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.