Category - Release notes

Fri, 4 Mar 2011


Joe

Fri, 4 Mar 2011, 12:43



Small but significant release - 4th March 2011

As we march along the road to the new moonfruit.com and the blog release we thought we'd squeeze out a few new features that continue to pave the way. So this morning we pushed out a small but significant release. Here are the highlights:

Background HTML tiling

Continuing on the design improvements allowed by the 'no background option' on the 2nd Feb release, we've updated the background HTML image options. It's now possible to set a number of different tiling options: no tiling, tiling, horizontal tiling, vertical tiling. These allow you greater control on how the background image will be displayed so that different effects can be achieved. You can also anchor the image to the top left, top centre and top right. And finally you can choose whether the background image will be fixed in the browser or scroll with your page (effectively whether your site will 'slide' over the top of the image, or the image will move with it as you scroll).

preview1.jpg
New template site showing fixed scroll HTML image background

Quick access to Page Master, Background and HTML background

One piece of usability feedback we've had is that getting into the page master can be laborious and often confusing for new users. So we've enabled a 'quick access' feature that means if you double click on an item that is on the page master you are prompted and given the option to jump straight to it. This 'quick access' also allows you to double click on the site background to get to the 'background' panel in the design menu, and double click on the 'wall paper' (HTML background) to get to the HTML background more easily. So generally it allows you to jump around a bit quicker. If you find this upsetting behaviour you can turn it off by going to 'Edit' > 'Preferences' and turn off 'Auto Page Master' (directions only in the new Toolbar).

preview3.jpg
Enter Page Master prompt and 'Auto Page Master' setting

Page length restriction

One important thing for the blog is to remove the page length restriction so that you can have articles and comments that flow on and on and increase the size of your page itself. So on the road to this we've completed the removal of the page length restriction, which was 3600 pixels long. We have still set a cap (30,000 pixels, over 8x longer), which we may adjust later after feedback. But this allows you to make things much bigger if you like. Remember massive pages with lots of content aren't always the best thing from a usability point of view, or loading speed, so use sparingly!

preview2.jpg
Page length set to 5000

As always, let us know what you think!

Wed, 2 Feb 2011

Joe

Wed, 2 Feb 2011, 11:10




Let's try that again – New release 2nd Feb 2011!!

And this time it's working! There has been a huge amount of work that has gone into this release as some of the core parts of the Moonfruit data structure have been rewritten to support the mobile HTML roadmap (V1.0 in this release) and the new Blog and e-commerce features that will follow (blog first, then e-commerce).

Mobile HTML version (V1.0)

So a large part of the work in the past 6 months has been in setting up the technology so that we can display your sites in the full Flash version (as before), a desktop HTML version (if you don't have Flash), and now a mobile HTML version (which is optimised for the small screen). We'll publish a dedicated article on just this topic in the next couple of days, but below is an idea of how the sites look in the different versions.

3Devices.png

The mobile optimised version is a single column render of your site in HTML. This allows the content to be displayed as a long vertical list which is easier to read and the user can scroll down through the objects on the page. The site navigation is done by a roll out menu, so the majority of the screen space is dedicated to your content.

This is Version 1.0 of the mobile HMTL and we will continue to upgrade it over the coming months. If you have cases where you think the mobile version is not displaying the right content in the right order, let us know and we'll add it to our test cases. We'll also add specific mobile styling into future releases to give you more options for customising it.

NB. If you are looking through the HTML version on your mobile and see a page with no contents in it, just refresh the page and it will then display the contents correctly. This 'empty page' will only happen the very first time a page is visited following this new release, so it won't happen for all users and will happen only once.

Shapes

The new shapes widgets allow you to apply effects, fills and gradients to a variety of different shape objects. These are seriously useful for customising the basic design of your site. We'll be looking to add this kind of functionality to other objects in the coming months, including text boxes, images and the blog, all of which will benefit from the improved design you can achieve with it.

newShapes.png

Let us know how you get on with them and the kinds of things you use them for.

No background option

We've added a new setting to allow you to turn off the Flash background of your site so that the HTML background is shown across the full browser. This allows you to achieve the 'full screen image' or 'chunky header/footer' styles that are common in the new contemporary web look and feel. How about a full screen image, shove in a few rounded corner shapes with drop shadow under your text boxes for legibility and bish-bash-bosh there you have it ;-)

noBackgroundImage.png

And before you ask, tiling options for your background image will follow shortly ;-)

That's it for now. We regret we can't bring you the blog at the same time, but there's a bit more work to do on that. 2010 was a big year for us in terms of investment in the infrastructure to make certain features possible, and 2011 will be the year when all these features start hitting the streets. Expect a lot more from us in 2011. We expect more from ourselves.

Mon, 17 Jan 2011

Joe

Mon, 17 Jan 2011, 16:33



Release issue - 15:45 GMT 17 Jan 2011

This afternoon we attempted to deploy a new version of our software to the live servers but found serious performances issues that had not shown up in our testing. We have therefore reverted to the previous release and the system is once again stable. We will now investigate the cause of the problems before attempting to deploy the code again. Apologies for the impact this will have had on your site. Many thanks for your patience and understanding.

Mon, 13 Dec 2010

Joe

Mon, 13 Dec 2010, 12:03




Release update - Mobile HTML, Shapes, Blog, etc.

Just to give you all an update on progress and expectations for the next release. We were prepping to have a release ready for the end of the year, but we won’t release it until early in January. We generally try to avoid releases too close to Christmas before many of the developers go away. The last thing we want is to find unexpected bugs that we can’t fix quickly which cause you grief.

