Setting the pace for 2018.

UNA platform and the team had a fantastic year in 2017. We opened UNA for public access; released 5 core updates; reached over 1400 accounts at UNA.IO; hired 3 new team members; released new apps like JOT Messenger, Videos, Google Tag Manager, "Decorous" template, ElasticSearch module, "Dolphin Connect" module, Shopify integration module and Snipcart integration module. 

Moreover, we have been engaged to help with a number of truly exciting projects that use UNA to build communities, professional networks and educational hubs. Some of these ideas are absolutely mind-blowing and we are really happy to see how UNA gradually becomes a platform of choice for those "clever" startups that are building truly unique experiences, while taking advantage of an easy-to-manage framework. 

The year 2017 was pretty much about putting UNA on rails, though the interest from webmasters already nearly overfilled our team capacity for support and development services. What a year!

Looking at you, 2018!

A few things will definitely happen this year. 

• UNA 9 final will be released. From then on, there will be two separate update streams - PRO and DEV. Only production updates will be pushed automatically to UNA-powered sites and development updates will need to be used separately. PRO updates will only be released after extensive DEV-level testing. 
• JOT Messenger will add video calls, talks branching and an embed-based service for quick integration into non-UNA websites (Dolphin, Wordpress, etc). 
• Videos app will add live video streaming. It's a hot trend, but not a trivial development feat. We are exploring various options, and plan to update the Videos app to allow live streaming with simultaneous comments and post-stream recording.
• The @tags everywhere. The "mention" tags is a widely anticipated feature, which we intentionally delayed until there is a clear vision and technical solution to make them as a system-wide feature. 
• Notifications will further improve to offer an effective configuration system for Email, Push and On-site notifications for various actions. There is a lot of control available already, but we aim to make them more streamlined and fine-tuned. 
• Performance and SEO will be improved dramatically, as we get to see more real-life projects and gain more knowledge in optimising for large-scale usage, as well as for search engines.  
• Native mobile apps, based on GoNative and Cordova-like wrappers will be brought out as service offerings and as technical descriptions for DIY implementations. We are already doing this for Enterprise-plan clients directly.
• Crypto-based features for reputation scoring, spam/scam protection, payment processing and purpose-specific tokens will come to light. At this staged we are looking to offer integration of the upcoming Requitix system and later potentially our own distributed ledger framework for custom tokens integrated with UNA. 
• Documentation and Tutorials will finally get a green light. We had to hold off with them during the pre-release updates, mostly due to the changes that keep happening in the core platform. As it settles we can publish more supporting materials and API docs. 
• Marketplace will become a whole lot more active, as we are opening it for new submissions. We plan to introduce new purchasing methods and bundling options, as well as more detailed instructions for 3rd party developers. 

Those are just the main points of focus. There will be hundreds of new features, updates, fixes and improvements. Our team is now bigger, stronger and ready for the major take-off in 2018!