Moonfruit Lounge - Release notes

New Toolbar updates as requested by you ;-)

Joe — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:54:00 +0000

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.

New Toolbar (side bar open)

The major piece of feedback we had was the request to be able to hide the Sidebar during edit mode so that when it was closed you could use the full screen real estate for your work and get a better idea of what the site was looking like. So now you can do this, either by clicking the 'strip' that runs down the side of the Sidebar on the outer edge, or by clicking again on the selected icon in the Top bar, e.g. icons now act like toggles for the Sidebar. So the hidden view will be like this.

New Toolbar (side bar closed)

And finally, if you want to maximise the vertical height of the edit environment, then you can choose to hide the top icons. To do this go to 'Edit', then 'Preferences' and finally 'Hide toolbar icons'. This will then remove the icons from view and leave the environment looking like this.

New Toolbar (side bar closed and icons hidden)

So there you have it. You ask, we do. Hopefully this will give many of you the feeling of the Advanced Toolbar that you have been pining for.

But as a reminder, the old Basic and Advanced Toolbars will no longer be available from 1 Feb 2010. This is being done to simplify our code base and allow us to develop more advanced features using the new technology available in newer versions of Flash (and Flex). It will help us develop a greater range of features more quickly, which we hope you will enjoy. We're not just doing it to wind you up. Honest ;-).

The original article explains more. We will also continue to work on new features for the Toolbar, so please let us know if you have further comments.

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

Joe — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:57:00 +0000

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

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...

What does this mean for you?

Moonfruit (and every site we host) is now running on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which means your sites and all their contents are now being served from a distributed network of servers located in 14 different places around the world. Using clever routing and caching, visitors to your site get the content served up to their computer from the closest location to them, which means they get your sites faster!

What do I have to do to get on this?

Most of you will already be on the CDN following changes in our domain name configurations that have been taking place over the last couple of weeks, but for some of you, who have your domain name hosted or managed elsewhere, you will need to take some action. So here are the different cases:

You have a site with one of our subdomain e.g. site.moonfruit.com (also t83.net, kk5.org, sm4.biz) - do nothing, you're already running on the CDN
You have a domain name which you bought from moonfruit.com, e.g. www.yourdomain.com - in most cases do nothing, you're already running on the CDN for the 'www' part of your domain, e.g. if you use www.yourdomain.com you're on the CDN, if you use yourdomain.com (without the www) you're not. This is because you can't set CNAME records on the root of your domain. So to get on the CDN you need to use the www version of your domain. (Instructions on how to do this will be provided.
You have a domain name hosted or managed by someone else (e.g. another domain name provider, not us) - in this case you'll need to change your DNS Zone file and create a CNAME record on the www part and set that CNAME to use your canonical address which is the original subdomain you got when you started your site, e.g. probably something.moonfruit.com. This doesn't mean that address will be displayed, it just means your domain name will copy the settings from this. Your domain provider will be able to help you with this (or you can always transfer it to us ;-) ).

Why did we do this?

More and more of our customers are located outside of the UK and have a global audience. This was really brought to a head following our last Twitter campaign in July which received an enormous amount of international attention. So that got us thinking, how could we improve the global delivery of our awesome website builder and improve the quality of service for everyone? The CDN was our answer.

And best of all, it will cost you nothing! We're paying for it, even for free sites. Consider it an early Xmas present. Enjoy!!

Where do I get the flights from?

That's our new Twitter comp to celebrate this launch. Check out www.moonfruit.com/flymeto.html.

So there you have it. Most of your sites are already running on the CDN, but for those that are not you can take the steps above and accelerate your site globally.

New Release - 27 October 2009 - Finalised New Toolbar

Joe — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:48:00 +0000

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.

New Moonfruit Toolbar

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

Bug fixes and improvements
On the road to make it fully ready for everyone to use we've had to fix quite a few little buglets and add a few sprinkles of magic. The highlights of which are:

CTRL key now works again
Keyboard shortcuts now function normally again
@ symbol and backspace now work correctly in Chrome
'-1' error (and '404' on Macs) for large file uploads has been fixed
In Firefox the keyboard nudge, enter, tab keys and cursor will work normally again
'Delete this page' option has been restored to the 'Pages' menu
Domains module now loads in the edit environment (doesn't go back to moonfruit.com)
Loading has been optimised for quicker download and more feedback
Sidebar panels now animate to add a bit of sparkle (we all need sparkle ;-) )

You can still get to the new Toolbar in the same way, e.g. 'View' --> 'New Toolbar', or if you're already using it you'll get the updates automatically.

I thought I'd give you a quick summary of the advantages of the new Toolbar from the last blog article. We're really please with how it has turned out and hope you like it too.

New Toolbar highlights
The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are, or can be, used today. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help you 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects while in Edit mode (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quicker ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)
Copy site/transfer site feature - allows you to create copies of your site as the basis for a new site (not for backup)
HTML widget - add any HTML snippet to your site using our HTML widget snippet (e.g. Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more).

Here's the original beta release article if you missed it.

And if you want to give it a go why not build your own free website ;-)

So that's it for now. Look out for a further announcement next week with some exciting service improvements...

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

Joe — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:00:00 +0100

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.

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...

New Toolbar (beta)
Some call it SiteMaker5, some call it Moonfruit+, all we know is we call it the New Toolbar. It's been launched as an opt-in beta version, which means it's fully functional, you can choose it, you can use it, but you're not forced to. We're looking for feedback - good and bad (constructive) - so that we can polish it off for a final release at a later stage. But it works and in our testing so far makes things far quicker and easier to do.

