Release 5.0 is Live!
So it's official... The 5.0 release is now live! We're very excited about it and would love your feedback. Some of the cool new features include:
- Eye dropper feature on colour mixer allows you to pick a colour already in use on the page
- Images are automatically resized when they are scaled so visitors get quicker page load times
- 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)
...and lots more! Click here to view the full release notes.
Comments
Hi Guys, first of all, thank you for fixing the google adsense issue.. that was really stressing me! sorry if i kept on!! not sure if you guys are aware that Google is now reporting that the sitemap.xml is invalid... google error is:
Invalid URL
This is not a valid URL. Please correct it and resubmit.
-----------------------So im guessing this is something that is going to need your attention aswell :) Cheers
hi when you updated the site to 5.0 I haven't been able to load my site yet .
(or it takes approximately 10 minutes to load)
@Ian - we've spotted this one too and it should be fixed as well. Sometimes it takes a day or so for Google to recrawl your site stop reporting an issue.
@Matt S - do you mean you can't load it to edit, or can't load it to view? Thanks,
Joe
hi this as to be the worst thing moonfruit have done its a disaster , and i for one a member for over 4 years and pay a monthly subscription am very disappointed . until you sort the problems out can we as members revert back to the old settings , a reply on this would be great as you dont seem to be interested on the forum on on query submissions ,
a very disappointed member
euroking
Hi Euroking, sorry to have disappointed you. If you can provide some more specific information on issues, we should be able to resolve them. In the meantime if you submit a support ticket we can switch you back to the 'old' toolbars if that's what you mean. Thanks very much, Joe
Hi Wayne,
I've just replied to your latest ticket regards your problem above (Euroking). We pushed out a fix for this issue early this afternoon and a basic of your site indicates editing is now possible without crashing. But if you could please check and either reply to the email or here that would be great as we'd certainly like to know if we've hit the nail on the head.
Thanks,
Walt
Whats happened today? One of my pages was truncated even though I didn't save it, and although File, Edit, Insert, will open, Pages, Design and Admin won't ! (Domain opens 1inch, and has to be scrolled.)
And all the Comments here after #7 have been lost. - ? (I wanted to see if others had anything similar.)
Update on#8: An hour later and Page,Design & Admin are back, BUT the orig'l problem (today) of page is still unresolved. Having tried to amend page lgth of one particular page (MRC,LRC,SOC) it keeps setting at 3600 whatever value I type in, so my page is truncated. This was after I noticed yesterday that it had become extended, ie with clear blank space below my last material.
How can I get my former page length back so that it shows the content ?
Hey all. I am having issues editing my website. I've checked and ensured that my flash is updated. Tried switching back to the old tool bar trick didn't work either. What's funny is, my premium account is working just fine except for my free account. How's that happening?
Please advise.
Regards
Jangelic
On my website I can only save the changes on my home page, when I click on save settings on the other 2 pages nothing happens...
Hi Oakmet,
Sorry what do you mean all Comments after #7 have been lost. I've checked the Admin system and nothing is missing or has been removed. There are a number of posts by you in the other article relevant to the release but nothing is missing.
With regards page sizing, our system actually supported a bug that enabled users to create pages longer than the permitted (by Flash Player) 3600. Visitors to the site would never see beyond 3600px despite the Site Leader being able to editor beyond this value. What we have done if fix the bug. So pages in edit mode are now limited to the Flash Player length of 3600. That said we are investigating a work-around for this that may enable more flexibility but that will take some time.
Jangelic,
I can see we have a ticket in the system for you and we currently working on your issue (along with a similar ones). We hope to get out a few bug fixes tomorrow once we complete testing so please bear with us.
Ruben,
Can you give us a website please so we can check it out.
Thanks
i) Apols, When I wrote about lost comments I hadn't realised that I wasn't on the same page as I'd prev'ly used for comments.
ii) Re page lgth: 6 of my pages are/have been longer than 3600, (MRC/LRC/SOC was 5000) and were and still are visible to all viewers except this change on Friday to MRC/. I've just checked again on another pc and under a different family user name, ie not in edit mode. My proof-reader friends never had any truncated pages, nor other people that gave me comments/feedback. My U21 page is 4200, Wld Champ p2 is 4050, and 3 other at 3700, 3800,3900, all still visble now to every viewer. Can you revert to orig'l 5000 max lgth please.
sure the website is: http://fantasysnexttopmodel.moonfru...
Hi Ruben, can you check your pages now and see if you can save.
Oakmet, I'll get back to you on this as the Flash Player does have limit of 3600 that going beyond causes instablity. I need to clarify some details with the Developers but will get you a response.
Thanks - Walt
yay, I can save it now, thanks for your help!
