QuickBlox Blog

Hi there! We have started new series of presentations about QuickBlox for developers!

It’s designed to help developers start to use QuickBlox. You will learn how to use QuickBlox API for develop your applications, how to use iOS/Android SDK, how to use admin panel for manage your apps and more.

Here you’ll find a collection of presentations that aim to help you build great apps, using best practices in a variety of platform capabilities.

The 1st presentation was yesterday, it was named iOS guide to QuickBlox galaxy. It was about how to develop for QuickBlox using iOS. You can see/download presentation here http://quickblox.com/developers/QuickBlox_4_teens

Have a nice weekend!

Hi there, we have updated QuickBlox iOS SDK to 1.1.0 version - http://quickblox.com/developers/IOS

Did you know that QuickBlox is updated every 2 weeks? That is the duration of our scrum sprint. Often we spend an iteration improving platform architecture, bugfixing and introducing small but crucial improvements.

Recent iteration has been different however as we are releasing 2 new major features: CMS and Custom Objects! It is super exciting to release these as both of them have been driven QuickBlox users and our turn around time has been less than 1 month.

Now, Custom Objects module is a topic for a separate blog post but let us tell you a bit more about CMS.

Content management admin panel (CMS)

So what our CMS (Content Management System) feature really is that’s adding an admin panel to existing Content module. Content has already been available as an API (check out Content API in our Developers section). Content module allows to store, stream and edit data and media for your apps. This allows to change app contents, UI elements or even behaviour without having to submit a new version of the app into the application store. Obviously an important feature and it has been available as an API since last year and custom CMS implementations have been available for selected enterprise clients. Now we are releasing a universal Content management admin panel for all QuickBlox users.

How it works

Simply log in to your QuickBlox admin panel and go to Content module:

You will see the List interface where all content elements of your app are listed.

You may view, edit, download, upload new files or create new rich formatted (HTML) content using WYSIWYG editor.

Tags

Tags is a very important feature of QuickBlox allowing to group/manage entities, tie users with data and restrict access where necessary.

Content now supports Tags too so you may organise your content elements (by categories or app screens for example) and also make certain content available for certain users – by matching Tags associated with Users and Content elements. As simple as that.

Rich Push Notifications

Rich Push allows to send rich content push notifications to your users. This allows you to send rich text formatting, media, HTML with embedded images / videos etc. How it works from system architecture point of view is basically you use a standard push notification channel to send a short message plus URL / ID. The app then pulls the rich content part from the server via a secure connection channel.

The reason I mention Rich Push in this post is basically QuickBlox has enabled it via Content and Messages API tied through a system of Tags. For example you want to send a Rich Push to a specific user or a group of users. You create a new content element using the Content management admin panel and simply add Tags connected with users or groups you want to address. The system will suggest the Tags currently linked with users as shown in screenshot below.

This enables you to send Rich Push via API in case you need to be able to push some content to your users. Please contact our team if you need assistance in implementing this feature. Rich Push is not yet available via admin panel of Messages module however we’ll add a UI for that as soon as we do more real world testing of Content + Messages + Tags technology and find what’s the best user experience scenario would be.

Let us know what you think and send you your feature requests and suggestions for improvements.

PS Content admin panel as described here is currently available on our staging servers for selected beta users. This is going to be rolled out to production servers in a week’s time. Send us your e-mail and QuickBlox login if you’d like to join our beta users group to play with it now!

We have just completed our latest iteration and finished one useful feature - Facebook & Twitter integration!

Now you can simple authenticate through QuickBlox Users module using your Facebook/Twitter account.

Please look updated pages http://quickblox.com/developers/Authentication_and_Authorization and http://quickblox.com/developers/Social_Networks_Integration_Manual

SDK updates are coming soon.

QuickBlox comes to you, helps you quickly develop mobile applications.

We have finished iOS SDK 1.0.0 – this is great update.  All server’s APIs are covered. Use this new version http://quickblox.com/developers/IOS

Also we have updated and finished ALL iOS SimpleSamples – this is simple samples, which demonstrate how to use ALL QuickBlox modules (Users, Location, Chat, Ratings, Messages, Content). Use them for rapid develop your own application – http://quickblox.com/developers/Category:IOS

QuickBlox – super powers for your apps!