Viviti Blog

We've released another version today! While only a couple weeks since our last release we've got a bunch of new stuff, much of it a result of some of the early beta testers feedback. Thanks to all of you, for the ideas and the bug reports!

Much time has gone into fixing bugs and making things work smoother - we've also added proper timezone support, fixed some caching issues, and improved some of the UI.

It's not all fixes though, some of the new features include a shiny new LastFM component. LastFM / Audioscrobbler has found it's way into a lot of media players these days and a lot of people are using it, so we thought it would be nice to allow you to put your favorite tracks, albums, recent songs, or recent albums on your site. It makes a great addition to your sidebar!

We've also made a bunch of improvements to the Blog system. We went and added comment management, more options of date formats, new comment approval options (for those who like to preview comments before allowing them to show up on the site), gravatar support, and a featured comment system which will highlight comments you make, and allow you to feature other peoples comments that you feel add value to your post.

A draft mode was also added, so that you can save your blog posts without publishing them and either preview them on your site, or come back and finish them later. Simply uncheck the "Published" checkbox when saving your blog post.

We made some UI changes as well, the biggest was changing around the adding of content to hopefully make it eaiser to use, by letting you pick what you want to add before asking you where to put it. For those who don't have flash, we also added a non-flash uploader to the file manager.

One thing we heard a lot of was people asking for more themes, so we've added a bunch more - and will continue to do so. Our intent is to keep adding more themes with every release - we understand that lots of people don't have the time or desire to create their own themes from scratch, and we want to be able to provide the best themes we can for you to use. 

To make it easier to sift through this ever-growing collection of themes we added the ability to sort themes by popularity and date added, as well as the ability to cycle through themes one by one while viewing the larger previews.

For those of you who do want to make your own themes, check out our theme documentation - and if you are a designer who wants to see your theme in our gallery of themes available for everyone to use, let us know!

There are a bunch of other changes and improvements to existing things, but we'll leave that up to you to find!

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Firstly, thanks for all your comments and suggestions, we appreciate everyones input. With the release of version 0.1.2 today, we've finally started sending out beta keys so you can help out even more. We've had an incredible number of beta key requests, so we're sending out a limited number of keys. If you're one of the lucky ones who receives one, please sure to give us your feedback and invite your friends. Every account will receive 10 free invites to share!

In addition to the various bug fixes and user interface improvements we're constantly doing, we've added a number of new features.

Our RSS and Atom feed component is now faster and better. When you import a feed you can now specify the number of entries to show, whether you want to show the whole feed, just the titles, or a short summary, and you can easily select which display from sites with multiple feeds.

You can now upload images, documents, and many more types of files into the new file manager, which automatically sorts by file type and allows you to organize your files into personalized collections.

To compliment the file manager, we've added a fantastic image component which allows you to display images from your file manager on your web site in any way you choose. Custom sizes, preset size options, image cropping, and resizing are all available. You can even set up a slideshow, link, or lightbox for when somebody clicks one of your images.

The already full featured blog component now supports tagging, we're adding even more hardcore anti-spam technology to what we've already done. Keeping your blogs spam free is important to us.

Although Viviti will not support themes from the Bravenet system, we have been constantly adding fresh, modern, CSS and web standards based themes and will continue to do so. It's a top priority of ours to make sure we have unique, high quality themes for you to choose from.

If you already have your own yourname.com web site, you can now point it to your Viviti site by mapping an A name record to it.

All in all, it's been a busy month here and we're proud to release this version and welcome you eager beta testers! Thanks for your continued patience during our beta cycle.