Beta blog update and some image goodies
Team fruit have been beavering away on some blog bug fixing and additional feature requests like highly trained little software ninja's – silently, stealthily and with great precision (except the occasional bug). So we have a small bundle of goodies to push out today. They are:
Image light-boxes
One of the requests that came in from the blog was to allow blog images to pop-up to full size to be seen in all their glory. We liked this so much we thought we'd apply it to all images in the product. When selecting an image on the page there's now a new 'pop-up' tab in the Editor allowing you to set the pop-up flag, the pop-up image and an image caption.
New pop-up editor panel
Image shown in full screen light-box
NB. This feature isn't available for images inside galleries or frames, but we'll look at extending it further in the future.
Blog Beta feature improvements!
(To join the blog beta, please see the details on the last article!)
New features
- Tweet button on each article, both post and list view
- Admin can set a display name to show as 'author' on the post rather than using the 'username' in the blog settings section
- Admins can backdate posts so you can add in historical (or hysterical) articles
- An RSS feed is now available, and an RSS button will appear on the blog template
- A button to return to the list view is now available on all posts
- Blog images will pop-up in a light-box effect (see above)
- Images are now organised in folders in the blog file picker
- Admins can turn off comments globally in the blog settings section
- Links will be automatically created in article text if you type a URL when adding a post
- Admins can set a default folder for blog image uploads
- Tags on posts now link to filtered tag results, e.g. A list page per tag
Bug fixes
- Links in posts are now working (hurray!)
New Tweet button on posts
Changes in the blog admin
We're still working on the rendering performance which we hope to ship in the next couple of weeks at which point the blog will be turned on for all users. We will continue to work on new features throughout the year too, though large parts of the team will be moving onto the shop.
NB. To get the new blog template (with the RSS button, tweet button, etc.), you will need to delete your current blog page (not the blog itself just the page) and add a new page back in from the pages section. The new blog page will not be default style again, so you will need to reapply your look and feel, and other items on the page will be lost. So you may want to copy all the page items to another page first, then delete the blog page, re-add it then copy them back. Sorry this is a bit inelegant, we'll look at changing that too.
New templates
And just for good measure we thought we'd keep up the tradition of adding in some new templates. So we've got 16 new ones now on the site wall on Moonfruit.com. Some of them look at little like this…
And that's about that for now. As always let us know if you have any comments or concerns and if you find any bugs or oddities, please let us know!
Comments
So does this mean we can have a different page layout on our blog, so its not the same as the rest of our site?
Tobi.
Fantastic!
Liking the tweet this button and the schedule posts option. Very surprised at the lightbox feature, that was something I suggested a few months ago which is a very nice bonus! New templates look great, Keep up the good work.
Congrats to the team. All good stuff, and its good to see it all coming together nicely. You must be chuffed to bits. Nice to see that you have pushed out the lightbox for global use on sites and not just the blog. Will bring a whole new look to the use of images such as thumnails.
Again Well done.!!
All looks fab. Any news when you will be making it easier for Resellers to select a sites on their log in...I think I'm getting RSI from clicking through on the scroll!!
I love the Image Lightbox feature. Finally Moonfruit is getting with whats is going on elsewhere. But it would be nice if the Pop-up image could have before and after arrows, so you can just keep clicking on images without closing off the present image box. Finally if you add a link to the image and you click on the image is goes straight to the link without the image popping up. Maybe there should be a feature inside the Pop-up Image Box that allows you to link to your desired destination.
Hi Tobi,
The Blog is added to your site as a normal page, so you can edit the design and layout as you can with any other page.
HTH,
Gary
I am making a short video for my site, when played it stops, is there anyway i can make it loop.
Pauly
Tag clouds and/or category list please!
SJP
Great release! Something else that users could benefit from is HTML coding in the blog itself. It would be great to add HTML snippets inside your article, also because I want to copy a HTML code of another commenting system as I don't really like the Moonfruit one as its too simple.
A ratings bar would be nice! So viewers could rate through stars, 1-5, smiley faces, 'thumbs up-thumbs down' that sort of thing.
Looks good so far and blog updates like this is much appreciated as everyone can see how Moonfruit is making the progress to deliver, thanks very much.
I agree with commenter number 5 "Kokotee" when he said: would be nice if the Pop-up image could have before and after arrows, so you can just keep clicking on images without closing off the present image box. Finally if you add a link to the image and you click on the image is goes straight to the link without the image popping up. This is something i've been requesting from moonfruit.com to try and improve this particular feature. As a photographer this would be very good if they will add it.
Thanks again to "Kokotee" by joining my voice regarding this. I hope moonfruit.com will finally solve this soon.
