Moonfruit Lounge - Release notes

Christmas release!

Joe — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:28:00 +0000

Ho ho ho. We thought we'd get a few more things out in the St Nick of time just before the holidays. We'll follow up later in the week with a summary of everything from 2011 and a hint at what's to come in 2012. But here's what's just been shipped.

Updates to the Shop Checkout page

Your customers can now set product quantities on the Checkout page when buying multiple items. And we've also made more clear the checkout options via PayPal, or paying by Card (not requiring a PayPal account). Plus there's a shipping drop down box.

NB. To get the Checkout page updates, you'll need to navigate to the 'Checkout page' (by using the shop drop down list in the Editor), and then on the Page Editor click 'Update template'.

Shipping updates

We've added the ability for you to set domestic and international shipping rates for your product purchases. This is part of a long line of shipping based features that we will continue with next year, but for now this is one additional variable you can change.

Category tweaks

You can now hide categories from the list so you can organise your products in secret ways, and then link to special hidden categories without them having to appear in the Category menu. You can also rename the 'All category'

Mobile render tweaks

We've updated the way we generate the mobile versions of your site to better organise the content we show. Items are grouped more logically and additional images will now show in the HTML version. Previously images covered by text would not be displayed, but provided at least 50% of the image is 'visible' we'll now show the image in the mobile version. We have another release slated for early 2012 which will further enhance the mobile version.

New Shop templates

We've updated all the shop templates to include the categories from the last release, and also the quantities, shipping and payment options from this release. We hope you'll agree there's some lovely stuff in there!

That's all for now. The team are already working on more goodies for early next year, but we'll soon be putting on our warmest socks and settling down for a good long sleep over the hols. We hope you have a wonderful time and a welcome break too.

As always, thoughts and feedback welcome.

Shop update: Categories!

Joe — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:33:00 +0000

As many of you will have noticed, we launched the long awaited ShopBuilder about a month ago and as promised we're going to have a continuous stream of new shop features coming as quickly as we can bake them in the Moonfruit oven. (We don't really bake our software, but you get the idea).

We've had a great response to the shop launch with over 45,000 shops having been built in the last month. And we've also had a lot of feedback from you about the additional features you'd like us to build as quickly as possible. We love the feedback, so keep it coming.

So first out of the oven is the new Category feature. Many of you were asking for it, so here it is.

Shop homepage with Category links

Categories allow you to create groupings for your products and have different ways of ordering and arranging them to suit the different audiences you may be addressing or targeting. In the shop manager you can now add categories and assign products to categories. One product can be in more than one category and the list order of products in each category can be different.

Category editor

Categories have their own URL so you can link directly to a category sub heading. We've also created a new link type on the link tab in the Editor so that any image or link can link to a category allowing you to construct your own navigation. You can add category links direct from the menu of your site too, so that your normal site menu can offer different category pages.

Link editor with new category link type

And if that wasn't enough, there is also a new category link widget in the File Manager which automatically creates a list of all your categories and links to each of them. You can customise the style of this category link widget and change the button style, font and colours.

Category list widget on right

The mobile and Facebook views have also been updated to incorporate the category view. So if you have more than two categories, your Facebook shop will show the category names and images, which link through to the category product lists. And on the mobile view you can navigate to the category types from the drop down at the top of the page.

Facebook shop with categories

Mobile shop with categories

So that's about it for now. All these images are taken from our shopdemo.moonfruit.com website, so feel free to have a look and a play there.

So what's next?

We're working on some improvements to the shipping options and the ability to change the quantities of items on the checkout page - so your customers can buy multiple numbers of an item more easily. These should be out before the end of the year (testing permitting). Then early next year we will bring out product variants, and after that basic stock control and discount/coupon options. After that? Well, some more stuff - helped by the feedback we get from you guys.

Shop Launch round-up!

Joe — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:30:00 +0000

It's been a busy few weeks here at Moonfruit HQ. Our new ShopBuilder product is now live and doing well, and has clocked up over 16,000 shop builds in the first week and a half, so we're pretty pleased. Here are just a few examples, selling everything from spices to handbags, headphones to concert tickets!

We launched the product with PayPal at their UK offices on Weds 19th Oct with a great audience made up of customers from Moonfruit, PayPal and StartUp Britain. The theme was Guerrilla ShopBuilding. We had PayPal's Cameron McClean and Beverley Bergin setting up the event and talking payment solutions. We then had StartUp Britain's Emma Jones and our very own CEO Wendy Tan taking about small business strategy and how to grow and get customers in these tough times, and me with a nerve wracking live multi-device demo (watched by the even more nervous development team from the back row!).