Help - can't sign into Moonfruit. Not recognizing my punctuation key strokes (@ for instance). No problem anywhere else, e.g. other websites, my software, etc. What is causing this? I use Safari and Firefox. Same problem in both.
hi guys thx for reverting my site back to old settings works a treat again except for the chat which is an ongoing thing i have with you always goes down 2-3 times a week for no reason
so oince again thx
euroking
Hi Reesie,
Can you explain further. Why would you be using an @ symbol to login to your Moonfruit site. We don't permit email addresses - just alpha/numeric logins. If your name above is correct then your username is 'reesie' and whatever password you set for your account.
Euroking,
Thanks for the feedback. We aren't seeing any errors with Chat but they could be buried under within a lot of data. Next time you have a problem with chat can you log the the times please GMT (UTC) or BST and the dates and we can have a closer look at the error logs and see if we can spot anything.
Cheers - Walt
hi walt chat has just gone off 19.08 30th july bst will let you know when it comes back on
euroking
chat returned at 20.11 30th july bst thx for help
euroking
I've been noticing some issues aswell with this new interface. Some are:
- page freezes (during editing) when scrolling down: scrollbar disappears then main pane truncates and vanishes
- page length editbox control showing value of LAST page edited, not current page being edited, UNTIL the cursor is clicked into it - then it changes underneath the cursor - very confusing
- page dropdown menu doesn't drop down anymore - but if you click somewhere where a page item would have been, it switches to that page (after several seconds of frantic heavy hard disc activity) - as if it's there but invisible - only way to select another page to edit is to go via 'Organize pages'
- nudging objects with cursor keys and shift+cursor keys to move 10 pixels at a time, hardly ever works now. Occasionally works for a single object, never for multiple objects.
Just like with certain well-known office programs from a certain well-known Operating System vendor, with every update responsiveness and simplicity get eased out, bit-by-bit, to allow replacement by more "intuitive and discoverable" interfaces that don't work as well as the previous ones.
Oh yes, and something I found in the previous version which annoyed me no end - there used to be Forum and Blog widgets - now that the fashion is for "twitter this, twitter that", it seems the only smart widgets we're allowed to use are Facebook and Twitter ones. How about good old Forums and Blogs? (4 years ago it was Blogs that was seen as the "killer app" of social web use - not anymore) They seem to have been totally removed from the widget menus. Not all of us are in love with Facebook and Twitter. Can't we choose to be different? Moonfruit used to lead the way, now it's just following (again, just like Twitter) - did the owners of Twitter buy Moonfruit or something?
...oh yes, and another things I'd add about that is that as of SiteMaker 4.0 I noticed that all Moonfruit sites load within a Facebook "wrapper" (i.e. the browser is invisibly directed to a secret Facebook page which then reloads the Moonfruit site within itself). I groaned when I first saw this happening but put up with it, until I found I can hardly ever get anyone at work to see my vocational websites because Facebook is blocked and therefore so are my Moonfruit pages, and if I want anyone in a place of business to see my online CV, again they can't because most businesses have their IT teams block Facebook, which again means as soon as a link to a Moonfruit site is followed it generates a 'network policy violation' when my site has nothing to do with Facebook whatsoever.
Shouldn't there be an opt-out setting available in the 'Admin' section (or is there now? I don't know - just about everything I try and click on the new interface slows my PC down so heavily and grinds my hard drive into a pulp I end up just giving up - I can hardly bother to work on my sites at all now - especially as I know hardly anyone can see them anymore anyway).
Image resizing - can this be made optional aswell? I deliberately upload SOME (not all) images in higher resolution than are displayed so that if they wish they can zoom up the page using their browser's zoom control and still see quality in the images - not a blow up of the low-res version seen at 100%. This again was what I used to tout as a great advantage of Flash websites - that as they're object oriented they respond better to browser zooming. Many of the images on my site are detailed and have things which my fans would like to see up close SOMETIMES - but not all the time - but at the same time I like my pages to be composed for the majority of times when the images DON'T need to be seen so large, and hence keep them to a more discreet size within the page.
Again, this was a great USP of building sites in Moonfruit, and a great piece of flexibility which it has now been decided by the powers at be I shouldn't have the choice over anymore. People LIKED the fact they could zoom up on my sites and still see detail in the images, and I explained to them that you don't have to upload pictures at exactly the same scale as they're going to appear on a page (unlike images in a normal HTML page - as although absolute sizes can be specified in an IMG tag, we all know it doesn't work very well and browser-side image resizing on HTML IMGs looks scraggy and ugly).