To get to it, login to your site and go to 'View' --> 'New Toolbar (beta)'. Your site will reload in the new environment but you can revert to the old style toolbars at any time. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:

Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help 'see' it in full glory
Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects (new under 'view')
Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets ('Insert' menu)
Quick pages menu - includes quick ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see 'Pages' menu)
Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new 'Services' menu)

The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. Moonfruit has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are used today. When we started many years ago we built a 'Page editor' whereas today SiteMaker allows the management of your website over its whole lifecycle. From initial build -> monitoring traffic and performance -> developing community -> monetisation -> ongoing updates.

Copy/transfer site
Some new features in the 'Admin' section are the copy site and transfer site features. This allows you to create a copy of the design and structure of your site which you can use as the basis of a new site. Please note this isn't a complete copy like backup, as some data is not copied, e.g. individual posts in comment feeds or forums. But the text, images, design, structure, etc., are all applied to the new site.

The transfer site feature allows you to transfer an existing site (or a new copy) to another user of Moonfruit.

Both features have been asked for many times, both by customers that want to build more sites themselves and by resellers who find they want to build similar sites for clients in similar industries over and over. These new features will help make that easier to achieve.

The HTML widget
You can't add HTML to a Flash site, don't be ridiculous! Or can you ;-) ? Some of you will have been using the Beta version of this widget for some time now, but for others this will be new. The HTML snippet widget allows you to paste in HTML code (or markup for the purists out there) that you might find elsewhere (Amazon affiliates, Youtube videos, Twitter feeds, etc.) into your Moonfruit website and use it seamlessly with our other features. The changes/improvements for this release are:

The widget now works in all major browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and on PC and Mac
Works with all HTML snippets (probably - we can't find any yet it doesn't work with, but I'm sure you will ;-)
Some regularly used services (Youtube player, Twitter feed, etc.) have some preconfigured widgets (snippets) available to help you get started (use the 'Setup' tab to get the HTML code)

So this new feature makes available all Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more. Happy hunting!!

But remember, this still only works if you have the Flash 10 player!! Currently FP10 has around 86% penetration according to Adobe but growing by 3-4% per month.

Product selling page templates
There are now some new product selling page templates with suggested layouts for creating easy to use product pages on Moonfruit. You can do this in the 'Add page' option in the 'pages' menu.

For those of you waiting, these are not the long awaited e-commerce updates, so apologies about that, but we are still working towards that goal and the interface lays yet further foundations for the e-commerce tools that will require these new technologies to work as well as they can.

Anyway, so that's about it. We hope you enjoy it and let us know what you think! Enjoy!

Known issues with new beta toolbar (keyboard shortcuts)

Keyboard shortcuts, such as copy, paste and delete among others, do not work in the beta toolbar
The Ctrl key does not work, e.g for multiple select and for drag select or for forcing links to work in edit mode
In Firefox, keyboard nudge, enter and tab keys do not work and the cursor will not flash in any text field

New release - 20th July 2009 - Membership tweaks

Joe — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:47:00 +0100

Following the successful release of the Membership features in May, we had some requests for a few tweaks and additional options. So being the friendly and agile guys we are, we thought we'd do them (while continuing with the other things we're working on).

So today we published a few minor adjustments to the Membership settings to allow you to:

Set a redirect page after login
Disable Facebook Connect login

The first of these changes was much requested, allowing you to send your members to a specified 'success' page after they have logged in to your site. This is great for redirecting them to the 'members home page' or whatever page you want to send them to. You can set the 'post login page' on the Settings tab of the 'People' section when editing your site.

The second change allows you to disable the Facebook Connect login options for members. Facebook Connect allows new or existing members of your site to login using their Facebook credentials, so there is no need to create a new user account on your site. This streamlines the join process and makes it easier for you to attract new members. It also ties together with the ability to post out a note to your Facebook wall from the 'Send a message' section of 'People', which is a great way to invite people to join your site. However, the new setting allows you to turn this off, which some customers (particularly businesses users) had requested. Again you can change the settings to disable Facebook Connect on the 'Settings' tab in the 'People' section.

Things we're working on now are the final delivery of the HTML widget (currently available in beta, but now that Firefox 3.5 is out we can release fully), and some changes to the edit environment to integrate new technology on the path to the new e-commerce features.

We hope you like the changes!

New release - 18 May 2009 - Membership and more

Joe — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:00:00 +0100

Want to know how to grow your website with more members and advocates? How to interact, manage and develop a better relationship with your visitors? Want to create members-only/client-only pages or sections? Want to post information or updates from your website to Facebook/Twitter? Build a collaborative website with edit rights for different people?

Well then, the membership release is what you've been waiting for! After many months of development it has finally arrived, jam packed with new features and a lot of improvement. Read on for more detail...

This release sees a whole new membership section with a number of improvements to make it easier for site owners to attract, manage and communicate with their members. In particular, the main areas of improvement are: a) to make it easier to invite members to join; b) to ensure members become members of the site only and no longer have to create a SiteMaker account; c) to replace 'SiteMaker' branding in the join process with the site owner's own look and feel; d) to allow site owners to create site administrators; e) to make managing page permissions easier; and finally, f) to enable integration with some Facebook and Twitter services.

More detail on these features is provided below. While there are over 100 new FAQs in the Help section covering the various new features, we will aslo be publishing some specific articles over the coming weeks. These will highlight more of what's new, what's improved and how you can make the most of it.