Wendy tells it how it is

It all went (came) off without a hitch and was very well received. We had a great time too and it was fantastic to meet so many of our customers and potential customers in one place to share ideas. We had some nice press too:

http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/moonfruit-makes-play-for-shop-identity-with-killer-facebook-integration/

http://www.three-sixty.co.uk/om4biz/?p=521

http://blog.workspacegroup.co.uk/blog/2011/10/20/tech-for-start-up-britain-week-guerilla-shopkeeping-fight-in.html

For those of you that haven't seen it yet, our new ShopBuilder allows you to publish once, sell everywhere, with your shop working immediately on web, mobile and Facebook. You update your products in one place and we publish the updates everywhere. All products added have their own page, URL and SEO data and are effortlessly connected to your main shop page.

Using PayPal's accelerated onboarding we can get you trading immediately with only an email address (no credit checking) and with their Express Checkout you can start collecting payments from your customers using web and mobile optimised payment gateways without any configuration required by you. We do the hard stuff, you get on with selling your stuff.

Web, mobile, social

Total design control

So what's next…?

…you may ask. Well the e-commerce road is long and littered with complexity, and we're not done yet. We see it as our job to make trading effortless and remove the barriers to setting up your own shop. We want to keep things simple, but also give you the features you need to run an effective store. So the challenge is to add features without cluttering the interface.

Next up is product categories, which will allow you to organise and group your products to create category specific lists and landing pages. Of course these will work across web, mobile and Facebook straight away, and here's what they will look like when you get them in a couple of weeks.

New category admin view

We hope to continue releasing new shop features every month or so (e.g. variable shipping, product variations, product quantities, coupons, etc.) so keep your eyes peeled!

New Release 17 August 2011

Joe — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 17:43:00 +0100

Hurrah it's release time again! Now hold your horses, it's not the shop yet, but it is creeping slowly towards the release window poised to jump out, but not quite yet. Instead we have a few previously unannounced goodies to release to you. They are:

New File Manager

The new File Manager brings file management on Moonfruit into the new decade! All your files (and ours) are now displayed in thumbnail or list view for easy review and navigation. List view allows you to sort by name, size, upload date and file type. You can also reduce or increase the size of the file manager window to see more or fewer of your files in one go. The upload process has been simplified with more feedback on progress of individual files, and you can now drag files between folders more quickly and easily.

File manager and upload

File manager list view

Getty images

Those amongst you with eagle eyes may have noticed the Getty name on our partners page some weeks ago, but we've now added a bunch of Getty images directly into our File Manager for you to use within your site. Initially there are 350 to choose from in the 'Getty' folder in the Library, but we'll be adding more as we go. Getty images are a great way of adding high quality photography to your site which can really make it look fantastic. These images are only available to subscribers, so that's another reason to upgrade ;-)

Getty Images in the File Manager

New templates

We've also added 5 new blog templates, as well as adding the blog to a bunch of the old templates, so there are now 30 blog starting points to choose from in the Moonfruit template wall! The 5 new templates look a little like this.

5 new blog templates

And that's about it for now. Let us know if you spot any unusual behaviour and as always we welcome your feedback!

Get Blogging with Moonfruit!

Sarah — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:52:00 +0100

Last week we put our blog feature out into the wild in public beta for everyone to try out and see what they thought of it. The feedback to date has been great and we're really glad that you all like it! The blog platform is waiting for you all to give it a try.

To help you get started we have 9 new beautiful blog specific templates for you to choose from. Alternatively you can use a standard template and tailor this to meet your own blogging needs.

We've had a few questions about what a blog actually is and how it might be useful to your business so here goes!

Blogging has been around since 1997 (in it's long form name weblog, shortened to blog around 1999). Since then people have been building these types of sites and as of 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence. Today the lines are very much blurred between what a blog is and what a website is. Traditionally a website was something were you update individual pages with content in the form of text, images, audio and video. There was no concept of when it was published and you couldn't easily syndicate it to other sites.

In comparison to a website, blogging provides a way to structure your content as 'posts' in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post available at the top of the page. Posts can be tagged to be able to find relevant content first and is published through a standard called RSS (the orange icons that you see on the internet). This in turn can be used to re-publish your content to other services automatically, such as TwitterFeed.com for publishing blog content to Twitter. Something that is fast becoming the norm with blogging is the ability to share your posts through Facebook and Twitter using the Like and Tweet buttons. Most blog platforms provide this as an extra that you have to add in yourself - we've taken all the pain away and it's there by default.

