Moonfruit Lounge - Release

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

Joe — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:00:00 +0100

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

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

General edit functions (click to enlarge image).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Known issues with new beta toolbar (keyboard shortcuts)

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

New Release - 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