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

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

Eye dropper feature

Line Spacing

Line Spacing

Link Editor

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 ;-)