New release - May 1st 2008
By Joe on Thursday, May 1 2008, 11:43 - Release notes - Permalink
It's release time again and this one is a biggy! Lots of things we've been waiting to get out for for a very long time, with something for everyone. Get ready for some excitement, quiet in the back row please, here it comes...
Domain name module
- Register and manage domain names through Moonfruit.com (good prices!)
- Free domain name bundled with SiteMaker Standard, Plus and Max accounts
- Existing subscribers will be credited with a domain voucher on their next payment! (see below for more details)
- Transfer to Moonfruit and email/webmail to follow in the next release
New File manager!
- Larger, clearer and easier to use interface
- User folders - create folders and organise your files
- Integrated multiple file uploader (no more Javascript popup window or Java applet)
- Native support for PNGs & GIFs (including preserving transparency)
- Rename files and folders
- Multiple select, delete and move
Improvements to SEO (HTML) version of sites (viewable from Edit->Page Settings->View HTML version)
- Nested navigation list now mimics the Flash Version
- Better grouping of elements, preserving things like tabular layout and sidebars
AdSense revenue share for SiteMaker Free users
- Users of SiteMakerFree can sign up with Google to share ad revenue generated by their site
- For each click on a ad on your Free site, you get 50% of the money
- So now you get a free site AND free money!
Other stuff:
- New design templates
- New backgrounds
- We've added new PayPal currencies: CZK, DKK, HUF, NZD, NOK, PLN, SGD, SEK, CHF
So there you go, a whole heap of stuff. That'll keep you busy for a while! Let us know if you find any problems and we'll get back to the grindstone to work on some more things for the months to come. Enjoy!
Domain vouchers for existing customers
We often get some grief for offering deals to new customers but not existing customers, so when it comes to the new domain offer we wanted to make sure that everyone on a qualifying pack got it, both new and old.
For new customers and existing monthly customers, it's quite simple: you get your domain voucher on your next payment, which for all existing monthly customers should be within the next month. You'll then get your next one (1 per year) on the anniversary of this first voucher being issued.
For existing annual customers, your next payment could be sometime away, so instead we will credit you with your domain voucher in June 2008. We're waiting 1 month to do this so that we can manage the flow of vouchers to existing customers, so apologies for the delay, but you will get your voucher.
If you are an existing customer and you upgrade you will be credited with any additional voucher due at the time of the upgrade.
Comments
There are some nice changes here in the File Manager. It's not quite 'drag and drop' yet but what a vast improvement! Good work chaps.
:-) Justin
Excelent changes to file manager and the design of it- no more Sitemaker written on it. Also well done on integrating the domains and offering the deals to all users.
Well done everyone!
Is this why i can' edit my site right now?
It's not allowing you to save edits right now. frustraiting as hell
Hi Heath, no it shouldn't be. What is your site address? Joe
It looks great!!
I added a post in the forum a while ago regarding an upgrade..
I asked why existing members who have already paid for one account, then have to pay Even more just to upgrade!!??
It doesn't make much sense.
Anyway, to avoid these extra charges I have started another account using a different name.. I want to buy the Max-package. Is it possible to transfer all my sites to the new account..
Could someone let me know - Thanks..
So pleased you sorted domains :-)
Hi Kelly, I'm not sure why an upgrade would cost any more than a new account? The code is designed to start with the upgrade pack price, then deduct any credit remaining on your current subscription. So it should always be less than a new account.
But if you choose to set up a new account, then we can transfer your sites over. Just contact customer support from your old account username and give the authorisation to transfer them to your new account. Thanks, Joe
ok thanks.
The way I understood it was that I currently host the lite package for £54...
If I now upgrade to max it will be £144.99..
That totals almost £200.
Whereas if I sign up as a new customer I can get the Max package for £114! Thats a total of £170
So how does it work exactly?? Am I credited the £54 on to the upgrade??
Sorry I'm confused
Hi Moonfruit.com
Why can I not access my websites? since a couple of hours I get this error message:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, theteam@sitemakerlive.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS) mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.5 Server at www.theatlaslions.com Port 80
Thanks for answering.
Atlas
Great new upgrades! Just one question!
Will the re-organising of files cause existing images on pages to dissapear?
Thanks.
Tippa @ 4WardEver
Hi Atlas, no this shouldn't cause this problem. In the last few minutes our main database has burped, but that should be back up an running shortly, but there is nothing that should have affected things for 2 hours. Try again in a few minutes.