Hi Moonfruit team,
Thanks for all the hard work you're putting in, making a great product even better!
Gripes - echo the need for some sort of referencing/index for blog, also the need to be able to choose pop-up AND link.
Also, today the pop-up wouldn't let me add a caption, and PC crashed twice whilst trying to add metadata (in blog). Maybe these are just blips applying to my PC but worth mentioning.
Thanks
Hi Shirley,
Could you let us know the URL of your site, please?
Many thanks,
Gary
Hi Gary,
URL is http://gohemel.co.uk
Doesn't look like I can copy and paste links from another page into "blog". Do I have to insert each link manually??
Shirley: Could you send a ticket through to Support, please? Your site seems ok when we check from here, so we'll need some more information on your system.
Snippy Coupons: Unfortunately, it isn't possible to paste links from text elsewhere on the site, as your browser will default to copying the text. You can, however, copy the URL you have set in the Link tab.
HTH,
Gary
Good to see some graphic updates - we need more though guys :)
Rollover images with effects would be very nice, and as others have said action arrows to go through a set of images. Gallery also needs improving and also effects on images. Must try the blog but so little time at moment...
how do you add videos and music to our blog? mines doesnt let me select it
Hi Major,
The blog is still in the beta phase, so not everything is ready just yet. However, video and music post options will be added in a future release.
HTH,
Gary
Hi we would like to thank moonfruit team for all their help as regards support etc and we love the new lightbox feature but can't wait until full size pop ups available within photo galleries as well! We are also impressed with our page ranking on google page 1 ahead of approx 18 million others using the meta tagging feature which we highly recommend ! With thanks the team at superbikepictures.co.uk
loving all the updates :) within the blog, are you going to make it so we can change fonts of headers and content?? Im prolly just not looking or im a twit, but I cant see how this is done.
Overall im a VERY happy little bunny...! youve just improved on an already excellent site editer :)
It would be nice to be able to have an option for the blog post to publish at a future date determined by author
Hi Melissa, you can already. Go to your Blog page, click "Add a post", enter your title/content, then use the radio button "Set Date" to pick a publication date.
If you don't have that you may not have upgraded your page when we did a release with more features a few weeks back. Let us know and we'll advise how to correct that.
Thanks.
Walt
How do I make it so when I share on Facebook/Twitter what shows up is the title and text of the article I've just published on my blog, not a complex weblink to the article and "Write and post articles, upload images, and allow visitors to comment on your blog page."?
Hi samster78,
I suspect that the default text will be changed before the final release of the Blog, and I'll also see if usage of a URL shortener is on the cards. However, you can edit the preview text when you share a post on Facebook, by clicking on it.
HTH,
Gary
Is it possible to use a lightbox for say an e-mail sign up form? I want to enclose a Mailchimp form in a lightbox so users don't have to leave my homepage...
Hi moonfruit team.
I love the new blog but one issue im having is 95% of the time i try to go to the page to edit it flash crashes then a couple seconds later firefox will crash. When firefox crashes at the same time as flash my computer crashes its getting on my nervs now any ideas why this is happening?
Website it crashes on www.universal-designs.co.uk
Thanks
New Blog is awesome! I've been waiting for this for so long :)
But, there is one more important thing which now blog doesn't have..
I can't control size of the text...but it's very important! Now the text in my blog is very little that it's hard to read and i can't do anything with this..
New blog is good.
Just one thing.. It would be great to have an 'archive' button to list the blog posts in a column at the top of the blog page
(already use RSS feed on page)
Many thanks
Hi guys,
Thanks for the feedback. I'll pass your comments on to the dev team. If you do encounter more bugs just log them on the blogbeta site at:
http://blogbeta.moonfruit.com/#/hom...
And if you have any feature requests you can log them at:
http://blogbeta.moonfruit.com/#/hom...
You could also drop your comments onto Fruitful Beta where some of our Dev team (working on the Blog) can pick up your comments directly and respond:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk...
But I will certainly forward on your comments.
Thanks
Walt
Looks good
Hi
The new blog is working well but I'm trying to get to grips with the backdating - can it be done after a post is published? I've tried via scheduling and it just keeps defaulting to today.
Also I'd like to agree with comments about font sizes - it would be great if it were possible to edit them.
Charlotte
Hi Charlotte,
Yes, you can backdate a post after publishing - simply click on Edit Posts, choose the post you want to backdate, and click on 'Set Date'. Once you have done this, click on 'Schedule publish' at the bottom.
HTH,
Gary
Love the new pop-up feature, thanks!
Can we expect Blog pages to appear in the XML sitemap anytime soon?
thanks
Justin
Hi Justin,
Can you explain? I'm seeing the /blog page appearing in the /sitemap.xml file on several of our test sites, all of which are live. The pages are visible and so are the XML entries.
