Moonfruit Lounge - facebook

End of 2011, what a year it's been!

Joe — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:52:00 +0000

The final release of 2011 slipped out late last week, and we've now had a chance to sit back and reflect on what we've delivered over the year. What a year it's been! But every year brings new challenges, so we're also looking ahead to what we're going to be delivering in 2012…

As you know a big part of what we're striving for is to allow you to "publish once, be everywhere" all with "total design control", so that you only update your content in one place (your website) and we take care of publishing it appropriately to web, mobile, tablet and Facebook in a way that supports your brand identity.

2011 laid the foundations for this, and we think 2012 will blow you away ;-)

Here are the highlights of 2011:

Mobile optimised sites (Feb 2011)
New Moonfruit.com brand and website (Mar 2011)
Updated design tools - shapes, backgrounds (Mar 2011)
Improved customer support via Zendesk (Apr 2011)
Hundreds of new site templates (Mar – Dec 2011)
Image lightboxes (June 2011)
The Blog (July 2011)
4,000,000 sites built with Moonfruit (Aug 2011)
New File Manager (Aug 2011)
Getty Images (Aug 2011)
WebUser Gold Award - best website builder (Aug 2011)
The Shop - Web, Mobile, Facebook (Oct 2011)
Launch event with PayPal (Oct 2011)
Moonfruit office expansion (Nov 2011)
Shop improvements - categories, quantities, shipping (Nov/Dec 2011)

It's no surprise that the team look a little bit tired! But never fear we'll leap back into action early next year with even more goodies.

What's to come in 2012

Mobile version styling (colours) and include/exclude content from mobile version (probably Feb)
More shop improvements – product variants, stock control, etc. (Regular releases throughout the year)
And maybe, just maybe a little HTML5 website magic…watch this space ;-)

So that's that. We hope you've enjoyed 2011 as much as we have and you are looking forward to bigger, better 2012, as much as we are.

Until we meet again early next year, have a wonderful Holiday Season (or Xmas!), and a Happy New Year from all the Moonfruit team!

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.

A month at Moonfruit

leila — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 17:17:00 +0100

I’ve been at Moonfruit for an entire month now, which is hard to believe. How time flies when you’re having fun!

I’ve spent a lot of my time in the past month finding my way around the product as well as talking to our users via the Moonfruit forum, Twitter and Facebook. The comments and feedback from everyone has been great. It’s given me a much better understanding of the Moonfruit community as a whole.

We’ve introduced ‘Site of the Day’ which has been very popular amongst our Twitter and Facebook followers. The Facebook group is going from strength to strength and we now have over 300 fans, many of which have been contributing to it on a daily basis. Do keep an eye out on the Facebook group over the next few months as we will be making a few changes as well as announcing up and coming features and some exciting new competitions.

In the mean time, I would love to hear your ideas – I have been sent some great ideas for competitions as well as new features people would like to see implemented. Your thoughts are very important to us.

I will be keeping you up to date on what’s happening here at Moonfruit HQ every Friday. If there’s a particular subject you would like me to cover, please email me: social@moonfruit.com

Finally, I just wanted to thank everyone for making me feel so welcome.

Leila

Moonfruit have a new Community Manager!

leila — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:11:00 +0000

Hi, I'm Leila, the new Moonfruit Community Manager. I started yesterday at Moonfruit HQ and am settling in nicely.

If anyone has any questions, suggestions or issues, please point them in my direction. I'm known by my nickname 'Swanny' on the Moonfruit forums and can be found tweeting as @moon_swan. Please feel free to say hello. I would love to hear any suggestions you have and would especially like to hear about your experience with Moonfruit as a whole. If you would prefer to email me, I can be reached on social@moonfruit.com.

We have a facebook fan page, which some of you might know about already - http://www.facebook.com/moonfruit . Unfortunately, the fan page was a little neglected due to a huge increase in our customer base. However, we're back on track and I'll be checking this on a regular basis.

If you know of any other Moonfruit communities on the web, or would like a group/ community to be created elsewhere, please contact me through one of mediums above to discuss further.

I'm very much looking forward to getting to know you all.

Leila