I WANT my images to be loaded in at full size and resized by the reader's viewing agent please. Like they were before. I always compress and optimise my images BEFORE upload to Moonfruit anyway, so even if they're of large size, their original filesizes will be quite low because there will be large expanses of similar colour within them. But oh no, the quality has got to be reduced again (in fact, the great thing about SiteMaker 4.0 is that it was only then that Moonfruit corrected the bug in all previous versions that ALL images would be 'optimised for the web' (i.e. compressed to mush) REGARDLESS of the check-box setting being ticked or not).
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your comments. I know as a long term user of Moonfruit you've seen a lot of updates over the years and seen quite a lot of changes to product. I can see you've taken some time to provide the feedback here so I'll give your points some thought over the weekend and give you a response on Monday.
In brief though we are aware of some outstanding issues and we working on these. We have another bug fix release going out Monday which should address some. Facebook you've always been able to disable for the login (so members don't see that feature). We are working on a new Blog - so yes we hear you - this will have a lot more functionality than anything similar at present. And not resizing images is being addressed after comments from one of our users in the forum.
But let me get you a more detailed response on Monday.
Thanks again for your detailed feedback.
Walt
hi again chat off again guys today sun 1st august 20.40 bst will let you know when its back
euroking
ps i agree with mark on the facebook and twiiter no use to me one bit i hate em
euroking
just a quick note guys is there any plans to do some stylish galleries for pictures as the ones you have are really outdated from other sites a carouselor a floating gallery would be cool just a thought
thanks
euroking
hi walt chat returned when i got up this morning 6.00am bst mon 2nd august
Hi Euroking,
Thanks for the Chat downtime info. We've introduced some more critical chat server logging and we are experimenting with some features that should kick the server if it looks like it is failing. This may take a bit of experimentation but we hope to get this issue resolved once and for all.
New Galleries is on the cards but we need to finish our new Blog widget first and we do need to crack on with the e-Commerce tools. We are taking on more development staff so we should be able to improve delivery times on new projects. Despite the headaches for a number of customers with the latest release we have introduced a new framework and technology that should allow us to speed up new feature development.
So yes we will be looking at a number of things, like the gallery, but a little further down the line.
Thanks - Walt
When will the new blog feature be released, do you have a timeframe or deadline?
Hi MrJoe,
We expect the first iteration out within the next couple of months. And we will then build on the functionality bit by bit. We'll provide more detail closer to the release and give you a bit more information on what to expect it can do and how it will look.
Cheers.
Walt
Hi guys
Loving lots about the latest version, but finding it very buggy. I use the latest version of Firefox on a PC.
1 - Moving items: to be able to move using the arrow keys on the keyboard, have to click item, click off and back on otherwise it just scrolls the screen
2 - Deleting items: again, only works with the keyboard delete key if I click on, off, then back on the item
3 - Copying items: when I select multiple items and use the copy button on the top taskbar, it crashes and I have to log out and back in. Copying 1 item works fine though
4 - Today, while logged in and editing, the loading bar in the centre of the screen doesn't go away. Hugely annoying.
Thanks!
Hi Keller,
Thanks for the feedback. Very useful points that we'll check out. I'm assuming you have the latest version of Flash Player installed on Firefox.
And Mark,
I haven't forgotten your posts. I've been busy trying to assist Support get through a large number of tickets. While your points are important I'd rather devote my energy in helping the team respond to urgent queries that need resolving. This should quieten down next week and I'll be able to formulate a proper response.
Thanks
Walt
hi guys chat off again tues 10th august 22.35 bst
just letting you know
euroking
I think you should rename this release "Stress 5.0". I have had no end of problem since this upgrade and this morning i find all three of my site completely out of sync, my site margins are all over the place, my sites are smaller within the frame of the pages and multiplayers and photos overlap text. I have tried to adjust the margins on one of my sites but my site site just keep changing. I have been with moonfruit for over 4 years and i must say a seriously am thinking about cutting my loses and with starting all over again with an off line design package like Serif. Too many problems here guys, whats the point in spending hours designing a site so that visitors can see something that is un viewable!. When sites are live to the whole world they should not look like a bomb has hit them. Time to store my info from my site and get outa here i think :(
I cant edit anything on my website ( which need an urgent edit) and no one at moonfruit has got back to me in almost a week, any explanations please??
im new to this webby thing and thought id cracked it,well now i see moonfruit has lost or deleted my pictures from gallery,will they come back as im not going to waist anymore time arfter work on this,will cut my losses and quit if no positive out come.
Just started my website with you last week,
very pleased with the site builder software and the look of my site
I would like to see a grid on the pages so it makes it easier to line up buttons etc
Hi Euroking: Just to let you know we've introduced some error checking on the chat server and a system that kick-starts it should it go off. This should minimise any outages while we work on a smoother solution.