Getting new members

It's now possible to invite new members using your Windows Live or Gmail address books. Alternatively, you can also just copy and paste a list of emails addresses if you want to transfer them from an offline address book. The content of the invite email can also be customised by you. As a site owner, it is now possible to create a member yourself, while in edit mode. Previously, the site owner would have to ask the new member to come to his or her site and create an account before being able to assign any access/edit rights.

Site Level Membership

Previously visitors to a Moonfruit site who wanted to join as a member were required to complete a two-stage sign up process: firstly, they had to create a SiteMaker account; secondly, they then had to join the site. Now, all new sites will be built with Site Level Membership, which means that visitors join the site in a one step process. It also means that the members are free to choose a username that is unique to that site alone. Previously, usernames had to be unique across all usernames for all members of the sites built by the partner.

Sites built before the launch will be able to upgrade their site to site level membership, therefore getting access to all the new features provided under site level membership. However, this is not mandatory and in fact some sites use the Moonfruit wide membership so that they can run a number of sites with shared logins.

The join up process now involves setting up a join page which contains a new customisable login/join widget where the site owner can create a branded experience explaining the benefits of joining their site. Previously, the join process took place in a SiteMaker editor style popup window Emails from the site now refer to the site's name and come from the site email address. Previously, some account emails were from the SiteMaker Team and mentioned SiteMaker.

Site Admin

A new role of Site Administrator has been created. A site admin has access to all the toolbar functions, but any information regarding the site owner, such as billing details, are not accessible. This feature is particularly useful for website resellers.

Managing members and page permissions

It is now possible to set up permissions for multiple pages at once. The interface on the settings panel has been improved to make it much simpler to understand what permissions have been given to individual members as well as each group.

You can now create groups and drag and drop members into those groups from a single panel. Site owners can now view and update members’ email addresses and send them an email that allows the member to reset their password (as long as the site is using site level membership)

Integration with Facebook and Twitter

It is now possible to allow visitors to become a member of your site using their Facebook login credentials, therefore making it easier for users to register as they won't have to create another username and password.

You can also link your site with your Facebook account enabling you to post notes and updates on your wall about your website so that your friend network on Facebook can hear about your site or be updated with any changes.

It is also possible to send updates to an associated Twitter account to communicate with your twitter followers about your site.

NB. If you have your own domain name you'll have to get a Facebook Application key to use the Facebook features. You can do this in the new 'People' section on the 'Settings' tab and we'll talk you through the process. It's quite simple.

And that as they say is that. It's taken a while for us to get our heads around it all, but we're sure you'll get to grips with it much faster. Let us know what you think and we hope you enjoy the new tools!

Remember we said HTML was impossible - well maybe not completely impossible...

Joe — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 08:09:00 +0000

Joe: Here is a true account from the development team of what happens when you leave them by themselves for a week, as told by Adam (one of our dev guys). Perhaps we should leave them alone more often...

Adam: So there we were, back from our Christmas holidays and nary a manager in sight. 'Organise yourselves this week' they said, giving the tech team free reign to work together and see what we could come up with. And what a week it turned out to be.

As some of you may know, we've been using scrum to manage SiteMaker development for some time now, so we're used to splitting projects down into week-long chunks of work. But what should we work on for a week? Better back-end services? Finish off the internal media manager?

Being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed after our break, one suggestion shone out like a beacon above all the others:

"Why don't we do the HTML widget when no-one's looking?"

The fact was that over the months and years while we've been repeatedly fending off requests with the simple response "sorry, it's not possible!", the browser landscape had been changing. CSS, IFrames, DOM manipulation had all made their way into the mainstream, so it looked like the scene was set. Deliver something that you lot had been asking for for years, work as a tight-knit team on something cool and give management a huge surprise all in one!

Not so fast

OK, so we hit a (pretty big) wall - there are still unresolved browser issues which mean that it isn't ready for general release.

The problem is that in order to float HTML content over a SiteMaker site, we need to enable a special Flash rendering mode (wmode opaque, for those really interested) if the HTML were to display properly on all our supported browsers. Initially we thought that there would be a huge performance hit associated with this mode, so there was some resistance to the idea, but testing soon showed that our fears were unfounded. We worked on the editing interface, the JavaScript code, the back-end support and the non-Flash accessible version as a team, aiming at a commonly agreed goal for the end of the week. We were on course to get the whole thing done and dusted and released on the unsuspecting world, on spec and on time...

However, there was a more sinister bug hiding in the wings that only reared its head in the wee hours of Friday morning. Bizarrely, if we use the special rendering mode, Flash sees your keyboard as a US keyboard. So for us Brits, " (shift-2) and @ (shift-') are swapped. But there's a whole world out there using SiteMaker and unfortunately breaking it for everyone outside of the USA is not really an option. We can't really tell everyone in France to stop using accented characters, or everyone in Greece or Russia to start using the Latin alphabet.

The future looks brighter

More encouragingly, we found that recent versions of the Flash Player work properly in IE, and that it looks like Firefox should have it fixed 'soon' (the bug was reported in December 2004(!) and appears to have been fixed in December 2008).

So, while we wait for the world to catch up and get this bugfix released and deployed to everyone's computers, we thought that we'd at least let you see our new widget in action, and then see what you think. You can now try out the effect that the wmode setting has on your own computer and see for yourself that, while we're *nearly* there, we have to wait for everyone to upgrade to flash player 10 and for Firefox 3.2 to be released.

The Moonfruit lab

So, while this week has been one of elation tinged with sadness, it did give us the opportunity to start on labs.moonfruit.com - where we hope to share more in-development work with you and hopefully get some feedback.

