Hello! It’s been just over a month since we made SocialGO Version 2 available to the public, and we’ve now opened up registration for our 3 marvelous plans. The whole team is really excited to see some great sites beginning to pop up on the new platform.

We’ve seen some great ideas and feedback floating around in our new Help Center, and also a lot of questions about the new service, how we’re moving on from the existing SocialGO.com, and what we’ve got on the horizon. We thought we’d take a moment to make a few things clear …

Why hasn’t SocialGO.com been replaced with the new version?
Right now we’re running sgv2.com alongside SocialGO.com as a separate platform – we’ll be making the full switch in due course.

Oh no! Will my V1 site be shut down?
No! We have no plans of closing any networks created on the current V1 platform, and even when we turn off new signups for V1 they’ll still remain.

Can I transfer my existing SocialGO.com membership over to V2?
No, not at this time. As we are running them as different platforms, your existing SocialGO.com account can not be used to create a V2 site. Sorry!

Will I be able migrate my members across?
In short – yes, but not right now. At the moment V2 is a standalone platform and we’re concentrating our efforts at bringing you awesome new widgets, themes and features. Our engineering team will be working on a V1 > V2 member migration script that will transfer your member profiles over, which will be available in due course. Until then, we would suggest to anyone that has a large community on the V1 platform to continue using that service if they want to avoid having members re-register.

I have an idea for V2!
If you think we really should be including something that’s not available, make sure you let us know about it in the Feature Requests section of our Help Centre.

How does the new 14-day trial on sgv2.com work?
When you sign up for a new V2 network, you’re given all the currently available features. You then have 14 days to choose a plan (Publisher, Community or Concierge) before your site is removed.

What new features are you working on?
Good question! We’ve created a short-term roadmap – sgv2.com/roadmap – to give our customers an idea of the main features that our engineering team are working on. Take a look! Remember, this roadmap just details larger projects – smaller things such as widgets and themes aren’t displayed here. We’re working on them all the time!

Remember – our sgv2 support staff are always available through our Help Centre.

Have you got a new sgv2.com social website? How’s everything been going? Let us know in the comments below …

Blogging. A valuable opportunity to broadcast one’s social, political and cultural views to the world? A way of publishing updates and encouraging participation in a community? Or a chance to let everyone know what you had for dinner last night?

Whatever you use it for, we wanted to make sure that the new SocialGO V2 blogging tools weren’t just another feature – but a quality publishing product in itself. To get going, simply click on the ‘New Blog Post’ link in the toolbar that runs across the top of your site.

1. Blog Types
SocialGO lets you make standard text posts, photo posts or video posts. Each is formatted differently to display your content in the best possible way.

2. Blog Title/URL
Don’t forget to name the blog, and what you want the URL (or ‘permalink’) of the post to be. This is really important if you’re thinking about SEO.

3. Content
This bit’s up to you! Dazzle your audience and write your post using our WYSIWYG editor – it’s easy to embed photos, links, videos or directly edit the source HTML.

4. Select Blog
Every SocialGO site can have multiple blogs with different privacy settings – and you can choose which of them your post will be published to. Stay tuned to sgv2.com/blog for some tips on how you can make the most of your multiple blogs, coming soon!

5. Post to Facebook/Twitter
If your SocialGO site is connected to Facebook or Twitter, your followers can be alerted of your blog post when you tick the Facebook and Twitter icons at the bottom of the form.

If you’ve created a network using the new SocialGO over the past few days – we want to know how you’ve found it!

Got an idea for a new theme? Found a problem? We’ve set up http://help.socialgo.com/forums – an area where you can leave your thoughts, report problems or tell us what features you think are missing.

So if you’ve built an sgv2 network, give us your feedback! Muchos Gracias.

We know that people need control over what their website looks like – without having to rely on web designers. While our design team has built some amazing themes for instant beautification, we understand that a lot of folks want to spend time creating something personal to them or their brand. Something they’re proud of.

We wanted to give our users the chance to customize pretty much everything about their design – without having to go near a line of HTML or CSS code.

Enter the SocialGO ‘Canvas’ theme!

Backgrounds, fonts, colors, layouts, borders, sizes – most elements of your SocialGO site can be completely customized through the Canvas options menu. If this particular framework looks familiar, it’s been built based on the WooThemes Canvas framework. We had WooThemes founder Adii over to SocialGO HQ last year to give us a hand structuring our theming in V2.

V2 contains a flexible templating and theming system, meaning that in future releases we will be able to offer more varied and structurally different themes. At the moment our interface only allows for interface control of 30% of the undercover smarts. We are working on exposing more to you guys as quickly as we can. We want design to be a key part of the SocialGO product. No longer should social networks have to look like a bad MySpace profile.

We will be adding additional theme options to our other themes, but for the moment Canvas gets the full suite!

To access the Canvas menu:

While the menu is newbie friendly, the canvas theme is also what you’ll be looking for if you want to take the reigns and use your own custom CSS stylings.

Select the ‘Disable All CSS Stylings’ option if you want to design your site using a fresh slate