Hello Dave: I am sorry to hear you're having problems with Release 5. I'm surprised at the way your site has changed margins as you've described. We know there are limitations on sites beyond the permissable 3600px limit with Flash but re-arranging items doesn't sound quite right. I've found your ticket in our queue and raised the priority of it to ensure it gets looked at promptly. We may ask you a few more questions but this help us figure what has happened - how consistent this is across your sites. Oh by the way can you try this quick fix use Ctrl + 0 (zero) and let us know how you get on. It's possible you've engaged the zoom function in IE which does do some weird things.
Ryan: I believe we have responded to your query now. And yes our reply was quite slow in finding its way back to you for which I am very sorry . If you have further issues related to this just reply to the ticket we sent and.
Unhappy: I've responded to your ticket with a few questions. It is quite unusual for any images to be deleted without manual intervention - our system doesn't remove images from site. But if you can give us details - in the email - then we can check out your site, the pages in question and then cross-match our error logs to see if there is problem and what we can do to assist you.
Gareth: A 'snap to' grid is something we will be working on at some point. I can't tell you when it will see the light of day but it is on our list of features to introduce.
Thanks,
Walt
thankyou for the info and positive feedback on the chat seems fine so far great work guys
p.s please put a carousel in the image tools
euroking
Please can you advise when will you be releasing the ecommerce? do you think it will be before December? I have been with moonfruit for over 5 years, and as my site is used mainly for customer to purchase goods during the Communion season, I need an order manager with vat etc,, like many other users I have been waiting patiently for the release but I have got to the stage that I am desperately in need of revamping my website, and if it is not with moonfruit then I need to redesign the website elsewhere before the Communion Season start in January 2011. An answer would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Keepsakek,
Our Agenda has been to get the Blog out first and then get cracking with the e-Commerce tools. We do have timetables for production but in software development, coding often (always) takes longer than expected. So once we get the Blog out we will have a better idea of times and features. We will do a staggered release of the e-Commerce tools so one element at a time. We did hope to have the first stage of e-Commerce out before Xmas but the SM v5 release took a bit longer than we had wished for and although the Blog is well on track it is taken a bit longer too.
We do appreciate that you like many other customers have been waiting patiently for e-Commerce tools and we wish this were different. But we do note the huge number of customers who are very happy in using the HTML snippet widget to sell all manner of items on their websites. While it isn't in-built e-commerce the snippet widget is being used both successfully and creatively as an e-commerce tool while we plan the release of our tools.
Kind regards,
Walt
Thanks for the reply, yes I do use lots of the HTML snippet widgets within the site, but this does not produce a VAT report, also we always have the ongoing problem of postage options for customers, plus if paypal do not send you an e-mail advising of payment, you do not know that you have an order? and this happens alot with certain e-mail servers., I think from your answer my best option is to start redesigning the website with another webhost.
Hi keepsakek,
As much as we would love to offer something more concrete or sooner we can't. And I'm sorry we can't help you with your request for something more immediate. But your comments do give us added incentive to ensure we work towards e-Commerce tools as quickly as we can for the benefit of a large number of our customers who are patiently waiting for these features.
I understand you need to look elsewhere - your business is important to you - and I for one certainly wish you luck. But do keep an eye on our Lounge for developments.
Kind regards,
Walt
hi guys chats down again first time for over a fortnight wanted you to know from 2.00pm gmt will let you know when its back thought you'd solved it but no
Hi Euroking,
Thanks. We checked the logs and the reboot system seems to be working now as expected. Chat server went down, 14:39, fixed itself 14:44. Down for 5 minutes at most...
While we continue to investigate the causes of the irregular outages on this server at least we know the auto-reboot is working so it gets customers Chat back up within a few minutes.
Thanks,
Walt
hi
looks like the problem with the chat is starting up again its been great for 2 months then was off for a few hours yesterday and its been off all this morning any reason for this or have we gone back to nbeing off all the time
thanks
HI GUYS the chat is off again twice today and its off now 18.39 bst whats happening thought wed sorted it not happy again
Hi Euroking,
Yes our apologies. We had to migrate the chat to new servers last week - nothing major just the old ones were running out of warranty - and the "auto-kick" script we run to restart the server wasn't enabled on the new service. That has now been rectified so the reliability should be back to what it has been over the last 3-4 months when we introduced the "auto-kick" service.
Regards,
Walt
Having spent a considerable amount of time constructing my site, uploading all the images, showreel etc., and upgrading it, I am horrified to discover that clients cannot access it with mac safari. What is going on? I need this site to function properly.
Hi Mark, our sites work perfectly fine with Safari as long as you have the most recent version of Flash installed. More details on your Mac, Safari version and Flash version would help.
Thanks
Walt