New Release - 25 March 2008
By Walt on Wednesday, March 26 2008, 17:00 - Release notes - Permalink
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
Comments
This is alot of work you've done this round. excellent !!
The Header Tag situation is yet another seo-benefit many aren't aware of but having control over these areas is just really really good.
The helper showhome pages can even be used to show clients things that can be done.
Question?
Does all of the text inside the FORUM show in HTML. Can the search engines see all the content in the posts... no matter how deep it gets?
Thanks to Joe and rest of team.
Jeff in Toronto
Hi Jeff,
If your Subjects are set to "Guests can View", then the subject title and description (or notes) will display if you publish that page for viewing in HTML (Log in > Edit > Page Settings > View HTML version). This is what the search engines will read.
That page will also offer links (to all viewable posts for each subject) using RSS feeds where the posts can be read by clicking the links on that page. The search engines should follow the links and spider the content on those posts, if they are marked public ( i.e. guests are allowed to view the posts and not just members.)
As to how deep search engines will go to read content, they are restricted to RSS providing a limit of 50 feeds which generally show the most recent feeds.
Another thing to note is that this only applies to the new (themable) forum. It doesn't apply if you have an old forum on your site.
Walt
Does this mean we will be able to do text links.
FANTASTIC yes I am shouting it out well done Moonfruit it all just gets better and better but I am glad the price does not go up and up with all the improvments and what is this
File Manager changes ?? coming soon mmm could it be 1 file manager to use on all of your websites ? would be wicked if it was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just 1 little snag please use plain English when describing some products these codes and short names you use can be a bit hard to understand what they mean
however
WELL DONE a paying member of 5 years and counting Andy
Hi David, can you shed some light on your comment, as we don't quite understand your question with regards to links. Thanks.
Andy, thanks for the comments. As for your wishing for an 'global' File Manager, sadly that won't make headlines next release. As each website has its own little slice of the database getting the File Manager to upload to multiple sites within an account would be a very big job.
And as for using plain English, we use terms well used in the web industry and, for our own benefit (so WE know what we're talking about), we make do make some names up. After all, you can't have software development and not have the odd bit of jargon! But while you may find we give a feature or widget an 'odd' name we will do our best in putting more time into describing what it does and how you can benefit from it. But point taken. And thanks again.
i get people send me links to their sites and these are in text and code which i beleive you paste on your site some where. unlike the banner links which ive got on the abobe site. can you throw some light on this.
Hi David, you can't add code, HTML or otherwise to text boxes but this shouldn't stop you linking to another site. The text you can simply add to a text box on a page. The link e.g. a web site address, would need to be copied from the supplied text/code i.e. just the www.sitename.com and added using the link option in the Editor.
In other words, add the text to the text box, highlight a section of text that will be linked to the external website, click on the Link tab in the Editor, select the URL (web address) icon and then paste in the web address you have been supplied with.
Details on this can be found in our FAQ. Happy linking!