title by default, it is now corrected.

There were many things wring with previous Pingback System, the Creation Title was used to fetch Creation. This Creation Title was used as Creator Name, the Creator name and date were never mentioned in the Pingback.

These all issues were corrected.

Reworked the entire Comments section to make Pingbacks look like real comments. Earlier ping was just a text with a link, no Creator Name no avatar, no CSS.

Now Pings look as good as real pings.

Monetization Tools

We introduced Monetization Tools back in January 2021.

There were many significant changes made to them.

We are primarily focusing on Amazon Affiliate, as Google AdSense requires us to do an Address Verification beyond the payment threshold, which we haven’t done yet.

Amazon Affiliate

Amazon Affiliate saw a couple of major changes.

Amazon Repeated Blocks

We added the ability to have repeated Amazon Affiliate blocks in your Creation.

You can add multiple https://amazon.in links or ASINs that would be randomly chosen one at a time and placed at an interval specified by you.

This makes the work of Monetizing through Amazon Affiliate a lot simpler.

The ability to have ads automatically repeat used to make Google AdSense a no-brainer for many people, as they were too lazy to manually insert blocks at every place.

Instead, we helped build a system that allows them to specify the product(s) once and repeat as and when needed.

This sounds good, right?

Hold on, we have something even better for you.

It’s called the Amazon Auto Affiliate.

Amazon Auto Affiliate Blocks

What is it?

Well, Amazon Auto Affiliate makes the work even easier.

Amazon Auto Affiliate uses a predefined list of products that are inserted in Creations at regular intervals.

This reduces the time to find the right products, thus making your job even easier, at a click of a toggle you have handpicked ads being placed at regular intervals.

But where will the ads be placed and what products will be shown?

We build a list of products from Amazon and assign them keywords. If we find these keywords in your Creation we add that product in your Creation at Regular intervals.

For example, a Table Lamp will be assigned keywords such as “Table Lamp”, “Home Decor” and “Lamp”.

If we find a Creation with Title, “Complete Guide to Home Decor” or that creation contact has #HomeDecor in it, then it matches the keyword “Home Decor” therefore the lamp would appear in your Creations…

If multiple products match in creation we put all of the products and choose a product randomly for each location.

In case no product matches in your Creation, we would use some generally popular products as advertisements.

Bluehost Affiliate

Bluehost Affiliate is another area of significant improvement.

Bluehost provides Ad Blocks for us to use.

We have built a system that allows you to select a block and make it repeat after regular intervals.

Creations related to servers, web development, WordPress, SEO, marketing, online presence, and entrepreneurship can largely benefit by having repeated ads of Bluehost.

This is a useful feature and works perfectly. You can choose any of the 10 image sizes made available to you in Monetization Tools.

Monetization Guide

With so many tools and features in Monetization Tools, there needs to be even more guidance to be able to support our creators.

That’s why we introduced the Monetization Guide in June 2021.

Adding this much information to the Creation Guide would have made it unnecessary long.

Moreover, creators that want to focus on creativity and aren’t here with the intend to Monetize their content have found the Monetization Tools too distracting.

My Creations

My Creations was one area that is arguably the most improved and changed page since our last update.

One of the major updates came in the search results of content searched in My Creations. Earlier search in My Creations simply searched all posts with a search term and sorted date-wise…

But now, we use relevance, Creations having Term in Title is prioritized, then Creations having search term appear in Title as well as Content is prioritized, and then Creations having search terms accompanies with white spaces on both sides also preferred.

This has improved the overall search relevance.

Some important changes are made to the Quick Edit tool.

We Added the capability to change Creation Status and even schedule creations from Quick Edit. Added smoother animations for the sake of better UI.

Besides that, after closing the Quick Edit, we also send an ajax request to update the details of that particular creation on the My Creations page.

As far as Saving Creations is concerned, earlier we were using AJAX but directly submitting the form. Now we use admin-ajax.

This ensures that ajax requests don’t return any response, therefore reducing the size of the request and speeding up saving.