Please pay us a visit - and see the mythical HTML Snippet widget in action :-)

We will offer some of you the chance to download and use the widget for yourselves, though you have to bear in mind that it doesn't work in all cases yet (only IE 6 or above with Flash player 10). You can apply to join the alpha test on the Moonfruit labs site. See you there."

Joe: So there you have it. Perhaps next time we leave them alone they'll create a perpetual motion machine!

New release - 18th Dec 2008

Joe — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:40:00 +0000

So this is Christmas (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), and what have we learned (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), another year older (laaa, laaa, laaa, laaa), etc. In fact speaking of another year older, as 2009 approaches we'll be entering our 10th year of moonfruiting, so not bad going for the old website builder.

Anyway, you don't want to hear about that, you're interested in Santa's Goodie bag, or should I say Google bag...

Keeping up the theme of releasing Google based widgets at Xmas (see last year) we thought we'd add the much requested Google maps feature to SiteMaker so that you can help your customers find you - if you want them to find you ;-)

Google Maps Integration

Add a Google maps interface directly into your site
Set a location beacon to show your exact location on the map
Allow your customers to manipulate the map (zoom/drag) to help them get their bearings
It's in the 'functional' folder called 'google map'

Improved YouTube Video Feed

We have also updated our video player to use YouTube’s very own video API to ensure reliability. This will mean that if YouTube change how they serve videos, you don’t have to worry about your video failing, we will pick up any changes and ensure the video feed is maintained.

However, please be aware that if the video owner has set or marked the video as "private" or "embed only", the video will not be available via our player.

Some other stuff

4 new templates to choose from
File manager reorganisation, including up to date 'all' folders to help you find things more easily

And...that's it. Not quite the usual Xmas bonanza granted, but we've been working on several big pieces of new functionality and haven't been able to complete them in time to get them to Santa.

We tried outsourcing some of our development to Santa's Elves to speed things up, but the economy at the North Pole is still largely based on traditional manufacturing and hasn't yet made the transition to a service sector based economy with strong conceptual software skills, so that didn't work out so well. On the plus side they did make us a nice set of toy soldiers.

So you'll have to accept an IOU from us, for early next year, for the membership and e-Commerce features. But to give you a little sneak preview, I've got a couple of screenshots of the work in progress.

The enhanced membership features will arrive first. We're building them first as a platform the the e-Commerce improvements, e.g. to run a good shop, you want your customers to be able to create user accounts and we found our current membership tools a bit lacking. So the new ones will make it easier to create and manage members, set permissions for pages (e.g. members only), and communicate with those members via mailing lists. The above screenshot shows the 'permissions' section where you can select multiple pages and apply view/edit rights in one go.

One of the big limitations with the current PayPal tools is that you have to set up each product separately. Well no more. With the new system you will be able to use the product manager interface and manage the attributes of your products in one place, e.g. price, sizes, colour. Once your products are set up you can display them in your site using 'product display widgets' which make it quick to add and organise many different products on a page, e.g. you can add them just like adding images to a gallery which will automatically set-up the price display and the 'buy'/'add to cart' buttons for you. The above screenshot shows the product manager in 'product list' mode.

So there you go, we are working on them, honest! These are screenshots from the working prototypes, so not just pretty pictures, though the final designs may change a bit as we do usability testing.

Have a wonderful Xmas (or holiday season) and we'll see you all in the New Year. Ho ho ho.

.co.uk transfers now available!!

Joe — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:22:00 +0100

We are very pleased to announce that we have released the changes required that now allow you to transfer your .co.uk domain names to moonfruit! Once your domain is transferred to us, you will benefit from the free email (5 mailboxes and infinite aliases) that other domain customers get. So what are you waiting for?!

Remember .uk domains work slightly differently from other domain names (it's governed by a different organisation), so if you are going to transfer your domain name to us, make sure you follow the instructions below.

To kick off the process with us:

Go to www.moonfruit.com/domains.html and click on 'Transfer'
Type in your existing .uk domain name and click 'Submit'
Next confirm that you are ready to start the transfer and that your domain is unlocked (not blocked for transfer)
Pay for your transfer
Contact your existing domain name registrar and ask them to change the 'tag' on your domain to 'GANDI'

It's this last step that can sometimes slow things down. Your existing domain registrar has to change the 'tag' on your domain at their end to your new registrar (which is GANDI, the registrar Moonfruit uses to manage your domain names). Once that's all done it may take a few days to come over to us depending on how quickly your current domain registrar makes these changes. And that's it.

Thank you for your patience while we ironed out these final issues, but it's all ready and waiting for you to start that process. And if you do have any problems please let us know.

Happy transferring!

Interim Release - 13 October 2008

Walt — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:51:00 +0100

What's this? Another release? Well not quite, it's an update to our previous release and a small one at that. Although it does include a nice feature for domains and a bug fix.

The key feature of this release is the addition of the preferred site address. This means that if you have one or more domain names, you can select one of these as your main address and whenever anyone types in one of the other domain names then they will redirect automatically to your preferred address. This is a very powerful feature for those wishing to make the most of marketing their site and using one particular address. You can do this by logging in, going to Admin > Site Address and then selecting your preferred address from the drop down. Once you close the panel, your site will refresh and you will have to log in again, which you will only need to do once.

What we have also released is a fix to the Video-no-audio bug. So for those of you who had videos on your site and needed to refresh the page to hear the audio, this is now fixed. If you have multiple videos on the same page you may hear a short burst of sound which is another bug we are looking at but we felt that ensuring your videos played audio was more important.