This January release will include the first version of the new mobile optimised HTML, some improvements to the desktop HTML (current HTML version), and some forerunners to the full blog release, e.g. new shapes components (including gradients, images fills, effects like drop shadows, etc. - see below) and a few other bits and pieces. There is also quite a big change to the way we store data. The full blog will come out a few weeks later.

We are choosing to do the release in 2 parts as there is a lot going into it and it’s much easier to manage this way. We appreciate this means the blog will be later than you expected, but we hoped to whet your appetite with some of these changes sooner rather than later, and the mobile HTML improvements will be in this first release.

In the meantime, here’s a few examples of the kinds of things the new shapes objects can do that will really open up some of the design possibilities in your sites...

New Shapes

All of these are achieved using the new basic 'shapes', with a number of effects, fills and gradients applied to them which are part of the shape settings. So the design possibilities are pretty wide ranging!

starsResized.jpg
Stars - using 2 semi-transparent gradient fills, with thick border and blur effect on star shapes


swissResized.jpg
Swiss cheese - using bevel border with blur, and multiple shapes aligned to appear to be one layer

girlyResized.jpg
Cute - Eiffel Tower has a flat image fill, chunky white border and drop shadow, while the girl has a chunky dotted yellow border and pink/purple drop shadow


carResized.jpg
Splat - a borderless image fill (car), with 2 transparent PNG 'splats' in brown and white, positioned to create a contrast


Fri, 16 Jul 2010

leila

Fri, 16 Jul 2010, 16:07



Release 5.0 is Live!

So it's official... The 5.0 release is now live! We're very excited about it and would love your feedback. Some of the cool new features include:

  • Eye dropper feature on colour mixer allows you to pick a colour already in use on the page
  • Images are automatically resized when they are scaled so visitors get quicker page load times
  • Line spacing control for text boxes: standard fonts on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, graphic fonts for the whole text box (this has been a feature asked for by designers for years)

...and lots more! Click here to view the full release notes.

Eye Dropper

Fri, 9 Jul 2010

leila

Fri, 9 Jul 2010, 14:57




New release coming next week

We are proud to announce that we are expecting to update SiteMaker to version R5.0 next week.

We've decided to bump our major release number to 5.0 because there has been an enormous amount of work done over the last months on the new edit environment. In our last release back in November, we introduced Flex (new Flash application framework) into the edit environment, which continued to talk to the old Flash edit tools that made up your site. We have now rationalised these into a single Flex environment which simplifies the code base and allows us to more rapidly develop features in the future using the Flex framework. Flex is still based on the Flash Player but it provides more tools to the developer who can therefore produce features more quickly. The big new features coming down the line (blog, eCommerce) will benefit significantly from being developed with Flex. These features are already in progress and well on the way to completion. More about that later.

Continue reading...

Mon, 30 Nov 2009

Joe

Mon, 30 Nov 2009, 11:54



New Toolbar updates as requested by you ;-)

Following the article we published a few weeks back informing everyone that the New Toolbar would become the only Toolbar available from 1 Feb 2010. We got a lot of very good feedback from you along with suggestion about some tweaks that we could provide to make it even better. So we did them.

This was mainly around being able to hide/minimise different parts of the New Toolbar interface (e.g. sidebar/top icons) so that you had more room to play with while editing your site. So we've added the ability to do both of those things, which means you can now choose exactly how you want to set up the New Toolbar to so it can be viewed just the way you want it to.

So, just a quick reminder, this is what the New Toolbar looks like.

sidebarOpen.jpg
New Toolbar (side bar open)

Continue reading...

Mon, 2 Nov 2009

Joe

Mon, 2 Nov 2009, 10:57




Moonfruit goes global - your site served from 14 locations around the world

Moonfruit.com and every site hosted by us are now served from 14 locations around the world.

serverMap.jpg

To celebrate the launch of this new service we are offering five (5) pairs of return tickets from wherever you are in the world to any of the 14 locations that Moonfruit sites are now served from. And we'll offset the carbon footprint of your flight so you can still look all your green friends in the eyes - or will that be green eyed friends ;-) - with a clear conscience.

To find out more read on...

Continue reading...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009

Joe

Mon, 26 Oct 2009, 17:48



New Release - 27 October 2009 - Finalised New Toolbar

Thank you to all of those who provided us with feedback over the past few weeks while the Toolbar has been running in Beta. This has been very helpful to us in ironing out some of those strange little bugs. We're very pleased to announce that the new (and improved) Toolbar is now live! Here's a quick grab of what the final version looks like.

toolbar.jpg
New Moonfruit Toolbar


So what are the differences? Read on, read on...

Continue reading...

Tue, 29 Sep 2009

Joe

Tue, 29 Sep 2009, 10:00




New release - 29 September 2009 - New interface, HTML widget, site copy and more...

Yeah, it's release time again! Believe it or not we get just as excited as you do at these times. The months of hard work all come together and we get to push new things out to the Moonfruit-osphere. And this one is a biggy too.

So first things first, the new interface. For those of you who didn't see our sneak preview, this is what it looks like.

menuEdit.jpg
General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

We're seeing the largest overhaul to the edit environment in the last 5 years as we drag SiteMaker kicking and screaming into the present and pave the way for the future. The long awaited HTML widget is now out of beta, works in all browsers (ooooohh), and opens up libraries of additional content. And you can now copy an entire site too...

Continue reading...

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