New Composer

This article will give a brief overview of the new updates to social post composer.

When you click on Compose Post in the top-right corner of Orlo, the composer screen will appear onscreen:

Whilst it looks very different to the composer we previously had, the functionality for the most part has remained the same. We've added a few new quality-of-life updates to make it a smoother publishing experience and the restructuring allows us to prepare for additional features to be added in the future. 

In the top-right corner, you'll see two new icons next to our Preview Post button. These allow you to change the view of the new composer. Our default is fullscreen, but you can also choose to have a half-screen view with the option to flip which half and a minimised view so you can see what is behind (if you need to reference your content calendar for example).

- Minimise

- When in Half Screen, swap which half the composer sits on

- Half Screen / Full Screen

 

Like before, the first thing you will need to do to begin the process is select the account(s) you'd like to post out on using the updated dropdown selector. Social accounts are now clearly organised by network, with the option to quick-select either all accounts or all accounts of a particular network:

Once you've selected your accounts, you can now begin to create your post. This works in the same way as the previous composer, with the main change being to how attached media is displayed. Once uploaded, attached media will be displayed underneath the text box.

In the top right corner of the text box, you can toggle your post into Draft Mode, to be saved and published later on. 

We've also updated our link editor, post text suggestions and video captions views (displayed below): 

1. Link Editor

2. Alt-Text

3. Video captions

Whether it's an image, video or GIF uploaded to your post, you can hover over it once attached to manage that media. All attachment types will allow you to remove them using the bin icon in the top-left corner, with the 3-dot menu in the top-right showing options depending on the type of media (ie Alt-Text for images, Subtitles for videos).

Finally, we've moved all of the additional options out of the compose text box and listed them underneath the attachments area. This means that going forward, we don't have to try and squeeze more icons into an already busy space on screen and any time a network offers new functionality for us to use, all we need to do is add in another section to the new composer view. As these are usually all optional, you will need to toggle them on if required for your post.

For the supported networks, sharing a First Comment allows you to follow up your main post with a comment that can include additional information or links (useful when the social networks might reduce post visibility based on there being links in them).

For content that you want auto-deleted after a certain amount of time, Post Expiry will let you "set and forget" so you do not have to make a note to come back and delete a post manually.

We've moved our Scheduler onto the same view as well, so you no longer have to click back and forth between the compose screen and the calendar view. With that, we've removed our heatmap scheduler view of top times to post out and replaced it with a concise 5-star time ranking. This will provide a list of the top times to schedule your content for, based on previous content from the selected account/s on the selected day.