And coming soon: Google Maps widget. A simple widget to start with that will allow you to set a location, zoom level and permit toggling of basic features. We are aiming to get this out next release along with a number of other features. So we will keep you posted.

New release - 15 September 2008

Joe — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:01:00 +0100

After a long wet summer, we've finally got some news to cheer you up. It's release time again! We've streamlined a few widgets, added social network bookmarking, and we're setting the stage for releases later in the year. You can also now transfer your domain names over to Moonfruit and use our website builder if you're with another provider. So have a look through the notes below and let us know what you think. Enjoy!

New features

Domain transfers - customers can now transfer domain names to moonfruit.com for use with their SiteMaker site and to benefit from the free webmail
New fonts - 20 new fonts added to the graphic fonts selection to enable further customisation of your site
Social bookmarking widgets allow visitors to quickly bookmark the site to services like Digg, De.licio.us, and facebook - see the 'social bookmarking' folder in the File Manger to add one
The Comments widget now provides 'pages' so that the widget is more responsive when it contains lots of comments
Thumbnail images are now larger (144 x144px, up from 100 x100px) - which should improve quality on screen

Bug fixes

Site addresses (domain names) can be added to a new site, even if the site address is already attached to a deleted site
The countdown timer no longer freezes on the page master
Members and visitors should now be able to add entries to the News/Blog again

What we're working on

Ecommerce tools - for those of you who are waiting for these, we are working on them! We'll publish an article soon which will give more detail on exactly what the tools will contain and it will show some early screenshots of how things are looking. We've taken a bit longer than expected to finish all our domain name work and some other backend changes, so we are not expecting to release any of the ecommerce features until the end of the year, or more likely January. But don't worry, they'll be worth it ;-)

New release - 08 July 2008

Joe — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:00:00 +0100

Help, it's another monster release! It's just too big; we can't keep giving away so many new features. The poor development team, they really need a holiday. But it's good news for you and our website builder! So, keep reading...

Free email accounts on Moonfruit domain names

Up to 5 mailboxes can be set up on each domain name you order with Moonfruit (purchases & vouchers)
Mailboxes can be accessed via webmail or using POP3 or IMAP
Each mailbox can have an unlimited number of aliases, e.g. names that go to the same mailbox
Or you can set up email forwarding to another email address you already have e.g. gmail, hotmail etc
See www.moonfruit.com/domains.html for details

Free Google AdWords vouchers for every subscriber

Get up to £50 pounds worth of Google AdWords vouchers with your subscription
Use the AdWords voucher to pay for ads on Google to direct traffic to your site
See www.moonfruit.com/adwords.html for details

Improved alternative HTML version (how the search engines see your site)

The HTML alternative for your site is now much prettier and better organised
Go to ('Edit' ->) 'View' -> 'HTML version' in the SiteMaker toolbar to see your HTML pages and navigate through them
You can then 'View source' on each of these pages to see your keywords and other meta data in the HTML

Advanced form improvements

You can now add a file upload field to your form so users can submit files
Files are uploaded to a specific folder of your choice in the file manager

And plenty of bug fixes, including fixing the Google SiteMap error in Webmaster tools, logging into sites from the portal, fixes for image problems in Directory and Calendar.

That's about it for now. We are of course working on more goodies for the future, but you'll have to wait and see for those. Let us know if you have any feedback or any problems with the new features. Thanks, and happy holidays!

Free domain name vouchers for all existing customers **

Joe — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:16:00 +0100

As promised we have now issued a domain voucher to all existing SiteMaker customers whether you pay monthly or annually. When we launched our new domain service in May, customers that pay monthly were credited on their next payment (i.e. within the first month). Annual customers had to wait until now. We delayed the issue of vouchers to annual customers so we could control the volume flowing through our system, as there were many thousands of domain vouchers to give away.

So thanks for your patience and you can now redeem your voucher for a free domain name though moonfruit.com!!

As a reminder for those who haven't used their voucher yet, and those who have just got one, it's very easy to do:

First go to www.moonfruit.com/domains.html
Then search for the domain of your choice
Once you've found one you're happy with, use the check box to select it and choose the period you want it for (1 year, 2 years, etc.), and click 'Next'.
Login (if you haven't done so already) - but make sure you login with your existing SiteMaker username, don't create a new one
Enter your personal details (the domain registry needs this to accept your domain registration)
Check that your order details are correct and ensure the 'Use my voucher' check box is ticked (domain vouchers can be redeemed against 1 year registrations for all domains except co.uk and org.uk, where they are valid and can be redeemed against the 2 year registrations).
Double check that your domain name is spelt correctly - if you get it wrong you cannot change it - as once you've bought it, it's yours as is!
Agree terms and conditions and click 'Continue to checkout'
And that's it.

Your domain will now be processed and once it is ready to use you can click on the 'Manage' tab on the domains page (www.moonfruit.com/domains.html). There you will see a list of your domains. Click the 'Manage' link in the bottom right corner of the domain you want to configure. You will now see a drop down list of all of your sites, from where you can pick which site to assign this domain to. This automatically points your new domain to your existing website and shouldn't take longer than an hour or two before your domain is ready to use i.e. it will display your website.

From sometime next month (July) we will also be releasing the email features, allowing you to setup and manage email mailboxes on your domain name. There will be a webmail interface, as well as POP or IMAP access if you prefer.

Until then, happy registering!

