Moonfruit Lounge - SiteMaker features

New showhomes sites

Joe — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:11:00 +0000

Because our tool can be used in so many ways, the choices can often be mind-boggling. Each tool has a number of different ways that it can be customised to make it look the way you want and do the things you do, but sometimes you don't know what you want until you see it! So that's why we present to you the show homes. Here you'll find real examples of how tools can be used to stimulate your creative imagination...

The showhomes section will be coming soon to Moonfruit.com, but we wanted to give you a sneak preview of what kinds of things will be on there. So here are some of the sites that we have built.

Image tools - http://imagetoolsshowhome.moonfruit.com

The image tools show home deals with the core image features within SiteMaker which include; crop tools, pop-up galleries and the slide show. This site shows you a range of existing tools and how to change their presentation to meet particular needs, e.g. as a product catalogue, or animated image sequence. Have a look.

Clipart - http://clipartshowhome.moonfruit.com/

There's loads of clipart available to use within SiteMaker, but it's not always easy to see it bit by bit in the File Manager. So here is a complete list of what is available split between graphic elements, image cut-outs, and maps & wallpapers.

Gradient effects - http://gradientseffectsshowhome.moonfruit.com/

Gradient effects are one of those things that can be used to create a vibrant design in your site, but it's not always obvious which ones to use and how to use them. This site gives you some ideas.

Themeable widgets - http://themeablewidgetshowhome.moonfruit.com/

The new range of widgets (chat, forum, form, mail to a friend, comments) are all themeable, which means you can change the button styles and colours quickly and easily. Here are some examples of how they could look.

Video widgets - http://videowidgetshowhome.moonfruit.com/

Video widgets can be customised to look a number of different ways without or without their controls visible. This site gives you a few ideas of how you can change the way they look to fit with your site.

Let us know what you think and enjoy!!

Updating page URLs and bookmarking

Joe — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:44:00 +0000

New changes due out in Feb will make navigating around your site more intuitive and allow your customers to bookmark specific pages. For more details read on.

What are we changing?

Every page in your website e.g. yoursite.moonfruit.com, has its own URL (internet address), which is yoursite.moonfruit.com/yourpage. However when people navigate around your site the URL doesn't update. A side effect of this is that you cannot bookmark a particular page as the address bar always shows the URL that you or your customers first arrived at. Well, all that is about to change.

In February we will introduce a change that will update the URL whenever you change pages. However, it will do this without refreshing the page, so music will continue playing and there will be no interruption to content. Because every page will now update the URL in the address bar, your visitors will have a much better idea of where they are as they navigate through your site. They will also be able to bookmark a specific page in the normal way, which means having saved that page in their ‘Favorites’ they will be able to return directly to the correct point in your site. It will also mean they can email these page links to other people by cutting and pasting from the address bar.

It has only become possible to do this since we increased the minimum requirements for SiteMaker to Flash 8. This is partly why we pushed that change through a few months ago and why we are completing this work now.

So what will it look like for you?

Well, if you have a site, e.g. www.joeslondontaxis.com, and you click on the Taxi Booking page, the URL will update to:

www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/taxibooking/4521371523

which is the address of that page. If you then click on Airport Taxi Booking in the menu the URL will update to:

www.joeslondontaxis.com/#/airporttaxibooking/4521387384

which is the address of that page. Your visitors will be able to go 'forward' and 'back' in the browser history as normal (and the URL will keep correctly updating), and they will be able to bookmark those pages too.

If you're wondering why your page addresses have a number after them, this is the unique ID for that page. Because we permit you to have two different pages in your site with the same name, we append the page name with the unique ID to be sure that we serve up the right page. This is similar to the way many large sites work, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7178288.stm from the BBC.

As for the # character, well that's just the character we use to let the Flash site know which page it should be looking at, and to tell the browser not to refresh the page.

So there you have it! An exciting new change to improve the navigation and bookmarking of your site. Coming soon to a Moonfruit site near you...

New forum - coming soon

Joe — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:20:00 +0100

Since we didn't have a very exciting release at the end of July, we thought we'd post up some screenshots of the new forum feature that is in development and will be delivered over the next few months. It should allow a whole range of new features, plus making it far easier to browse and manage posts. So have a look...

Here are a few screens for you to see. They're not the final versions! But they should give you an idea of what to expect.

This first one is the new subject view.

Then we have a full list of topics.

And finally the posts themselves.

Like the comments, we should have an RSS feed on the topics, and the forums themselves will be searchable. Let us know what you think. Enjoy!

SiteMaker video player - news and views

Joe — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 11:33:00 +0000

The SiteMaker Video player was released two weeks ago, allowing you to upload FLV (Flash Video) files, or embed any video file you can find on YouTube or Google Video directly in your site. And unlike any other in-site video player, you can drag, scale and manipulate the video just by dragging and clicking. We reckon it's very cool! (and there's more to come).

So what do you think about it? Are you using it? Post a link to your video site and let us know what you think about it.

But before you suggest a range of enhancements, let me tell you about some of the ones we've already got in the pipeline, which should be released later this month. They include:

Auto-play option added
Option to hide controls
Option to maintain the 4:3 aspect ratio of the video - when enabled the video is padded out with black space, like Windows Media player; when disabled, video occupies entire screen and scales with screen
Clicking on screen toggles play state between play/pause
Hovering over the screen fades in either a play/pause icon on the screen, depending on the play state - icon fades out when mouse leaves screen
Pausing the video now dims the screen with 50% alpha black
Clicking the provider link on the screen now takes user to actual video’s site, rather than just Google Video or YouTube
Volume icon responds to different levels of sound, showing no bars, one bar or 2 bars - first sound wave is now smaller than second to give illusion of increasing sound.

So there you have it, SiteMaker finally has a video player. And not a bad one too.