Spinsoft Website Builder. Version 1.03.04

1.03.04 is Live!

We have revised the naming of this version to 1.03.04 since it includes some major updates and substantial database changes.  This version introduces a number of improvements and features that were left out of the previous update due to time restrictions plus a whole heap of extras that we thought would be useful.

There are a tonne of updates to read below, so if you just want to browse through at least view these important items, they are marked in red further down the page so you don't miss them.

Important!  Please read below for important changes to Pages and Content.

Important!  Please read below for important changes to Images.

Important!  You should update your forms as soon as possible.

Important!  Use the new logout button when exiting.

Important!  New Product Settings section, please read below.

Important!  Please read below for important changes to the Member List.

*This update features new graphics, please clean out your cache*  Click here for instructions

What's new in 1.03.04

Base Module:

• Interface
  • On Demand Loading: You will notice changes to the loading of the system, we have implemented a new 'Load on Demand' system so you can log in faster.   What this means is that a section such as Image Library, will only load if you visit that section, it still only loads once but this method is most efficient for bandwidth since many times when you login you only want to edit a page or make a minor change.  So loading is much quicker now, the only thing stopping it from being practically instant is because it checks the available diskspace when you login, this can simply be skipped on the loading screen however and you can double click the diskspace at anytime to update it. 
  • Important Change!:  Added a new Logout button to the top right of the Website Builder.  It is recommended that you use this instead of just closing it, as it logs you out properly and clears your session, reducing the risk of session hijacking.
  • You can now view your diskspace at the top of the website builder, it is much more accurate than in previous versions.  In addition to this you can hover your mouse over the diskspace to get a breakdown of disk/database/mail usage, and you can double click the diskspace bar to update it.
  • We have made some adjustements to the code which will hopefully stop the browser caching some important files, this means new versions should successfully run without cleaning out your temporary files.  Having said that we really recommend you do this anyway - it's good for your pc!
  • Added a refresh button to each section, this can be found to the right of the section heading.  This is useful if you ever get stuck because you lost internet connection, you can simply reload the section without having to login to the whole system
  • We have adjusted the height of the main menu buttons and pushed everything up for the problem some users were having at 1024 x 768 resolution.  We have a new layout planned for one of the future updates which will improve the space usage for all users.
  • You will no longer be able to load bypassing the popup, this is a required feature so we can keep things looking as they should.
  • Infotips are now more noticable when they occur with a slight animation
  • The look of SEO (search engine optimization tips) has been changes so they are easy to identify.
    