** NB. Please see Pricing page and Moonfruit Home page for qualifying packages.

New release - May 1st 2008

Joe — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:43:00 +0100

It's release time again and this one is a biggy! Lots of things we've been waiting to get out for for a very long time, with something for everyone. Get ready for some excitement, quiet in the back row please, here it comes...

Domain name module

Register and manage domain names through Moonfruit.com (good prices!)
Free domain name bundled with SiteMaker Standard, Plus and Max accounts
Existing subscribers will be credited with a domain voucher on their next payment! (see below for more details)
Transfer to Moonfruit and email/webmail to follow in the next release

New File manager!

Larger, clearer and easier to use interface
User folders - create folders and organise your files
Integrated multiple file uploader (no more Javascript popup window or Java applet)
Native support for PNGs & GIFs (including preserving transparency)
Rename files and folders
Multiple select, delete and move

Improvements to SEO (HTML) version of sites (viewable from Edit->Page Settings->View HTML version)

Nested navigation list now mimics the Flash Version
Better grouping of elements, preserving things like tabular layout and sidebars

AdSense revenue share for SiteMaker Free users

Users of SiteMakerFree can sign up with Google to share ad revenue generated by their site
For each click on a ad on your Free site, you get 50% of the money
So now you get a free site AND free money!

Other stuff:

New design templates
New backgrounds
We've added new PayPal currencies: CZK, DKK, HUF, NZD, NOK, PLN, SGD, SEK, CHF

So there you go, a whole heap of stuff. That'll keep you busy for a while! Let us know if you find any problems and we'll get back to the grindstone to work on some more things for the months to come. Enjoy!

Domain vouchers for existing customers
We often get some grief for offering deals to new customers but not existing customers, so when it comes to the new domain offer we wanted to make sure that everyone on a qualifying pack got it, both new and old.

For new customers and existing monthly customers, it's quite simple: you get your domain voucher on your next payment, which for all existing monthly customers should be within the next month. You'll then get your next one (1 per year) on the anniversary of this first voucher being issued.

For existing annual customers, your next payment could be sometime away, so instead we will credit you with your domain voucher in June 2008. We're waiting 1 month to do this so that we can manage the flow of vouchers to existing customers, so apologies for the delay, but you will get your voucher.

If you are an existing customer and you upgrade you will be credited with any additional voucher due at the time of the upgrade.

Bug fixes and site updates - 2 April 2008

Walt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:55:00 +0100

We were worried that if we released bug fixes yesterday, no one would believe us (being April Fool's day). So we held off a day, did some more testing and felt happier getting them out today. Some of you may think we play computer games for 3 weeks and then have a mad rush of development over the last week to get work completed. If only! We've actually been busy fixing some bugs, while work continues on some big ticket items.

Today we released these changes to correct some annoying bugs and added a useful guide for those interested in Search Engines:

Blurry thumbnails for the pop-up gallery (as well as slide show and image effects) have now been fixed
Editor (File Manager and other panels) which sometimes hid in the top-left corner and wouldn't budge should be back to normal
Users can now set up Google Analytics with the new tracking code - the 'ga.js' tracking code - although either will work fine
We've finally added the new SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) guide to the moonfruit.com site. You can find it on the Guides page and it provides useful details on getting your site listed, site rankings, links and more.

That's it for the moment.

New Release - 25 March 2008

Walt — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Apparently, spring arrived last week, but with the Arctic weather that hit the UK over the weekend you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd returned to mid-winter. But this week does mark the arrival of our 2nd release for the year with some goodies and some bug fixes. We continue to finish and refine two larger projects - domain name registrations and a new File Manager - and these will be launched very soon. But rather than keep you waiting we wanted to give you a few new features to play with while we polish the other features and we wait for the real spring to arrive.

So what's on offer this month? You'll find details below:

New Features

'Viewport' added to make editing and managing files easier
Improvements to W3C compliance and some tidy up
HTML version of page now opens in new window
Making Title tags more prominent in the HTML
'Show Homes' page and links added to moonfruit.com
Addition of 10 new templates
New SEO guide added to the moonfruit.com portal
Improvements to multiple selection with changes to using the Control or Shift keys
Ctrl key required for 'logout' from widgets when editing

Bug fixes

Making the File Manager more context sensitive when adding images, audio and video
Resetting the Video widget will now hide the video provider label

Viewport

Editing your pages, especially long ones just got a whole lot easier. Viewport is the name we've given to a great new feature that in simple terms enables the Editor panel to follow you around your page. In the past editing long pages meant dragging the Editor panel down the page or scrolling back up the page to find it. But not any more. Once you open a long or wide page for editing you only need click on an object and the Editor will appear on the border of the visible page.

Changing pages no longer sends the editor back to the top right hand corner of the new page, it will maintain its previous position, unless the view changes but at the very least it will stay visible. And opening up the File Manager will respect the same conditions by opening up within the visible browser - if opened up by the Editor's mini menu.

These improvements also mean that any media being added to the page will also remain within the visible browser so that you will never lose, for example, images you've just added to a page.

HTML Enhancements

One of our commitments has been to improve how we publish your sites. With this release we have changed our focus slightly by tweaking and refining how we generate HTML from your site content so that it meets with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) compliance. We've also refined our software so that if you wish to use the Generate HTML button to view the HTML version of a page on your site, it will now open in new window, making 'View source' a little easier. The other big improvement has been to Title tags in HTML. We've applied rules so that the first Title text box renders as an H1 tag in the HTML with all other Title text boxes generating a H2 tag. The H3 tag will be applied (after some rules) to text that has been set as bold. But a more complete explanation will be published later in the week by one of our team members.

