By now you’re all aware that we’ve been working on allowing you to display your comment section in different languages, and today we’d like to make that available to everyone! Thanks to a fantastic effort from 24 volunteers collaborating across 5 continents, we’re able to offer 12 new languages to you right off the bat, with more languages hopefully coming soon. Here are the new languages that we’re releasing, along with the awesome folks who contributed to each translation:

• Arabic (Egypt)
  • Hisham Sadek – blog
• Croatian
  • “Andrija Papec – blog
• Filipino
  • Kevin Paquet – blog
• French
  • Alexandre Vallières-Lagacé – blog
  • Brice Gouban – blog
  • Jeremy Selier – blog
• German
  • Thomas Kalka – blog
  • Thomas Knapp – blog
• Malay
  • JL – blog
• Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Rafael Fischmann from MacMagazine
  • Vinicius – blog
  • Bernardo Pina – blog
  • David Soares – blog
  • Bruno Alves – blog
  • Beto Cadilhe – blog
  • João Pedro Cunha – blog
• Russian
  • Sergey Soloviov – blog
  • Maxim Yanovsky (Максим Яновский) – blog
  • hell0men – blog
• Spanish (Mexico)
  • Jorge Martinez – blog
  • Oscar Cubillos Herrera – blog
• Spanish (Spain)
  • Peter Olle – blog
• Ukranian
  • Vladimir Medushivsky (ДЭВИД®) – twitter

To change the language used in the comments area on your site, just go into the fancy new Settings & Layout section of intensedebate.com and the pick the Layout option on the left. At the bottom of that page you can pick from the list of supported languages.

These are first runs of the translations, so please take a look and see what you think. If there are any words you think might make more sense as something different, then please drop us a line at labs@intensedebate.com, letting us know what language you’re looking at and where the text you’re talking about appears. It might be easiest if you send us a screenshot showing exactly which bit of text you’re talking about.

Thanks for all of your patience, and another huge thank you to the wonderful volunteers who have made this possible.

If you don’t see your language and you’re interested in translating, please email us at the address above. We would love your help!

Posted by Beau Lebens in features

We’re excited to introduce a new enhancement for our Facebook Connect implementation: share comments back to Facebook.  We recently rolled this out, so if you use Facebook Connect to post comments in IntenseDebate then you might have noticed this.

Our Facebook Connect integration is a cool way to let your readers post comments using their Facebook profiles. With our latest enhancement they can now opt to share their comments with their Facebook friends when they post using Facebook Connect. Just like our “tweet this” Twitter integration, this is a great way to get your friends in the debate and drive new traffic to your blog and comments.

When you’re logged into Facebook Connect you’ll notice a new “Share on Facebook” checkbox just below the comment textbox on the right. Select that when you post using your Facebook Connect account and you’ll have the option to customize the text that you post back to Facebook.

If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, now is the perfect time! Get started with IntenseDebate.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’re excited to introduce two new IntenseDebate Plugins: AddThis and Facebook Share buttons for your posts!

Facebook Share Button
The Facebook Share button provides your readers with an easy way to share your blog post with all of their Facebook friends. Now you can install the Facebook Share Button with one click through your IntenseDebate Plugins page. Hats off to Dog Lover for developing this plugin! Make sure you check out Dog Lover’s other plugin, TweetMeme Retweet Button.

AddThis Share Button
AddThis is a bookmarking and sharing service. Enabling the AddThis button gives your readers the ability to share your blog post with their friends through a variety of online services (in addition to Facebook). Many thanks to tylerabell for his contribution!

We love offering new ways to enrich your blog and comment section with additional third party services with just a simple mouse click. Just like our other IntenseDebate Plugins, like PollDaddy Polls, Seesmic Video comments, Smiley, and YouTube (among others), there’s no need to mess around with any code in your template. We do it for you. All you have to do is activate it!

Learn more about our Plugins and Plugins API.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Our last blog post announced our redesign of the Edit Profile pages where you manage your IntenseDebate user account. We’ve continued to make our way across other pages in your IntenseDebate.com account, and we’re pleased to introduce our latest redesigns of your account Dashboard and Following pages.

Your Dashboard has had an overhaul and a bit of a face lift to match the new design style, while the Following page has been reorganized and is now easier to maintain.

One of the most noticeable changes to the layout is the sidebar. We’ve added additional tabs to the sidebar for your Dashboard and Following pages, which we think drastically improves ease of navigation. This is a theme that you will continue to see as we set our sights on your blog admin pages.

The coolest part about our redesign is that this is giving us a chance to cleanup and update our CSS and other background code, which fits in with our future plans for localizing IntenseDebate.com. We have just begun our localization project for the comment section interface, so localizing IntenseDebate.com is a longer-term project. Keep an eye out for another localization progress update coming soon.

We’re rolling this out slowly to minimize shell-shock that normally accompanies major interface changes. We’re always interested in feedback, so let us know what you think about the redesign.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

One of our ongoing projects has been revamping all of the useful pages in your account at IntenseDebate.com.  We’ll be the first to admit it, there’s a ton of awesome features in your profile but they need to be better organized so you can find them all!  We don’t want you to be overwhelmed with too many sudden changes, so we’ve been rolling out small changes over the past several weeks, some of which have likely gone unnoticed, until now…

We have released two major changes. The first is our stylish new home page at IntenseDebate.com. Since you have to be logged out of your IntenseDebate account in order to see the front page (click here to logout), you might not have noticed that one. But, the next change you will undoubtedly notice when you’re logged into your account, and that’s your shiny new Edit Profile page.

So what’s new?
It’s all about the layout. On our old profile pages we just crammed in as much as we could. We would release new features like our Twitter integration (tweet this & latest tweets) or our Gravatar support and we would squeeze it into the old page. Now we’ve organized it a bit more sensibly.  In your Profile Panel you’ll find the following:

• Account Page: here you can manage your basic account settings like your username, email address, OpenID, password, and email notification options.
• User Profile Page: your display name, profile description, and your personal websites (linked to in your profile) are all located here.
• User Picture: manage your Gravatar or IntenseDebate avatar.
• Services: this is where you can manage all of your 3rd party services that you link to in your profile, as well as your Twitter account integration.

We think you’ll agree that this is a major improvement.  Hats off to Isaac and Jon for their work!  Keep an eye for more changes as we continue to make our way across IntenseDebate.com. 🙂

Posted by Michael Koenig in features