• Administration
  • We have flagged the main admin accounts so they can't be deleted, and whenever they login it will be in open admin mode.  This is a feature that we set in the database and is purely so you can't lock yourself out of the website builder.
• Image Library
  • Important Change!:  We have improved the way images are handled for Search Engine Optimisation and to handle the new available image formats (Gif & Transparent Gif).  What does this mean to you?
    • Image Names are now UNIQUE per site.  This is because the name is now used for the physical name of the file.  Eg.  An image with the name 'Fish' might have previously been named 'image10.jpg' but will now be called 'fish.jpg'
    • For compatibility with the previous method, image names such as image1, image2, image3 will not be allowed.  However slight alterations are allowed such as image 1, image 2, image1a, image2a, anyname1, anyname2.  (This restriction specifically only applies with the word 'image' followed by a number)
    • So, take advantage of this and use relevant keywords in your image names.
    • Existing images will remain in the format image1.jpg etc, until you resave the image.  So your current images will show correctly on your site still.  When you save the image you may need to rename it if you get an error that the name already exists.
    • The code inserted into the rich text editor for images has been changed, however for compatibility we also handle the current code.  So you do not have to go and replace all of your images.
    • We will be sending out a new install file for the updated imageuploader which is compatible with the new changes, the previous version should still work, however it will only upload images as jpeg.
  • When saving an image, if you use custom settings you now have extra settings
    • Image Quality:  You can set the image quality, this only effects JPG images.  The higher the quality, the more diskspace it will use.  For photo's with people etc, lower quality is recommend as it is harder to notice - you can even get away with 40%.  For images which have text or sharp objects, higher quality can be better.  Having said that for text based images GIF can be a better format depending on the image.
    • Image Type:  You can now chose the image type to save as.  Before this update all images were saved as JPG, but now you have the option to save them as GIF or GIF (with transparency). 
  • More image formats are now supported:  You can now upload images of type Jpeg, jpg, gif, tif, bmp, wbmp, png 8bit and png 24bit images.
  • Transparent Gifs AND Animated Gifs are now supported.   To keep your transparency you must select GIF (transparency)  when saving your image.   Animated gifs can be saved as GIF or GIF (transparency), if you save it as a JPG all of the frames will be merged into a single image.
  • There are two new fields in the image settings, Image Title and Image Caption.  Image title shows above the images in an image gallery, and above the image when viewed at full size.  The caption shows below the image when viewed at full size.  Both of these are fully styleable in the template design.
  • If an image is taking a long time to upload you will be prompted after 1 minute intervals if you want to continue or cancel.  The image will continue to upload while you are making your decision, so if you have set a large file to upload and walk away from your computer it will continue uploading even though it will ask you if you want to continue.
  • SEO TIP: Added to Image Name.
• File Library
  • There is a new field in the file settings for each of your files, this new File Keycode feature allows you to apply a key that must be entered to download the file on your website.
  • Multiple keycodes can be entered separated by commas (e.g 123,345,xyz) and all of these will allow the visitor to download the file.  This is a good way of phasing out old keys while you hand out new ones.
  • If a user clicks on a link to download a file with a Keycode, they will be sent to a page where they can enter the keycode to download the file.  However if the site is running the Membership Module in policy mode, the keycode will only be required for members who do not normally have access to the file.
• Panel Library
  • We have added a new special panel ‘Member Name Panel’, which is only displayed when a member is logged into your website.  It will show ‘Welcome firstname’.
  • Special panels can now have rich text added to them, and there is an option to show the rich text above or below the special panel data.
  • Custom panels now have a new setting to always show, only show when a member is logged in or only show when no member is logged in.  These allow you to give a more interactive feel to your members.  These settings do not effect policies.
• Pages and Content
  • Important Change! : We have added two new buttons to the page settings, Publish and Un-Publish. 
    • The save button will now only save the page settings, it will not save the physical file.
    • To save the physical page on the website you must use the new Publish button. 
    • You can also remove the physical page off the website without deleting the page item by using the Un-Publish button.
    • These changes will allow you to have full control over when your page is live on the website, and when changes you make go live.
  • You can now enter a longer Title for your pages
  • For Image Gallery pages, there is now a new option in Page Type Settings. You can choose wether or not to show the new image title above the images in the image gallery.
  • Descriptions have been added to the pages in the ‘special pages’ category under the new heading ‘special page description’.  This will only be shown for special pages, not the pages you create.  You can take a look at these so you can see what each special page does.
• Template Design
  • Dropdown Menus are now available for both Horizontal and Vertical Menu's.
    • These dropdown menus work without javascipt, and have been tested in all major browsers with great success.   These browsers include IE6, Firefox, Opera and Netscape for PC and Firefox, Safari, Netscape and Opera for Mac.  Netscape has some minor issues with the hoverzone being cut off in some situations, but it does not effect menu operation.
    • For Horizontal Menu's the drop down is always in effect if you have more than one level of menu, for Vertical Menu's you have the option to use the Normal Mode, or Dropdown Mode.  For very large menu's we recommend using Normal Mode since it is more efficient.
    • We have developed the drop down menu system with special safety zones so that they are easier to use and won't be accidentally closed just because you move your mouse to the edge.  These safety zones can be seen if you toggle them on in template design.  This will allow you too see where they are and design your menu accordingly.  (This toggle only shows/hides the safety zones, even if you turn this toggle off they still work, you just can't see them).
    • The safety zones can be custom set to any size by setting the margin of the appropriate tier menu background.  This gives you full control over your menu of each tier.
    • All settings for the dropdown menu's can be accessed in Template Design, under the Vertical and Horizontal Menu tabs.
  • Vertical Menu also has another new mode, All Open Menu, which is similar to normal mode however all sub menus will be open and visible all of the time.
  • Floaters now support full richtext!  This gives them much more flexiblity and opens up a whole new range of template designs that you can make.
  • Swap template now has a new option to ‘republish pages’ if desired.  Previously this was always done, but with the new publish/un-publish of pages you may just want to swap the template without rebuiling the page.   If you decide to republish then the latest richtext for each page will be used.
    