Hi Tippa, moving files into new folders won't cause any problems with images appearing on your site, they will still be in the right places. We aren't actually changing the location of your files, just your view of how they are arranged, so it won't break any referencing. Thanks, Joe
Thanks for answering but I still cannot access my sites, I get this error message:
502 Bad Gateway
nginx/0.5.35
Atlas
Hi Atlas, yes that one is our fault. Give us a few minutes, we're just investigating the problem. Thanks, Joe
Hi Joe!
Thanks everything is back to normal now.
Cheers,
Atlas
Hi Kelly, the Lite package is actually £26.99, with the Standard at £54.99. But which ever package you have, as Joe mentioned, we will credit you the remaining time you have left on your existing account when you upgrade. So if you have only just purchased your package of £54.99, then we would credit most of that back when you upgrade. If you have owned your existing accunt for 6 months then we would credit you half that amount. So what this means is that if you upgrade to Max then with your credit it will be cheaper.
As for discounts on new accounts, well we do offer discounts to attract new users. What we offer existing customers is a continuously discounted subscription rate (we haven't raised prices for over 4 years) and we continue to produce new and exiting features.
I hope that makes sense. Thanks,
Walt
my site is www.heathcardwell.co.uk
It won't let me save any edits/ view my site or do page edits or anything like that?
Apart from that, the new file manager is a godsend for me. I have so many images and need to rename and organise them, so thanks for that at least.
Hi, In addition to my previous enquiry - How do you move existing files to any newly created folders?
Ta, Tippa
Hi Heath, i've just tested editing on your site and it seems to work. Can you try again please? Thanks, Joe
Hi Tippa, you select the files you want to move, then click the folder icon in the top bar of the file manager and it will allow you to move the selection of files to a different folder. I hope that helps, Joe
Hi Joe,
Sorry, I overlooked your first response - all sorted now!
Thanks
Tippa
Hi, thanks. seems to be sorted now. not sure why i got that problem, but thanks anyway.
cheers for the updates. love moonfruit!
heath. x
Problems!
1: My domain name finsklapphund.no redirected to www.finsklapphund.moonfruit.com - worked fine yesterday. Today eternal wait! www.finsklapphund.moonfruit.com works fine!
2: Norwegian characters does not display correct today! Worked fine yesterday!
Are the problems related to the new version?
Thanks thats great..
Now I get it!!
I dont mind paying at all - Its a fantastic service and worth every penny!!
Kelly
This update is fantastic, png, and folder support is awesome, this completes almost everthing i could ask for.... just waiting for the sitemaker stuff to be removed from the member features now!
For any of you people wondering... as i was untill i tested it... moving images to a customer created folder does not cock up the site, all images stay fine on the site.
Top stuff moonfruit, you guys are bloody amazing at your jobs... well done to all of you.
aww gawd , chuffed to read about the multiple file delete option , but toooooooooo late for me I deleted my whole site about a fortnight ago rather than delete files individually .. sob!!!! I am painstakingly rebuilding it again!!
fab news though moonfruit
Hi boys,
HELP! Can't anymore upload any pictures to my site?
A bug or just a glitch?
Best and thanks for the great new jobs
Elle
The best upgrade to the FILE MANAGER ever!!!!!!!
I've been here about 7 years and the File Manager has never been this good!
Great job Moonfruit!
Kekefan.
ps. any chance of a blog like widget, or a update to the old News widget? sorry to be cheeky!
Turkish Charecters does no display correct whic was fine 3 or 4 days ago ????
Hi Dixie, your domain, http://www.finsklapphund.no, appears to be working fine. We had a few glitches with our database yesterday so this may have been the cause. But it looks good now. As for Norwegian characters we have a fix going out this morning for that.
Juyklo, same as with my last comment for Dixie, we will have a fix for your Turkish characters not rendering out this morning.
Elle, are you trying to upload as a Site Leader or member? We have a known bug where you cannot access the File Manager (through the page, slide show or gallery) as a site member - a fix is being released this morning for that. Site Leaders are unaffected. If you can't upload as site leader, we would need more info. You can either give us brief description here or go to Support and log a Query and tell us what type and size of files, what site you are trying to upload to and what, if any, error messages you are getting.And Kekefan, a new blog/news widget is something we have been thinking about but it will be some time before we get a chance to look at that one even though we are constantly re-prioritising what we upgrade, re-work or give a make-over too. But keep the faith ;-) we will get around to it.
Thanks guys, and keep the feedback coming.