You can use a blog in various ways depending on whether you are blogging as a business or blogging for pleasure. If you are a business looking to use the Moonfruit blogging feature then you may choose to use it for letting people know about your latest products, Maybe provide news or information around what your company is up to at the moment, providing your customers with an insight into the inner workings of your business. Your blog isn't just about publishing either. When you publish a post you can enable comments and then have conversations with potential customers creating a community.

As an individual you can use your blog to share your passions, interests and insights. It is a place to share and learn from others. The world is your oyster and now is the time to give it a try!

Moonfruit Blog Beta is now Live!

Sarah — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:30:00 +0100

Calling all Moonfruiters! Blogging has been used as a global platform for announcements for some time now. It has provided a stage for the public to sadly learn that Lance Armstrong was to race his last Tour de France, or that Christiano Ronaldo had suddenly become a father. Blogging has become a natural tool for announcements, news and sharing content. We are really happy to announce (conveniently through a blog) that we here at Moonfruit are releasing the Moonfruit Blog Beta! We would love you to take a look and try it out.

The blog platform is a simple to use set of tools enabling you to update your blog page quickly and simply. You have a range of different ways in which you can do this in the editor. Firstly click on the blog beta button to add your blog content. Then create your first post.

You can have three different types of post: a text post, which is a post that only contains text; an article post, which enables images and text as well as being able to split an article across multiple pages; and finally an image post, which is (unsurprisingly!) a post that display images. If you are in a hurry and just want to write a quick text post then on the blog dashboard you can use the quick post feature. This will take the first line of your post as the title and send it straight out. If this is your first post then when you click to publish you'll be prompted to add your blog page to your site.

As with all good blog platforms you can add tags to your posts and all posts are published to an RSS feed. On top of all this you can add metadata to every post enabling you to control your SEO (search engine optimisation) on a post by post basis. You will also find some global settings in the blog settings area. In this section you can set global site wide tags and the image alignment as well as decide how many posts you would like to be able to see on the blog page.

The thing that makes the Moonfruit blog different from other blog platforms is the ability to be creative with your blog site design. Just like with other pages a blog page can be edited through simple click, drag and edit. Quite simply what you see is what you get. If you have any questions on how to use the blog or find any "unusual features" then just ask.

Here are are a few Moonfruit sites that are already using our blog functionality. Do share your blog sites with us, it's always interesting to see what is of interest to you!

We look forward to hearing about your experience with the blog.

And one bonus blog link The Moonfruit Intern blog.

A new and fruity update!

Sarah — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:21:00 +0100

The lovely team here at Moonfruit have been hard at work for the past couple of weeks and have released a minor update for you. We’ve been doing some performance enhancements on the blog which is currently in beta and it is now loading faster than it used to. The update also fixes a bug with the Google Search widget and forum search is back up and running! If you are based in the USA or Australia you may also find that our site loads a bit faster than it used to as well.

New templates

Sticking with the template tradition of always having new templates with updates, we've got 5 new ones available on the site wall on Moonfruit.com. Here’s a sneak peak!

And that's about that for now. As always let us know if you have any comments or concerns and if you find any bugs or oddities, please let us know!

Beta blog update and some image goodies

Joe — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:14:00 +0100

Team fruit have been beavering away on some blog bug fixing and additional feature requests like highly trained little software ninja's – silently, stealthily and with great precision (except the occasional bug). So we have a small bundle of goodies to push out today. They are:

Image light-boxes

One of the requests that came in from the blog was to allow blog images to pop-up to full size to be seen in all their glory. We liked this so much we thought we'd apply it to all images in the product. When selecting an image on the page there's now a new 'pop-up' tab in the Editor allowing you to set the pop-up flag, the pop-up image and an image caption.

New pop-up editor panel

Image shown in full screen light-box

NB. This feature isn't available for images inside galleries or frames, but we'll look at extending it further in the future.

Blog Beta feature improvements!

(To join the blog beta, please see the details on the last article!)

New features

Tweet button on each article, both post and list view
Admin can set a display name to show as 'author' on the post rather than using the 'username' in the blog settings section
Admins can backdate posts so you can add in historical (or hysterical) articles
An RSS feed is now available, and an RSS button will appear on the blog template
A button to return to the list view is now available on all posts
Blog images will pop-up in a light-box effect (see above)
Images are now organised in folders in the blog file picker
Admins can turn off comments globally in the blog settings section
Links will be automatically created in article text if you type a URL when adding a post
Admins can set a default folder for blog image uploads
Tags on posts now link to filtered tag results, e.g. A list page per tag

Bug fixes

Links in posts are now working (hurray!)

