Moonfruit Lounge - Release notes

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! 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!

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.

New Release - 21 August 2007

Joe — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:00:00 +0100

Lots of bug fixing this month, a couple of new things, and the new forum is working in development but not yet complete for release.

New stuff:

Copy & Paste - Same page - paste (duplicate) on same page at new position
Copy & Paste - Between pages - paste on new page at original position (paste in place)
Design templates - some new templates from us, and we're going to release a guide to allow you to produce and submit templates to us which we can add to the build process.

Bug fixes:

Myspace videos should consistently load
Video player should no longer display 'buffering' at the end of play back and hang
Audio from Video should now stop when navigating to other pages (with multiple video players on a page)
Double pages loading - stops multiple pages loading simultaneously on rapid menu clicks
You can now load images directly into widgets e.g. image effects, slide show, polaroid tool, immediately after uploading
Link buttons now display correct name after link added e.g. site name, email address, page name

Coming soon:

New forum
Multiple select

New release 21 June 2007

Joe — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:14:00 +0100

This month we've been laying a few foundations for new things to come in the future and tiding up a lot of old code, but we've still found the time to get a few new things out. Check out the list below.

New stuff:

New Chat feature - Chat has been rebuilt allowing you to host live chats on your site!!
SiteMaker caching - Better management of our application files, so they will be quicker to load!
Membership enabled on new sites - New sites will allow 'join' by default
Usability improvements to text boxes
Improved FAQ search

Bug fixes:

Pages panel with 500 pages - no longer runs slowly with large number of pages
Improved thumbnail quality for uploaded GIFs
Object rotation – angle field now works correctly
Group emails – now come from site name/site email address not username/user email

Coming soon:

Multiple select
Cut and paste between pages

New Release 17 May 2007

Joe — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:56:00 +0100

Our latest release is now out. We've focused on increasing the interactivity on your sites (comment widget), and providing you with marketing tools (mail to a friend), and the ability for all sites to support membership. There's a summary and then a detailed description of some of the new features below.

New stuff

comment widget (with RSS feed) - allows visitors to post comments on your site
mail to a friend widget - allows visitors to mail your URL to other people who might be interested
membership enabled for all packages - allows you to enable membership and have people 'join' your site
Kewego added to video widget - now add videos from www.kewego.com
site HTML now W3C compliant - site HTML now passes W3C compliance, which is better for SEO
new Press section on moonfruit.com - see our press section and learn more about us

Bug fixes

Allows you to change the widget name in the selection label
Video/images sizing bug has been fixed

What we're working on

cut & paste between pages
multiple select of page objects
and other secret things...

All the new widgets can be found in our 'favourites' folder of the file manager. Enjoy.

Comment
The comment widget is a tool that site builders can add to any page, which allows visitors to their site to post comments which are visible to everyone. You can have several 'comment' widgets on the same page, and give them a title relevant to what they're about, e.g. 'what do you think about this video?'. The comment widget allows you to moderate comments before they are shown, or delete inappropriate comments, so site owners have complete control. The comment widget also publishes comments to an RSS feed, which means that visitors can subscribe (not paid) to the feed and receive updates when new comments are added. The impact of all of this is that site builders can have far greater user generated content and interaction on their sites, which will keep people coming back for more.

Mail to a friend
The MTF widget is a tool that site builders can add to any page that allows visitors to send the site address to a number of their 'friends'. The idea is that when visitors see something they like on the site, they can mail the address of that page to other people that might be interested. The impact of this is that all sites will then have a marketing tool that they can put on every page which encourages people to spread the word about their site.

Site membership
Site membership is not a new feature, but has now been enabled on all packs. Every new site built will be set up so that visitors can 'join' the site and get a username and password. The site builder can create 'members only' pages, set edit rights on pages for certain members (to allow collaborative working/contribution), set certain features to allow only members to post, e.g. the comment, and do their own member mailing lists to update people with changes, new pages, etc. It's a bit like a friends list, but without publishing a list of all your friends on your site (which we might do later).

New release 30 April 2007

Joe — Tue, 01 May 2007 16:42:00 +0100

Our latest release is now out there. Check out the additions and bug fixes in the list below. For those of you looking for the comment widget, this has been delayed to the next release, but will be out in May with some other goodies...

New things

Table enhancements - better text selection while editing the table widget
New 'table' templates - we've added a folder to the file manager with some useful prebuilt tables
Google Site Search: allows your visitors to search your site contents using Google search (this only works if your site has been indexed by Google)
Increased disk space - we've upped the disk space limits on all SiteMaker accounts
Positional page adding - when you add a new page, decide where it appears in your menu
New FAQs - information for the Video widget, Domain name pointing, Google AdSense, etc.

