New look REW Blogs: More than just a pretty face

Welcome, REW Bloggers, to the new V2 REW Blogs. As you will notice, there are a lot of changes that have happened since version one.

At first glance, you'll notice a much more aesthetically pleasing layout, with cleaner lines, re-organized features and navigation – a more pleasing user interface overall.

However, there's a lot more going on "under the hood", as it were. We've added a lot of cool new features and tools that will help you make the most of blogging. These features include:

• New listings management with customizable property types, features, and statuses. Drag-and-drop photo management for far easier image management, and extended features on details pages inspired by the REW IDX. Such things as saved searches and favorites for visitors, new inquiry forms, on-page mortgage calculator, Google mapping of listings and some soon-to-be-released syndications that will really maximize your listings' exposure.
• Social bookmarking of other members ("Friends" - this name will change). You can now flag other REW Bloggers that you respect and showcase them on your REW blog, improving blog interlinking and ease of access for readers to find complimentary information.
  
• New abuse reporting - the community can now participate alongside the REW Staff in policing the blogs and keeping them clean of link spam and other violations of our rules and terms of service. Clean, professional blogs mean better authority for the entire community and thus more opportunity.
  
• Profile commenting - You can now leave comments on other members' profiles: Recommending them, providing a testimonial or reference, etc
• WIDGETS! - This is one of the cooler features - You can now customize your REW Blog from a selection of our widgets. Select from current items such as user stats, relevant reading, blog tags, friends, Flickr photos and more.
  
• Signatures - This should be popular - Many of our members were adding manual signatures with their contact information at the bottom of each post - you can now set a default signature in your profile that can be turned on or off, and modified at any time, saving you the time of having to create one each time.
  
• Listings statistics - detailed statistics on your listings including unique views, total page views etc

There is a lot more that I could go on about, but this should probably be enough for you to check out for now.

I will be posting detailed tutorials on all of the new features, and as always, if you have any questions or would like to discuss elements of the blogs or make suggestions, report bugs, etc, you are more than welcome to post at our Blogs Forum.