Besides that for saving quick edit and normal save creation, we improved the date/time submission to work with all post status and creation types and accommodate the quick edit functionality. (Earlier Quick Edit never changed the last modified date in the database. Besides that for scheduling creations lot of work was done for saving the creation date and modified )

Creation Tools

The Creation Tools allowed you to perform tasks like Edit, Clone, and Delete.

Clicking Delete got you to an interface that required you to confirm your intention to Delete creation.

The UI has been improved to now show a preview of your Creation, including Title, Thumbnail, and Content.

This is accompanied by Buttons to Cancel or Delete your Creation.

These buttons are fixed to the bottom of the screen and are prominently visible.

The improved UI makes it much easier for you to decide to delete your Creation.

Besides the much more prominently marked delete button makes it much easier to find.

Moving onto another Tool, called Legacy Edit.

Initially, Legacy Edit was based on a separate codebase, entirely different from the normal Creation Interface, the Legacy Editor Interface was the Creation Editor from late 2019.

Now the legacy edit is the same form (same features) as normal edit, with the only change being the use of WordPress’s built-in WP_Editor which we used to have before shifting to TinyMCE 5 in late 2019.

The Legacy Editor’s primary function is to allow unfiltered editing of Creation.

Normal Creation Editor has a lot of things happening at the backend to clean up the code and perform various tasks. This makes work easy for most of the creators, however this sometimes caused issues too. Specifically, creators showing 

Especially coding everything in 2 forms would have been an unnecessary burden, and integrating into 1 form was a better approach.

We did it, and now the URL for legacy is milyin.com/my/?task=edit&creation=xxxx&legacy=true instead of the previous URL which was: milyin.com/legacy/?task=edit&creation=xxxx The WP_Editor currently looks unpolished, needs lots of color sync and dark mode compatibility

Creation Interface

Add Media button and Select Featured Images have got Dark Mode Compatability and overall sync with Milyin’s general design and Color Scheme.

This is particularly important for the entire unity of the Creation Interface.

The image uploader was always a gray area lacking the general design scheme, we have improved it and improved the general UI of Media Uploads.

Our Creation Interface for a large part of our existence was a heavily modified version of the WordPress plugin Frontier Post.

Frontier Post modified version with a lot of changes served us for quite some time. But now we deleted everything unnecessary, Beautified the code across the entire plugin, and removed all references of Frontier Post/FP.

It’s now like a completely home-grown plugin. Earlier only the necessary parts were edited.

Function names used to contain the name of Frontier Post, and variables had $post/$thispost/$tmp_post now it’s all $Creation. Form names were like Standard.php and Detail.php, they are now New.php and My.php.

All admin-related files, all capabilities, and options along with Shortcode parameters are gone.

Stats

Some big improvements to Stats Page, it used to show the last 60-day stats in a horizontal scrolling container, which was poorly designed, had limited space, and made it difficult to analyze data and trends at glance… 

This is replaced with SVG graphs that show the data using lines, each line has points representing data for a different day, which can be hovered to open a Tooltip showing further details…

Graphs are available for Views, Words, Images, Comments, Amazon, Bluehost. However, Google AdSense isn’t there, as currently, we are not using Google AdSense ($10 Address verification pending)

It will be added in the future, though no timeline is planned. 

Besides that, these graphs can be seen for 7 Days, 14 Days, 28 days, 60 days.

The graphs make it easy to understand data, and are an easy way for Creator to visualize his growth.

Stats With Graphs And Daily Stats

Notifications

Notifications are really important. Milyin sends important notifications as emails to users.

However, we also have a notifications system on-site, which can be accessed through a bell icon at the bottom of the screen.

These notifications were really useful for people lazy in reading emails.

There were some important changes made to the Notifications too.

The most important is the ability to mark all notifications as read and delete all the notifications.

There are notifications that people want to ignore, as a result, this button is a lifesaver for such people.

Besides this, earlier you might remember that notifications had to be manually marked as read.

Now, all the notifications can be directly marked as read or deleted at will.

Now Notifications are also automatically marked as read.

For example, if you have a notification of a chat message from a person. If you open the chat page, the notification is automatically marked as read.

That’s it with our updates.

We hope you enjoyed reading them. We would love to hear suggestions from you for the future. 

Your thoughts and ideas are welcome.

[Documentation]