Not sure of what the other improvements have done yet, but the File Manager is superb! Uploading and organising my image files has never been easier than when I was editing my site last night. Thanks for all your hard work and for listening to our pleas. It'd be great to see the addition of a within-site Search facility, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's in the 'in-development' pipeline too. Not being pushy or anything... hint, hint!! :-)
Dixie and Juyklo,
The accented or extended characters should be appearing again. This only affected some of our newer widgets - the forum, chat and comments in particular. If you guys have any more issues with this please let us know.
Walt
Great job! The new File manager is GREAT! Now all I need is a shopping cart ;-)
Do you have any plans for that in the near future?
Hi Marie, yes it's next on our list ;-). It will take a while to develop, but we expect it to arrive in the summer. Thanks, Joe
Is there any liklyhood of being able to upload gif's which are animated, and which will work on the site. I have attempted to do this but the image is static. I have noticed that you have some sample animated images, so if we can't upload our own how can we send ours to you so that you might consider adding them to your samples.
In responce to mitb, just use software which turns animated gifs into swf files and then upload the resulting flash file to your moonfruit site and hey presto, you get the result you want, the animated image, not a static one.
gif2swf offer a free trial.
If you use the transition effects on here, you can be even more creative with basic animation.
Hi Joe,
I noticed a new upload widget that is not working, I tried today to upload some photos and the upload button does not seem to work somehow.
How to get this work?
Atlas
Hi,
Just wanted to say the File Manager is superb! Uploading and organising my images and files has never been easier and some great new templates. Very happy customer
Cheers Guys
Hi Moonfruit I must congratulate you on the new features especially the upload file section I always had prob with the java thingy just glad its gone thanks guys your features and produts just get better and better and miles ahead of (if any) competion fantastic
forgive me for posting on here but for some strange reason I was just checking out on moonfruit page and my website when a pop up came on said it had perfomed an illegal action and closed since then moonfruit has not worked or come back rite half of the pages are gone and missing the login has gone and the priceing page it as if the flash has gone please can someone help unable to use full features of moonfruit or even view or logon to my website now unable to quite a lot what has happined ??
its back i downloaded a new flash and its worked x
Love the changes, especially the folder organiser. Just one question - when converting my .gif animations to .swf format I seem to lose the original frame speeds and the uploaded animation is too fast - is there something I'm missing? I'm using the gif2swf as suggested earlier. Many thanks.
WOW! I have waited a long time to be able to sort images into folders..... and delete more than one at a time... this is great! It will make a real difference to me as I use Moonfruit to run my school website and we get through a lot of images and it was getting unmanageable. Thank you for all your hard work in keeping this great web building package moving forward! Only one thing I would really like to be able to do now..... how can I embed my Jalbum slideshows onto a moonfruit page?????..... until your slideshows upgrade a bit, I have been forced to look elsewhere, but have to link off the page to a Jalbum.....
Hi folks, grouped responses below:
mitb and Pinkerbell - There is a reference in our FAQ about uploading animations. There are some guidelines to consider i.e. running 24fps, export for Flash 8 (7 will work too), use only relative references, mask animations beyond SWF boundary, file must be self contained. Check out our FAQ for a little more info (How do I create my own animations and widgets?).
Atlaslions - If you are using a Mac and encountering problems with uploading files, there is a small issue between the Flash Player and Mac OS which we have found a patch for. We have a fix going out today.
Andy - Glad to hear it was a temporary hiccup.
Kate - We are now considering the next version of SiteMaker and what new or better tools, features and widgets we can produce. But please drop a note in the Wishlist on the Forum so that we have a reference for when we start looking at the next steps.
Thanks everyone.
the new file manager is great
i here that you may be improving the shopping cart / ecomms bit - what tools can we expect and when
The updates are terrific, and the domain names are much appreciated.
Would love to be able to join a Web Ring http://dir.webring.com/rw , which requires the ability to use JavaScript-based NavBar (SSNB). Any chance of including this in a future update?
I would really, really, really, really (you get the picture!) love a widget or something that people can add a profile(with custom fields set by admin) and upload their their photo(s) to that profile, which is displayed on the site and search box to search by age, sex, ect. etc. The possibilities of that are endless and I am desperate for this feature, infact I would have to upgrade to the max plan to do all the sites I have in mind for this feature!
can you send me step by step direction to convert my existing files to a new domain name when deside to upgrade. thanks
Patrick
Hi,
Photo Bag: Nothing concrete yet with regards to features on the new e-commerce tools, except to say it will be much better than the current offering. We are very keen though to offer unit options i.e. 1 unit with say size and colour selection. But we still need to discuss fully what we want to deliver. And the range of features will also govern how long it takes. Either way it will take us a few months to provide you with a useful alternative.