New Tweet button on posts

Changes in the blog admin

We're still working on the rendering performance which we hope to ship in the next couple of weeks at which point the blog will be turned on for all users. We will continue to work on new features throughout the year too, though large parts of the team will be moving onto the shop.

NB. To get the new blog template (with the RSS button, tweet button, etc.), you will need to delete your current blog page (not the blog itself just the page) and add a new page back in from the pages section. The new blog page will not be default style again, so you will need to reapply your look and feel, and other items on the page will be lost. So you may want to copy all the page items to another page first, then delete the blog page, re-add it then copy them back. Sorry this is a bit inelegant, we'll look at changing that too.

New templates

And just for good measure we thought we'd keep up the tradition of adding in some new templates. So we've got 16 new ones now on the site wall on Moonfruit.com. Some of them look at little like this…

And that's about that for now. As always let us know if you have any comments or concerns and if you find any bugs or oddities, please let us know!

Template-tastic!

leila — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:21:00 +0100

We know how much you love new features... So, in addition to last weeks release, today we've added 6 more stylish templates for you to play with.

We had a lot of requests to introduce blank templates so you could design your site's from scratch. This has now been added in both black and white as well.

We'd love to see what you guys create , so please leave us a message on our Facebook Group or Twitter. The best sites will be featured on our home page for all to see :)

Here's a preview of the new designs. As always, we love to hear your feedback.

Updates to Moonfruit.com

leila — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:55:00 +0100

Moonfruit's make over is well and truly in full swing and we love it! We've had a huge amount of feedback, most of it extremely positive, though there have also been some complaints about things that we've missed or moved that were more easily available in the old moonfruit.com. We really do value your feedback, as we may under-estimate how important some features are to you, or we may misunderstand how you use them - we're only human after all – so your feedback helps us put things right.

We have been listening to your requests and last Thursday (24th March) we released some updates to the new moonfruit.com that addresses some of these concerns. We also wanted to let you know what else we're looking at.

We had a fair few requests for the 'site counter' to be returned to your site dashboard on moonfruit.com so that you can quickly see how many visitors your site has had since you last looked. This is now back and updates as you flick between your different sites.

Another piece of feedback was that the forums were different and difficult to find. We'd renamed them to the mysterious 'Share and Learn' to reflect the fact that they were so community driven and a place to share and learn. But due to popular demand, we've changed this back to 'Forums' to make them easier to find and the layout should be more familiar to you all with the old categories that we had in the past.

You may have also noticed there's a profile photo option with the new forum too which is a sign of things to come. At the moment you're not able to use this, but we'll be extending moonfruit.com in the coming months to add this profile feature to make it an even more personal experience (should you wish it to be!). We'll also be looking at migrating some of the old forum content over to the new forums so that they're a bit more complete.

A few of you were finding it a little bit difficult to navigate your way around the new account functions once you were logged in. So, we've made it quicker and easier for you to use. Here's the breakdown of how this will work:

There will be an 'Account' drop-down in the top right hand corner which will give you quick access to the main account functions - Dashboard (your Moonfruit home page), Billing, Support and Domains, as well as the ability to log-out.

The 'Billing' screen will show you a history of what payments you have made and allow you to renew your package. Remember, if you are an existing customer, you will continue to pay the same prices as before, provided you don't upgrade or downgrade, and the best part is you get all of the extra benefits that come with the new packs (extra disk space and bandwidth)! Downloadable receipts are on the way soon.

A quick link to 'Support' has been added to the Account navigation to make it easier to get help. The FAQs and forums are now combined in a single knowledge base so that it is quicker and easier for you to find answers to your questions. Please search this before submitting a ticket to support as this might save you a lot of time.

We have re-introduced the 'Domain Management' option into the Account navigation. We didn't realise just how many of you were going through moonfruit.com to manage your domains, as it is also available within your sites, so we added this to the drop-down for quick and easy access. For those of you who have been having issues managing your domains via the toolbar in your site, chances are you're still using the old toolbar and therefore need to upgrade this to the new toolbar (in the 'View' menu).

As well as these changes, there are a few further bits of feedback that we will work on in line with your comments. Some customers have requested a multi-site view for the site dashboard, particularly those of you with a high volume of sites (particularly resellers). We appreciate that it might be a little tedious to scroll through all the previews to find the site you'd like to update when you have so many, so this is a feature we'll be working on in a future release.

And finally…

You've all been talking about it! YES! You guessed it... The Blog! Our new blogging feature is very nearly finished and we're pleased to say this will be out in April. We haven't got a solid date as yet. But please keep an eye on the Facebook and Twitter feeds as any news will be announced there - as well as on this blog.