Editing Improvements

To make editing your site just a little bit safer we have now applied a new rule to the 'Log in/Log out' widget. If you added one of these to your page you must use the 'Ctrl' key to logout when in the edit environment. This is to avoid accidentally clicking this button to test it, causing you to log out and lose your latest changes. This makes the 'Log out' widget like any other link button.

Multiple selection received some attention too. We updated the keys used to mark multiple selection on your pages. You can use either Control or Shift - but not both, which still allows Ctrl-Shift-D to be used for duplicating content.

Getting the most out of your site

We often get questions from users about why their site isn't appearing in web searches, or why their search rankings are poor. We've now compiled Joe's articles on this into a PDF and will be adding this to the moonfruit.com portal shortly. This should give novice users a good introduction to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and how to apply it to their web sites.

New Templates and Show Homes

Every release we try and add a few new templates or designs and this release is no exception. We've added 10 new design templates to the Personal and Professional sets, so once you've decided the Site Type you now have 10 new designs on offer.

The Show Homes sites we created to publicise our great variety of media, and some useful widgets, received a lot of interest. So, to simplify the access to these sites to compare media or see what's on offer, we added some links to the moonfruit.com portal. Just visit the 'Sites' menu on moonfruit.com and then follow the Show Homes link.

Bug Fixes

Some of our widgets had their own eccentric behaviours when it came to adding media using the File Manager. We have made a big step forward in making this behaviour closer to normal so this is less a bug fix than an improvement. For example, in the past adding an images to your Pop-up Gallery or the Slide Show, would have meant using the tool itself to add an image as using the File Manager would have added an image to your page and not into the widget. This has now been changed, so that the File Manager will know you are editing a specific widget and add your media to it and not the page. This newly 'context-sensitive' behaviour means you can now add audio, image and video files to the appropriate widget directly from the File Manager.

We also tidied up the Video widget so that the previous video feed provider label was removed when the player was reset to play your own video. Please note: If you replace an externally fed video with another (externally fed e.g. Youtube, Google etc) then we will display their label as a professional courtesy.

Coming soon (Two big projects that are very close to completion)

Domain names (finally!)
File Manager changes

New Release - 8 Feb 2008

Joe — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:51:00 +0000

It's the first release of the year! Hurray! And hopefully a good one too. We've got a few big changes to site navigation, some edit improvements and some bug fixes/enhancements. Details below.

So the new features are:

Updating page URLs and bookmarking
Undo/redo (for moves and scales)
SEO improvements (page title changes)
Forum improvements

Bug fixes;

Kewego videos work again
Thumbnail generation improved for galleries

Updating page URLs and bookmarking

When you navigate your site, the URL (web address) in the browser will now update to show the address of the page you are on. This means you can now bookmark any page in your site, or email a link to someone so they can jump straight to a page. We published a whole article on this last month, so full details are here.

Undo/redo (for moves and scales)

We've now introduced undo and redo functions for certain edit features in your site. This means that whenever you move or scale objects (either single objects or in multiple selection) you can now undo/redo those changes. This is particularly useful for when you move something by accident. The current undo will not undo certain other actions, e.g. object deletion, text edits or colour changes, but we may be able to introduce some of these features in the future. This has been a big project and there is a lot happening under the hood, so to speak, even if with just moving or resizing objects. So at times it may take a few clicks for you to see visible undo or redo actions occurring. Have a play and let us know what you think, we think it will be a useful new addition!

SEO improvements (page title changes)

Just to prove we do actually listen, we got lots of feedback that the 'Page title' field that we set in the HTML for your site was too short at 50 characters, so we've increased the amount of text available to 120 characters. Apparently Google will only use the first 66 characters of the page title in its indexing, but Yahoo will use up to 120. So the thing to do is write a single title that has a useful message/keywords in the first 66 characters and further detail up to the 120 limit.

Forum improvements

We've made a few minor changes to the forum. These are the introduction of 'move topic' which means you can now move topics to other subjects if they are posted incorrectly. And navigation improvements which allow you to jump to the first/last post of a topic. We've also fixed a couple of bugs, for example you couldn't post a reply if you found a topic via the search function and when you did reply to post you got returned to the first page.

Bug fixes

Firstly, Kewego videos should now work again following a change to the way that they posted the video source. And secondly, we have changed the way that thumbnails are produced which should improve the quality of thumbnails in the galleries. Please note that for the thumbnails to improve you will need to (delete and then) re-upload your images, e.g. the current thumbnail will not change, only new ones will use the new conversion process.

We also updated the robots.txt file so that customers using Google Verify should no longer see the '403 - Forbidden' error message, although please bear in mind this may take Google from a few days to a few weeks to re index your site and pick up the change.

And that's about it for you.

Coming soon

Domain names (finally!)
File manager changes

New Release - 20th Dec 2007

Joe — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:53:00 +0000

Ho ho ho. T'was the week before Christmas and all through the office not a developer was moving, not even those usually most active. Probably tired, but that's another story.

Anyway, it's Christmas present time! That's right, SiteMaker Claus has his goody bag stuffed full of little software updates for all the good boys and girls (and even those who haven't been so good). So here's the list in full...

New features

Form 2 - the form strikes back
Support for Google Webmaster tools
Automatic generation of Sitemaps
Text formatting - justified text supported in standard fonts
Updates to moonfruit.com including new design templates

Bug fixes

File downloads in IE7 no longer show an error message

That's the summary, but here's the detail for each of the new features including some guidance on how to use them.