Bug fixes

Member edit bug - members can now user the File Manager correctly
Colour editor - typing in alpha value to HSV tab now updates the selected object
Black JukeBox - now works correctly on the Page Master

Let us know if you have any problems, and we'll keep working on the comment. Next release will be before the end of May. Enjoy!

New Release 14 Feb 2007

Joe — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:02:00 +0000

We thought we'd kick of 2007 with the software equivalent of New Year resolutions - bug fixes! You could also call these Valentine bug fixes, but that's pushing it a little...So this release has less of the new stuff, and more of the old stuff working better. We've also been working on some tools behind the scenes that will pave the way for the next generation of widgets, but these won't appear until our March release. And the launch of moonfruit.fr should be just around the corner...

So here's a summary of the changes in this release;

New stuff:

New templates during the build process, particularly for business customers
New page templates for 'add a page'
New PDF download for font picker
Improvements to Flash detection/alternative content for sites
New FAQs: Google, PayPal, Keyboard Shortcuts

Bug fixes:

Video player now displays the video controls by default
FavIcon selection now less picky – variations in size now permitted
Improved management of page permissions
Page settings cannot be changed while editing the page master
Pages are now created with the correct ‘visibility’ flag
Popup gallery now closes correctly when changing pages
The jukebox player will continue to play when viewing a slide show
Improved tabbing in ‘Admin Panel’ on ‘Site Information’ tab
Video player now gives feed back if the requested video can't be found
Logging in as another user from the toolbar now refreshes the page so correct user is identified
When editing text in a panel, use of 'Del' will only delete the selected text, and not the object
Links have been disabled on Jukeboxes to provide correct operation
Tabbing now works on all forms
Support pages (Submit a query) now working again in all browsers
Membership questions now show all text instead of 'defaultValue' when question runs to two lines
‘Cancel’ button now added to "Join this site" for non-members
Hidden ‘Multiple File Upload’ button now visible in all conditions for Internet Explorer

If you spot any problems with the new release, please let us know by submitting a query at www.moonfruit.com/support.html.

New Release 15th December 2006

Joe — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 17:53:00 +0000

After our last release on 21 Nov, we thought we'd just do a small manageable release so we could get it out before Xmas, but it looks like it's turned into a monster release packed full of new features! Don't know what happened, must be all the mince pies we're eating (Marks & Spencer pies are the best btw).

Here are the main changes;

Improved video player - autoplay, hide controls, etc., see Video article
Google Analytics integration - add Google Analytics to your site and start getting detailed site stats about page views, visitors, geographical location, etc.
Full 'arrange menu' options - allows you to better arrange objects on your page in terms of layering, e.g. send to back, bring to front, move forward, move back
Keyboard shortcuts in edit mode - e.g. delete key and many more, you can see them in the advanced view of the SiteMaker toolbar
Custom site widths - have a site of any size and shape
Custom border widths - change the size/colour of the border of your site
Favicons - upload your own favicon for display in your browser address bar
Border (HTML) images - upload your own image to your HTML border
Scale and position bug - some objects were difficult to line up, they would move 1 or 2 pixels after a save - this no longer happens.

Try out some of these and let us know what you think. And post a link to your site, we'd love to see how you're using them.

Enjoy, and Merry Christmas from all The SiteMaker Team!! (ho ho ho).

New release 21st November 2006

Joe — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 13:32:00 +0000

We've released some great new features and made some general improvements to the way your SiteMaker site works. And since you're reading this you'll have found our new website and blog at www.moonfruitlounge.com.

This release includes:

Video player - Upload FLV (Flash Video) files to play in your site. Or link to your favourite videos from youtube.com or google video.

Meta data per page - Add HTML page titles, keywords and descriptions to each page of your site. This helps Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Many experts recommend making them different on each page and making them relevant to the content of each page.

Alternative content for visitors without Flash - Your site will now display an alternative text only version when visitors without Flash arrive at your site. This conforms to W3C guidelines for accessibility of your content, ensuring that everyone can see some of your content and further improving search engine optimisation.

PayPal shopping cart improvements- PayPal links will now open in the same window! And for 'Add to cart' and 'View Cart' links, the window will have a 'Continue shopping' button encouraging your customers to return to your site.

New www.moonfruit.com website - Our site has been overhauled to make it cleaner, quicker and easier to use. We hope you like it!

www.moonfruitlounge.com - Our new blog will make it easier for us to keep you up to date with what's going on at Moonfruit. Have a read!

That's it for now, let us know if you have any issues, and please report them through our Customer Support Query Form as normal.

Coming soon

Google analytics support
Google webmaster tools support
Moonfruit.fr