It's out! We apologize for the slightly longer than expected delay, but we hope you will find it worth the wait. This has been a very large release with over 80 bugs fixed, significant speed improvements and a lot of new features, components, and UI improvements.
Some of the new components have already been talked about on the blog, but there are a couple we never got around to announcing.. the full list of new components is below.
- Paypal - Sell items on your page using paypal.
- Google Maps - Display a map to any location you want.
- Form Builder - Allow users to submit feedback via a form on your website.
- Ebay - Add a list of items for sale to your site using your eBay account.
- FriendFeed - Display a feed of your data from your FriendFeed account.
- Delicious - Show bookmarks from your del.icio.us account.
- Upcoming.org - Display events for a city, or watched events from an upcoming.org account.
- BlogRoll - Create a list of your friends blogs, and include the date updated, or even the most recent post if you want.
We've made some significant improvements to the component management interface as well. Now when adding new components you aren't asked if you want to add to all pages or just this page, instead we show indicators on the page and let you pick in the same step as deciding where to add the component.
If you have nested pages (yoursite.viviti.com/products/widget) you also get the option to add to just the pages in that path. This means you can create groups of pages, and add content that will appear on just that group of pages in addition to adding content to every page on your site, and to specific pages only. This also works on dynamic pages, for example you can add content that will show on all blog posts.
We also made it so when dragging components you can now drag them between "All pages" and "Only this page". A lot of people asked for this, and it should make working on your site much, much easier. Previously you had to delete the component, and then re-add it! Another neat little feature we had requested was the ability to drag components to the different pages via the Page drop down, so we added that too.
To make customizing themes easier, we created the ability to replace images in the themes. This will effect any image that is an IMG tag in html (not css background images, as those are used for layout purposes). We've modified most of the themes to use IMG tags, so you can now point at images in your layout and if it's replacable, you will have the ability to select your own image.
To the Blog service we added spam filtering, the ability to disable commenting on posts after a set period of time has elapsed, announcing/ping service for new posts, global comments feed, tags option to the blog archive component, multiple categories per blog component, and a easier way to edit and remove blog posts without having to view the post itself. Phew. That's a lot of blog upgrades :)
We didn't stop at the blog though, there is now syntax highlighting in the edit theme form, and a syntax highlighting option in the visual editor in case you want to post code snippets on your website. Pages can now be password protected, and we created a nice page manager to easily edit, delete, and create new pages. Searching was added to the file manager, and the file manager will show EXIF data of uploaded photos. We added a page description (for meta tags) and Sitemap XML option for those that want to improve their SEO, and the ability to customize your favicon (we even provided a nice set of default choices).
We've made various other tweaks and updates, and added a bunch of new themes (now over 100), but that should be the more noticable stuff! We hope you guys enjoy it, we're certainly excited to get this release live!
If you encounter any problems with this release, try clearing your browser's cache and refreshing the page; otherwise, report bugs in the Viviti forum.