Form 2
The new form widget can be found in the 'Forms' folder in the File Manager (Advanced Form). There's just one for now, but we'll add some new pre-configured versions in the New Year. The new form has a lot of new features which include:

Support for drop down boxes, list boxes, radio buttons, check boxes
Required fields - set fields to be compulsory and validate for 'email', 'numbers', or 'text only'
Emails now come from the person filling in the form - not Sitemaker - we thought you'd like that one ;-)
Forms are themeable and scalable just like the other new widgets
Data submitted via the form is not only emailed, but also saved in a data store (CSV file) which you can download from your site (in the Edit panel), so you'll never lose data to junk filters again!
All text on the form is now customisable, including buttons, titles, success and error messages

NB. We haven't added file attachments in this release, but hope to do it in the future.

Support for Google Webmaster tools
We heard many requests from our customers to support site validation for Google Webmaster Tools. If you sign up for Google Webmaster Tools, you can now paste the validation tag they give you into the 'Site Information' panel which will add it to your site HTML and allow you to be validated. For more information on Google Webmaster Tools see their pages on it.

Sitemaps
Slightly related to Webmaster tools, sitemaps are a list of all visible pages in your website. They are a tool to help search engines correctly index your site. We now generate one automatically for your site. Any page that is in your menu is automatically included in the sitemap and for pages that are not, you can add them in manually using a check box on the 'Page Settings' panel. You don't need to do anything to get the benefit of a sitemap, as search engines look for them anyway, but you can download it if you like at: yoursite.moonfruit.com/sitemap.xml.

Justified text
Not a biggy but still important, we've added justified text formatting to standard text boxes. This means you can now left align, right align, centre or justify your text boxes as you like. We hope to add this to the graphic fonts in the New Year.

Updates to moonfruit.com
We thought moonfruit.com could do with a tidy and reorganisation for 2008, so here it is. We've added a new community section to draw more attention to the great sites and users that we have on moonfruit. Content from the forum and blog are also displayed directly on the moonfruit homepage along with a feed displaying some of your finest sites. And finally, we've added some new design templates and created some new categories including one for those templates made and submitted by our customers.

And that's your lot. Have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and we'll be back with some more changes in 2008. Ho ho ho.

Latest Bug Fixes

Walt — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:42:00 +0000

Following our release last week we encountered a few bugs. These have now been fixed and a list of the fixes can be found below:

Group permissions have been modified to make them more understandable and easier to use
Forum group permissions (setting a forum group) no longer affect member views of subjects list
A group can now be removed from permissions if required
You can now edit subject permissions multiple times (as you would expect)
When you open a single post with "read more" you will no longer see an additional 'ghost' post.
Fix for mini toolbar items - copy, paste, duplicate and delete now work as expected

Walt

Updated: New release - 24 October 2007

Joe — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:40:00 +0100

Updated: We've released a fix for the forum bug with membership permissions and a few other minor things. Enjoy.

It's finally here, the new forum, multiple select and a host of other goodies. Enjoy the changes and let us know if you find anything peculiar!

New features

Forum

The new forum widget is out and is now live! It includes the following features:

Customisation/design features

resize to any width/height
use of new 'themes' technology
change text size colour and background colours independently

Functionality

subjects/topics/posts views for many different threads of discussion
set permissions, e.g. guests, or members only
set edit rights for moderators (e.g. members or a group of members)
lock subjects
set posts as 'sticky'
search all subjects/posts
all topics have their own RSS feed
all posts can contain rich text formatting, e.g. bold, etc., plus links
all posts have emoticons

Plus more. Have a play with it and discover them for yourselves.

NB. We can migrate data from the old 'message board' feature on request via customer support.

Theme technology (version 1 release)

We have introduced a new 'theme' technology to allow the easier customisation of the appearance of different widgets on your site. All of the new generation of widgets have had this theme technology added to them. The themes editor is available on the 'style' tab of the widget. The widgets currently using themes are:

Forum
Comment
Mail to a friend
Chat

The theme technology allows you to pick a look and feel from a defined list. This will change the colours (background and text), plus the button styles and border styles of the widget. Once a theme has been chosen, you can customise individual elements on the 'style' tab.

Version 1 of the technology is now live, but we hope to release extended versions of it soon. This will allow you to set up and save your own themes and set default themes for your whole site, so the appearance of all widgets could be changed at once

Multiple Select

You can now select multiple objects at the same time on your page! This can be done either by:

dragging the selection box, e.g. click (outside of an object) and drag to create your selection box (any object inside the box will be selected). Or,
holding the 'control' or 'shift' keys and clicking on the object that you wish to add/remove from your selection. (You can also click on the list of objects within the drop down menu on the 'edit' panel to add them to your selection). Or,
use ‘Select All’ from the ‘Edit’ menu on either the advanced or basic toolbar

Once you have a set of objects selected you can:

drag them as a group
nudge them as a group using the arrow keys (shift + arrow is a big nudge)
delete them as a group
copy and paste them (even between pages!)

New Media

40 new fonts

15 new crop tools for images

15 new stock images

18 new image cut outs

40 new graphic elements, symbols and logos

We've created a demo site of the widgets at sitemakerwidgets.moonfruit.com

Upgrades/changes

Comment

Addition of themes technology
Addition of rich text formatting (including links) in comments

Mail to a friend

Addition of themes technology

Chat

Addition of themes technology

And that's all there is for now. It's been a long one, but hopefully we'll have a bit more before Xmas.