#1: APGvNext Unique Features & Benefits : .

Discussion Forums - create a community that attracts new and return visitors

Instantly create a space on your site to let people share ideas, photos and documents with UI optimized for good User Experience.

You'll find everything you need in a modern community software: group based permission settings, selectable themes, notifications, private messaging, WYSIWYG editor, drag 'n drop upload, photo & video embedding, AJAX-based interactions, etc.

The software takes advantage of the best web technologies and standards, like HTML5, CSS3, AngularJS and JSON Web Service.

Blog inspired homepage - publish articles on an interface designed for readability

An optional blog like interface that allows you to show articles you write in the forum in a manner that's optimized for reading.

Simply label the threads you want to show on the blog, and the software will publish them instantly, without duplicating content that makes management difficult.

This is useful when you want to show community content instead of the old-fashioned forum index to visitors upon landing. It's great for SEO, too, as Google loves seeing content as quickly as possible.

Featured Article & Content Scroller - put interesting stuff front and center

You can now feature interesting discussions on the homepage with attention-grabbing headlines and graphics that draw visitors in.

This feature uses the same method found on news sites (like CNN) that helps you instantly increase your members time-on-site and drop your bounce rate.

You've got two choices for highlighting community activities with our software: a top level content scroller and a featured articles area that can show random articles to keep your home page look fresh.

jQuery Mobile (web app) - giving your users optimal touch experience

Provide your members easy access to your community on the go, using any smartphones or tablets.

Our software has a web based mobile skin built with jQuery Mobile for those who host the forum that want to offer quick mobile access interface.

jQuery Mobile supports Google Analytics, letting you track mobile usage easily.

Page Creation - creating web pages with unique URL, outside the forum system

You can create web pages for different purposes and optimize them for search engine with keyword-rich URL and unique Title / Meta tags.

For example, you can create a signup confirmation page to measure visitor-to-member conversion, or deliver member-only, time-sensitive content to your VIP members, etc.

In addition, this feature allows you to create partial pages and embed them in the forum, too. For example, you can put an announcement on the registration page with additional info about your community membership.

Google Friendly - integrated Analytics & Authorship, giving you an edge on Search

Improve your rankings on Google with Authorship integration & Search Engine Friendly URLs for your forums and posts.

You can also enable Google Analytics to collect vital community traffic stats and usage patterns. Google Analytics works with our jQuery Mobile app too!

The forum software also embeds Canonical URLs in the HTML code to ensure Google channels "link juice" correctly. Links embedded in forum posts are all nofollow'ed to comply with Google's webmaster guidelines.

Improved Nav Bar & Instant Search - quick access to content that matters to you

The top navigation bar gives you instant access to the latest topics, the hot topics, and topics you participated in on all pages. It's Ajax based so you don't have to navigate away.

The master search box at the top also shows you the most relevant results instantly, with an option to go to the details page where you can filter or re-order the results (fine-tuning).

In addition, the software also shows a list of related posts for every thread, providing suggestions for people to stay engaged. Related posts are updated automatically to include new content, so they never become stale.

Photo Gallery - complement your community with photo sharing capability

Your members can share photos in an integrated community gallery space. Visitors can comment and create slideshow for the photos, too.

Attaching photos is easy: your members can use the new HTML 5 capability to drag 'n drop photos to their albums, and the software will automatically resize and rotate the photos to ensure optimal viewing experience based on the browsers used.

Photos can be embedded into forum posts, too, so photo sharing can be easily extended outside the gallery.

3rd Party Tools Integration - Admin CP options make for easy integration

Integrate with 3rd-party web apps and share data easily with built-in programmable hooks & web services calling capabilities.

For example, you can make the software send data to your other web app when someone joins the forum, keeping membership synchronized between databases. You can also use this feature to automatically connect the forum to your newsletter provider (e.g. MailChimp, Aweber, Infusionsoft, etc.).

On the front end, you can easily incorporate AddThis.com's social sharing buttons, or advanced website analytics services like CrazyEgg or Kissmetrics without touching the source code.

Surveys & Polls - collect opinions using built-in polls or Google Drive Survey

Embedding multi-question polls in your forum post is easier than ever. You can create as many survey as you wish, without relying on 3rd party tools.

If you want better customizability or more advanced data collection capability, you can use Google Drive Form or Skydrive Excel survey in the posts, too. Using these features frequently helps you gain valuable insight into your members and you'll know what adjustments you need to make to keep the community happy.

Spam Prevention & Post Moderation - keep troublemakers away

New for 5.1: The software now incorporates the world's most intelligent automated spam filter, Akismet, to help you fight human spammers.

In addition, the software has built-in protection against black hat link building practices (the most common form of forum spam), so even if spammers somehow slip through, their efforts are effectively thwarted.

The software also let you enlist the community to moderate itself. You can let members flag spam & report abuse to moderators, to help kick troublemakers out of your community.

ASP.NET Membership Provider - effective 2-way membership integration

Already have a membership database you want the forum to link to? Or, you want to use the forum's membership database for your own site? We've got you covered in both cases.

The software natively supports connecting to multiple external Membership Providers, so you can hook up to many membership db's at once without coding. And with our own JSON-based Membership & Roles Providers, you can easily hook up your site (and other web apps you own) to the forum membership, without code dependency (no dll duplication).

Using the software on the Intranet? No problem. We support Active Directory Membership Provider, too. Your employees can easily log in with their Windows credentials without a separate login. In addition, we also support Windows Authentication (auto sign-in; with multiple domains, too), so your members can bypass all login screens if they're already signed in to your domain.

High Performance - proven to handle thousands of concurrent users

Performance matters a LOT on the web: Google's revenue drop 20% when search results take 0.5 seconds longer to load, and 40% of people abandon a page if it fails to load within 2 seconds.

ASP Playground was designed from the ground up as a platform that can scale with your community as your community grows. And it's been proven to perform well on some of the largest communities online, without needing expensive hardware (in many cases, a single web server is all it takes to handle 1000's of concurrent users).

The new version, APG vNext, is further optimized to make sure you can safely turn on ALL features, even in the most demanding communities. As a programmer, you may find the following performance enhancements interesting:

1. No dependency on the ASP.NET Session Object to reduce memory usage on the server. This also makes it easy to run on web farm (load balanced servers) without any configuration.
2. Viewstate disabled on most pages to reduce page download size and save bandwidth.
3. Optimized caching on the server that eliminates unnecessary database calls to further speed up page response.
4. Bundles and GZip compresses CSS and JavaScript to cut down the number of requests, so pages load fast even on the browser's first request.
5. Custom thread pool to handle emailing and long running tasks to avoid blocking threads for ASP.NET.
6. Use of Stored Procedures and combined queries to reduce the number of database round trip.
7. Most CRUD operations are purely JSON Web Service based, making them light on your server and network.