Terry: Building an interface for WebRing HTML is not something we could develop quickly and we have already agreed our development program of new features and software upgrades that will span the next 6+ months. I'll certainly mention your request to the developers.
Lee: Yep we get the picture. As with HTML inclusion this would be quite a bit of development work so it would be something we would have to carefully investigate and discuss to see if the time and resources spent on this would be of benefit to the customer base as a whole. But thanks for the suggestion it's certainly worthy of consideration.
Patrick: Sorry, can you give us more detail? I'm not sure I understand what you mean by converting existing files to a new domain name? If you wish to upgrade your package you don't need to convert anything. If you already have a domain name, unfortunately we don't offer transfer in (move your name from another provider to us) at present but that is coming soon. Just give us a few more details and we'll try to help.
Hi Walt...thanks for the reply about adding profiles with picture uploads etc. I appreciate it would be an intensive devlopment project. Have you considered making this feature only available to people on the max plan? or creating a Max+ plan for say an extra £5 a month on top of the max plan. This would go some way of covering costs and providing a premium service to those that are willing to pay a premium package.
Hi again. I just noticed that you cannot use a png image for an image effect, which is a real shame and really limits the creative possibilities with masked png files, which ive just discovered. It's all a slow learning curve.
I don't yet know flash and have been trying to push what i can do with creating images, simple gifs, turning them into swf files and using the image effects, by creating lots of layers on a page.
I would like to be able to use masked png files in image effects to push things a bit further before i have to start learning flash.
Is that something which is possible to do and if so, is it something you would consider?
Thanks in advance.
my web site
Hi Lee, thanks for the feedback. We'll certainly give your suggestion some thought.
Heath, yep the image effects widget should display PNG files. We've checked the code and we are not restricting these files from showing so we'll need to have a closer look. This has been raised as a bug and we'll try to sort this out as soon as we can although to be honest it will probably be a few weeks before it gets fixed, tested and released.
SEO Question (duplicate content):
My website was originally showing example.com high in the SERPS, now it only seems to be showing example.com/home (homepage) and this tends to show up 10 pages lower with the same keywords.
Would Google not see my site example.com as duplicate content to example.com/home as they are both showing the same content?
Thanks
What's coming up in the June release?
hi good job
hey all you skaters check out www.sk8life.moonfruit.com rite now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
just purchaesd a domain name through moonfruit and got confused - how do I change the original moonfruit site I have to my domain? Its the free site so do I have to upgrade?
Cate
Hi, i've asked many of times in the wish list if it would be possible to have the Forum updated to show an Image URL??
I noticed that when it was first released that Joe said it has been set -up for this and would be updated but the main thing was to get it released...
i think it would attract a lot more people to our sites if the Users can display and image from an image Hosting Company such as www.photobucket.com
Your Calendar Widget allows this so wondered if you would add that to the forum? it would make it look so much more presentable, i hope you agree?
Also on the Message Board on our sites it has the facility to allow visitors to receive an email when a reply is posted, can this not be added to the Forum? it would bring people back to our sites.
Many Thanks, Jeff
Hi Jeff,
Reasonable requests, we'll see what we can do, but no promises as we have a large backlog of requests to get through.
Thanks for the suggestions though.
Hey guys
I was just wondering if there was a glitch with the file uploader at the minute?
Its allowing me to browse for an image but when I select one it doesnt appear in the file uploader box.
Do you have any ideas why? Its frustrating not being able to add new images!
Cheers, Gav
Hi, I think Moonfruit is a good resource, but it is missing one important feature.
An insite Search Facility! I think this would be a popular addition for the next month.
Hi, i still can't use masked png images in image effects. Can you confirm either way that this will or will not be possible in the near future please.
Could you also consider more transition effects, a longer delay time than 1 min and the ability to use moonfruit images and flash in transitions, like the flame ect., not just the ones you upload yourself.
These are the kind of things which gives greater creative freedom. thanks.
Gav, sorry about the delay in reply. We did have a minor glitch with the uploader but that was corrected fairly promptly.
Rids, we do provide an insite search although that relies on Google having indexed the site. We understand that an alternative version might be of use but it takes time to investigate our options, plan and develop. And we already have the next few months well booked up with development plans. But it's an idea we have spoken about and may re-consider at a later point.
Heath, both PNG and GIF files can now be used in images effects, crop tools etc. We'll take your comments on board about the transitions - effects and timings.
Thanks