Spinsoft Website Builder - Version 1.03.00

Welcome to version 1.03 of Spinsoft Website Builder.  This update features some major changes to how sites are structured to give you extra flexibility and the ability to create a very impressive website for your visitors. The biggest of these changes is the introduction of sidebars & panels, along with secure login to the CMS and product attributes for those of you with the Product Module installed.

Be sure to have a play around with the changes, and if you come accross any bugs or issues please let us know as soon as possible. Please note that there will be another small update later this week to update the front end (your website) to reflect some of the new features such as product attributes. Meanwhile you can prepare all of your products for this.

Lastly we are working on an all new help & documentation site which we will release this week also.

What's new in 1.03.00

Spinsoft Website Builder will no longer packaged as lite/premium etc.  The new modular structure allows you to only license the modules you need.

Base Module:

• Spinsoft Website Builder has now been customized in a compact window, if you have popups blocked simply click the link as indicated and it will allow the popup. If not then the CMS will load automatically.
• Administration login has been added to the CMS, at this stage please use the login we have provided for you. In the next major update we will include the ability to manage administrators from within the CMS.
• Disk Usage information has been added to the top bar of the program. It will give a relatively good indication of how much space you have used, out of how much space you have purchased. This amount includes email usage.
• A site pulldown has also been added to the top bar of the program, Spinsoft Website Builder now supports the ability to manage multiple subdomains and directories all from the one installation! If you would like to add a subdomain or directory to your site, please contact us for pricing.
• Sidebars & Panel Library
  • Sidebars have been introduced to give your website even more flexibility. First you build some panels in the panel library using the rich text editor, then in your template design you can build both a left and right sidebar for the template. You can have a set of custom sidebars for each template! This means that with multiple templates you can make sure you show panels with information relevant to the current set of pages.
  • Panels are designed in the new panel library, here you can create individual panels, and then put these panels into groups. Groups are great so that you can randomly display any one of the panels whenever someone visits your site. For example you might have 5 items on sale that you want to randomly show in that panel spot on the sidebar.
  • Sidebars are built from template design, and can be seen about half way down before you get into text formatting. They are built in the same way your menu is built, so it should be very easy to pickup. You can add both individual panels or panel groups to the sidebar.
  • Important notice: Your vertical menu is a special panel item that needs to be added to one of your sidebars, for existing sites we have done this for you. Other special items will be added so you can place them in your sidebars such as member login and shopping cart.
• Special Categories now appear as blue folders. You cannot delete these folders, however you can create subfolders within them. Some blue categories such as "Special Panels" in the panel library will not allow you to create items within the folder, this is a design intention.
• Some new icons have been added to certain areas of the site.
• Adjustments to the way items, categories etc are updated on the fly has been improved. This will allow multiple users to use the cms, stop the previous problems that occurred when you added simultaneous items/categories too fast.
• Multiple users can now successfully operate the CMS at the same time even at different locations. There should now be no conflict even if working in the same area of the site. Keep in mind that unless you use the refresh button on the category tree/item list, you will not see the items they are adding/removing. If you notice any problems with multiple users, be sure to let us know. (Please note multiple users requires multiple logins, if you need more users setup let us know. In a future update you will be able to manage users within the CMS.)
• Added refresh buttons throughout the site to update the category/item lists. This is useful when you know someone else might be updating the CMS at the same time.
• Added the ability to select any template as the 'default' template. When you create a new page it will automatically assign itself the default template.
• Improved the look of the default template and included sidebars.
• When adding pages in the menu builder, the page name automatically gets spaced and capitalized. With this in mind you can plan the naming of your pages to reduce renaming in the menu builder. E.g. the page photo_gallery would be named "Photo Gallery" on the button.
• The ability to create image groups has been added, at this stage you can't use the groups in your template but we are hoping to add this functionality later in the week. We will supply full details when they are active.
• Optimized image operations so they will now be created & removed faster, in some cases taking half of the previous time.
• Added Confirmation when deleting templates

Product Module:

• Product attributes have been introduced as a new feature within the product module. It gives you incredible flexibility when creating your online product catalog, by allowing you to add Attributes to your product with various values. The attributes allow you to change price, and product code based on the visitors selection, and even disallow certain combinations!
• For full details on product attributes, please visit the help section. Please keep in mind that the help website is under construction, and most sections have not been completed.

Bug Fixes in 1.03.00

• Fixed a problem which was causing stylesheets not to load right away, making another unformatted page show before the proper one. (This will only be fixed when you save your pages again)
• Fixed a bug which stopped you from selecting the top of the tree in menu builder
• Fixed an issue when you added a folder of items to the menu, causing the order to change every time you added the group
• Fixed an issue where the template styles weren't being applied in the rich text editor
• Fixed a template issue with link inheritance. If a visited link has its color, or background color set to transparent (the white box with the red diagonal line through it), it will now correctly inherit the color from the original link style. For this change to take effect, please go and save your template so it will be rebuilt.
• Many other minor bugs have been fixed with the changes.