Tag - release

Tue, 20 Dec 2011

Joe

Joe

Tue, 20 Dec 2011, 10:28

17 comments

Christmas release!

Ho ho ho. We thought we'd get a few more things out in the St Nick of time just before the holidays. We'll follow up later in the week with a summary of everything from 2011 and a hint at what's to come in 2012. But here's what's just been shipped.

Updates to the Shop Checkout page

Your customers can now set product quantities on the Checkout page when buying multiple items. And we've also made more clear the checkout options via PayPal, or paying by Card (not requiring a PayPal account). Plus there's a shipping drop down box.

Shopping Cart Updates

NB. To get the Checkout page updates, you'll need to navigate to the 'Checkout page' (by using the shop drop down list in the Editor), and then on the Page Editor click 'Update template'.

Shipping updates

We've added the ability for you to set domestic and international shipping rates for your product purchases. This is part of a long line of shipping based features that we will continue with next year, but for now this is one additional variable you can change.

Shipping Options

Category tweaks

You can now hide categories from the list so you can organise your products in secret ways, and then link to special hidden categories without them having to appear in the Category menu. You can also rename the 'All category'

Hidden Categories

Mobile render tweaks

We've updated the way we generate the mobile versions of your site to better organise the content we show. Items are grouped more logically and additional images will now show in the HTML version. Previously images covered by text would not be displayed, but provided at least 50% of the image is 'visible' we'll now show the image in the mobile version. We have another release slated for early 2012 which will further enhance the mobile version.

Mobile Shop

New Shop templates

We've updated all the shop templates to include the categories from the last release, and also the quantities, shipping and payment options from this release. We hope you'll agree there's some lovely stuff in there!

New December Templates

That's all for now. The team are already working on more goodies for early next year, but we'll soon be putting on our warmest socks and settling down for a good long sleep over the hols. We hope you have a wonderful time and a welcome break too.

As always, thoughts and feedback welcome.

Wed, 2 Feb 2011

Joe

Joe

Wed, 2 Feb 2011, 11:10

163 comments

Let's try that again – New release 2nd Feb 2011!!

And this time it's working! There has been a huge amount of work that has gone into this release as some of the core parts of the Moonfruit data structure have been rewritten to support the mobile HTML roadmap (V1.0 in this release) and the new Blog and e-commerce features that will follow (blog first, then e-commerce).

Mobile HTML version (V1.0)

So a large part of the work in the past 6 months has been in setting up the technology so that we can display your sites in the full Flash version (as before), a desktop HTML version (if you don't have Flash), and now a mobile HTML version (which is optimised for the small screen). We'll publish a dedicated article on just this topic in the next couple of days, but below is an idea of how the sites look in the different versions.

3Devices.png

The mobile optimised version is a single column render of your site in HTML. This allows the content to be displayed as a long vertical list which is easier to read and the user can scroll down through the objects on the page. The site navigation is done by a roll out menu, so the majority of the screen space is dedicated to your content.

This is Version 1.0 of the mobile HMTL and we will continue to upgrade it over the coming months. If you have cases where you think the mobile version is not displaying the right content in the right order, let us know and we'll add it to our test cases. We'll also add specific mobile styling into future releases to give you more options for customising it.

NB. If you are looking through the HTML version on your mobile and see a page with no contents in it, just refresh the page and it will then display the contents correctly. This 'empty page' will only happen the very first time a page is visited following this new release, so it won't happen for all users and will happen only once.

Shapes

The new shapes widgets allow you to apply effects, fills and gradients to a variety of different shape objects. These are seriously useful for customising the basic design of your site. We'll be looking to add this kind of functionality to other objects in the coming months, including text boxes, images and the blog, all of which will benefit from the improved design you can achieve with it.

newShapes.png

Let us know how you get on with them and the kinds of things you use them for.

No background option

We've added a new setting to allow you to turn off the Flash background of your site so that the HTML background is shown across the full browser. This allows you to achieve the 'full screen image' or 'chunky header/footer' styles that are common in the new contemporary web look and feel. How about a full screen image, shove in a few rounded corner shapes with drop shadow under your text boxes for legibility and bish-bash-bosh there you have it ;-)

noBackgroundImage.png

And before you ask, tiling options for your background image will follow shortly ;-)

That's it for now. We regret we can't bring you the blog at the same time, but there's a bit more work to do on that. 2010 was a big year for us in terms of investment in the infrastructure to make certain features possible, and 2011 will be the year when all these features start hitting the streets. Expect a lot more from us in 2011. We expect more from ourselves.

Mon, 13 Dec 2010

Joe

Joe

Mon, 13 Dec 2010, 12:03

33 comments

Release update - Mobile HTML, Shapes, Blog, etc.

Just to give you all an update on progress and expectations for the next release. We were prepping to have a release ready for the end of the year, but we won’t release it until early in January. We generally try to avoid releases too close to Christmas before many of the developers go away. The last thing we want is to find unexpected bugs that we can’t fix quickly which cause you grief.

This January release will include the first version of the new mobile optimised HTML, some improvements to the desktop HTML (current HTML version), and some forerunners to the full blog release, e.g. new shapes components (including gradients, images fills, effects like drop shadows, etc. - see below) and a few other bits and pieces. There is also quite a big change to the way we store data. The full blog will come out a few weeks later.

We are choosing to do the release in 2 parts as there is a lot going into it and it’s much easier to manage this way. We appreciate this means the blog will be later than you expected, but we hoped to whet your appetite with some of these changes sooner rather than later, and the mobile HTML improvements will be in this first release.

In the meantime, here’s a few examples of the kinds of things the new shapes objects can do that will really open up some of the design possibilities in your sites...

New Shapes

All of these are achieved using the new basic 'shapes', with a number of effects, fills and gradients applied to them which are part of the shape settings. So the design possibilities are pretty wide ranging!

starsResized.jpg
Stars - using 2 semi-transparent gradient fills, with thick border and blur effect on star shapes


swissResized.jpg
Swiss cheese - using bevel border with blur, and multiple shapes aligned to appear to be one layer

girlyResized.jpg
Cute - Eiffel Tower has a flat image fill, chunky white border and drop shadow, while the girl has a chunky dotted yellow border and pink/purple drop shadow


carResized.jpg
Splat - a borderless image fill (car), with 2 transparent PNG 'splats' in brown and white, positioned to create a contrast