Thank you to everyone who helped us test out the new Moonfruit.com in BETA - As you can see from all of the above changes and additions we’ve made, your feedback and suggestions are very important to us and as long as you continue to tell us your thoughts (no matter how brutal), we can continue to deliver a product you love to use!

Small but significant release - 4th March 2011

Joe — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:43:00 +0000

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

Background HTML tiling

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

New template site showing fixed scroll HTML image background

Quick access to Page Master, Background and HTML background

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

Enter Page Master prompt and 'Auto Page Master' setting

Page length restriction

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

Page length set to 5000

As always, let us know what you think!

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

Joe — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:10:00 +0000

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

Mobile HTML version (V1.0)

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

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

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

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

Shapes

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

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

No background option

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

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

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

Release issue - 15:45 GMT 17 Jan 2011

Joe — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:33:00 +0000

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

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

Joe — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:03:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

New Shapes

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

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

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

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

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

Release 5.0 is Live!

leila — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:07:00 +0100

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

Eye dropper feature on colour mixer allows you to pick a colour already in use on the page

Images are automatically resized when they are scaled so visitors get quicker page load times

Line spacing control for text boxes: standard fonts on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, graphic fonts for the whole text box (this has been a feature asked for by designers for years)

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

New release coming next week

leila — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:57:00 +0100

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

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

But for things you get now, this new release contains the following changes:

New toolbar edit environment

New loading sequence
Sidebar panels now scroll making it easier to reach some options when many panels are open
The available toolbar shortcuts is now customisable (good for those that liked the old ‘advanced toolbar’)
People panel now appears integrated into new edit environment, making it easy to use on devices with small screens
Updated services area for Google Analytics, AdSense and Webmaster Tools, plus some additional new services
Toolbar preferences are attached to the user rather than the site, meaning different site admins can have different toolbar preferences

Sidebar Scrolling

Other designer and usability enhancements

Line spacing control for text boxes: standard fonts on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, graphic fonts for the whole text box (this has been a feature asked for by designers for years)
Eye dropper feature on colour mixer allows you to pick a colour already in use on the page
Longer links can be added for external URLs, with the option to open in the same or new window; previously, links always opened a new window
Edit history cleaned up (less clicks to undo/redo)

Eye dropper feature

Line Spacing

New link editor

Performance improvements

Images are automatically resized when they are scaled so visitors get quicker page load times
We've reduced the number of requests to load a page and made Facebook calls asynchronous which will also improving site load times

One thing to note is that we have upped the minimum requirement of the Flash Player for the new toolbar to version 10.1, which is the latest stable version. Note, this requirement is just for the new edit environment and visitors will still only require Flash Player 8. We've been watching the uptake of FP 10.1 across our sites carefully and have seen it rise very quickly in the last few weeks so hopefully many of you will already have this. If you have any problems with the upgrade please get in touch.

What we’re working on

It’s been a while since the last release and what you see above is not all that we’ve been working on. More is in progress and it certainly won’t be as long again until the next release.

Growth - As a company we’re growing very fast which is both good and challenging. Good in that the development team has nearly doubled in size in the last 6 months (and we’re still hiring) but challenging in that we have to manage the growth pains. Also in the past few months we’ve completely rebuilt our server infrastructure and storage for massive scalability and continue to push content via the CDN (Content Delivery Network) to improve performance in all parts of the world.

But you’re interested in features, so here’s what we’re working on in the likely order it will be released in:

Blog – Many of you have asked why Moonfruit doesn’t have a traditional blog... Well, we will soon! The blog will allow you to publish dynamic content, manage comments and tags and assign permissions, while still maintaining the design control that makes our tools unique. We’ll release some screenshots of the tools in the weeks to come. But personally I’m very excited!

HTML improvements – We have two of our PHDs working on our HTML rendering for both desktop and mobile. We’re targeting an improvement in the mobile device HTML first (as there are more of these that don’t support Flash), but this is part of the overall multi-format publishing (Flash/HTML/HTML 5, etc.) that will evolve in the coming months/years. Flash isn’t going away, but our HTML version should be better.

Ecommerce – the eCommerce features are likely to arrive last of these but will be worth the wait. With a product manager (for many hundreds/thousands of products), different product display and checkout options, it will be a vast improvement. Like the blog much of the ‘management’ will be in Flex, but the products and carts will be displayed dynamically within your site.

There maybe a few more surprises too.

And finally...

As always, thanks for your patience and support. We’re really ramping up at the moment so the coming months and years will just keep getting better. We’re in this for the long haul and we hope you are too ;-)

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