According to Ning, changes are coming in July.

Megatag Community

For almost a year now, I and other volunteers have been maintaining the Megatag community, an online community of artists, designers, and talented people working in interactive media.
In some ways, Ning represents the ideal. Absolutely anyone can create their own social community. This appeals to many who would rather not go the Facebook route. As other social community sites become more open and share more of their user’s information, many people feel drawn to more closed and specialized communities. The odds of such communities retaining their original purpose for existence seems to be much higher, and the community leaders have more control over what happens.

That said, there are quite a few features that I’ve wished Ning had in place, namely the ability to customize the layout and design. Ning suffers from what a lot of community sites suffer from – bloat of information. This can be a problem based on the group the community site is intended to serve.

Better Customization

For instance, on Megatag I’d love for people to be able to upload and show large format examples of their design work, somewhat like the Behance network. Behance does a very good job of enabling creative people to create very good looking portfolios with minimal code knowledge.
Even if you have code knowledge in spades, the Ning platform really does not let you do much customization. Believe me, we’ve pushed the limits in this regard at Oddly.

I’d be willing to pay for more customization options – and it seems like a lot more people would too, because this is just what Ning is promising. Starting in July, Ning will offer three paid subscription services, dubbed “mini”, “plus”, and “pro”.
Details seem few, but a few things caught my eye, such as customization options for CSS, Javascript, and references to API access.

I can not tell yet just how far they are opening up the access, but I’m quite hopeful that we’ll be able to build that portfolio community, with clean uncluttered design and the features we are seeking.

Provided they stay on track with their timeline, we’ll know soon enough!