Thank
Walt
Hi Walt, I'm not referring to the main blog page but the individual blog post pages. On my test blogs the post pages are not included in the XML sitemap. It would of course make great sense from an SEO point of view to rectify this.
Also, another observation on SEO and the MF Blog. You provide an area to enter meta data on posts (well done) but then do not include a box to assign a Page Title? The Meta Page Title for each post is the same as the main Blog Page. As the Page Title is acknowledged as being v.important in SEO this is quite an omission. Can you look at either creating an extra field to enter a Page Title or like on most blogs, automatically take the post title as the Page Title.
thanks
Justin
Hi Justin, Thanks for the clarification.
I've forwarded your comments onto the Dev team and I'll let you know what they have to say when I get some feedback.
Cheers,
Walt
Hi Justin,
In response to your post the Dev team suggested there may be confusion around the title because we do not update the browser title dynamically as you navigate to pages ie. you won’t see the page title (in the browser) change when clicking from the list to the post.
The generated HTML will use the 'post' title, and only fall back to the ‘blog page’ title if no title was specified for the post.
We did look at the inclusion of posts in the sitemap.xml but from our perspective we couldn't see a benefit to having the blog post pages in the sitemap. Links to individual posts will be indexed from the ‘blog page’.
As we generate many more ‘pages’ (for dynamic content) the sitemap could grow very quickly, which then may become a problem itself. If you look at the sitemap for BBC news http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/sitemap.x... they don’t include every article ever published, only the top-level categories (regions).
Hope that answers your question. It was a good one though and got some of the Dev team thinking.
Thanks,
Walt
Hi Walt
Thanks for looking into this but I am not satisfied with the comments of your Dev team for a couple of reasons.
a) To compare any site that I build to the BBC and how they handle SEO and content management is not particularly helpful. Essentially I want my pages, including blog post pages to be indexed by Google and the rest of the search engines ASAP. The BBC does not have to worry about this being the world’s NO.1 website, but most small websites need all the help they can get to maximise the amount of pages that Google will index. Most other blogs that I know of include the post pages in their XML sitemap, not sure why MF should be any different.
b) OK, I now understand that the Page Title is not shown on the page/browser. The point is that Google does not see the pages titles either which makes SEO impossible and negates all of the benefits of a blog for site optimisation. I may be wrong but it seems to me that Google is not indexing the Page Title or any of the page content! You can clearly see this if you look at one of your featured sites ( http://valemmichfans.com ) that now uses the new MF blog. Put the following search into Google to see exactly what I am getting at: site:valemmichfans.com/events-blog
I hope this clarifies my concerns about the blog and SEO.
Thanks
Justin
Hi Justin, I've spoken to the Dev team.
a) When the bots hits the sitemap they will follow the page /blog and read the content of the posts regardless. From our point of view, knowing how bots work, it's unnecessary.
b) Ooops our mistake. We thought we'd fixed that. We hadn't. Good spot and thanks for bringing it to our attention. We'll try to get that fixed as soon as we can.
Walt
I can't get the add/remove link to work on the beta blog...What am I doing wrong?
Hi Anthony,
The Link function on the Blog works in the same way as it does in the text box widget - you just need to highlight the desired text, and then click on the Link button and enter the required data.
HTH,
Gary
RE:Tiny blog text.
It is def. a pain but I use a program like Picnik to write up my post and insert the pic in my blog. Pdf(ing)it is another solution.
Hi,
Please can you help.
Really want to implement a light box feature in my gallery. Is this possible now. Will make things a lot more user friendly.
Thanks for your support
HS
Hi Hassim,
I'm afraid this isn't possible at the moment, but we do have plans to look at improving the galleries in the near future.
HTH,
Gary
Are you thinking of adding the Google+ function to blog posts....please!
Hi Abby,
This is something that we're considering, but we are going to monitor how popular Google+ becomes first - we don't want to open the floodgates to having numerous sharing buttons on every post, if you see what I mean.
HTH,
Gary
Hi, I am new to website design, so apologies for my efforts! Any feedback would be much appreciated.
I have some questions with regards to the "timing of texts"
Can I time the word shifts the same way that I can time the "image effects" - I am trying to get some of the text delayed i.e "Before" "during" and "after" to run in a delayed sequence..... any help would be great! :)
Hi Janie,
Unfortunately, it isn't possible to alter the timing of text effects - apologies for this.
HTH,
Gary
Can I put a link at the bottom of each page to take the viewer back to the top of the page?
Hi Kenny,
This is possible, but involves a little bit of Javascript. It is discussed (with examples) here:
http://support.moonfruit.com/entrie...
HTH,
Gary