    In addition to this, the successful infotip now shows more information including how many pages were swapped, how many pages were re-published and if there were any pages that were not due to errors.
  • When you select a template, on the ‘Template Setup’ tab you can now see how many pages are using the current template.
  • Template extensions now have the options of using parent panels, so whenever they are saved the selected panels in the parent template will be used for the extension.  If you want to use custom panels for the extension, leave it on ‘use custom panels’.
    
  • Template Layout
    • You can now enter ‘auto’ as the page footer height.  This is the recommended setting as the footer will expand with the content you have in it, all presets were updated with this. 
    • Some additional error messages have been added when entering invalid widths/heights
  • Customize Style
    • Added a new black and white box in addition to the current transparent box in the color selection.  This will make it much quicker and simpler to select them
    • Added a Color picker to each color element, simply click the circle in the top left of any color, background color or border color and then you can use that color elsewhere!
    • The text color will now only show where appropriate, previously it showed wherever background color was.
    • Added a new vertical align option for table cells.  You can now control the vertical position of the cell contents to top, middle or bottom.
  • Select Image for all elements has been updated to handle the new image system.  It is much more user friendly now: it remembers where you are in the library even when switching between templates, you can change the size of an existing image without having to select it again and you can use all available image sizes.
  • Link Styles have been moved to their own tab next to text styles.
  • New Style: You can now style the 'current' menu button for both menus.
  • New Style: You can now style all 3 levels of buttons in the Horizontal Menu Tab.
  • New Style: You can now style the background of each menu tier in the Horizontal and Vertical Menu Tabs.  This should give some extra flexibility to your menu's.
  • New Style: You can now style you download file links differently to other links.
  • New Style: You can style the new Image Title and Image Caption in the Image Gallery tab.
• Rich Text Editor:
  • The insert link functionality has been improved.  You can now insert dynamic links to anchors, pages, images, files and products!  Using Insert File will now use this new system.
  • Insert Image has also been improved. It will remember where you were in the library (for the duration of editing the current page) and has a new 'Insert with Imageview Link' option.  If you use this your image will be linked to the bigger version of the image in the image viewer.
  • The insert image also now identifies images when you double click them, so you can easily change existing image settings without having to find them in the library again.  This was one of my main annoyances so I know i'm glad its fixed!
  • We have added some new key bindings.  You can now use numbers 1 to 9 while holding down your alt key to select a style.  Alt 1 to 3 are paragraphs, Alt 4 to 9 are headings.
  • Added a new autosave feature, each time you load the rich text editor for a page, panel, product etc this setting will be turned off.  If you think you might be working on the item for quite a while you may want to select an autosave time from the dropdown next to the save button.  There are various increments between 5 and 30 minutes.
  • You can now use the save button even if you have a popup option like ‘insert image’ etc open.  This will handle the rare case where your internet connection temporarily drops out right at the point of loading the popup and you cant close it.  Instead you can press the save button, close the rich text editor and open it again.
  • You can now hide/show the properties panel of the Form Builder/Table Builder to give you the full editor width if desired.  This setting will be remembered for the entire editing session.
  • Table Builder:
    • Tables now have their own table builder in the rich text editor, and they are now easier to work with.
    • You can format the table much easier than before, in some cases it was tricky to select the right part, now if you select anywhere in the table you can press the table format button and edit the settings in the right properties panel.
    • Table rows and columns can now be deleted!
  • Form Builder:
    •  Important Change!:  There is a new FORM result section which you will see under your form in the rich text editor.  This new area (with the green heading) is where you put any information you would like to be shown once the form is sent successfully.  Previously when they sent the form they got ‘Thank you, form sent successfully’ but now you can put anything you want in.  In addition to this, once sent successfully the form itself is hidden, and the form result is shown instead.
    • Forms now work properly in detailed product descriptions, this can be useful on special products where you can put “Enter your details and we will send you more info”, or even for prize draws “Submit this form to enter the competition” etc
    • We have added a new ‘preset forms’ button to the form builder toolbar.  You can add contact form, information request form, or a custom registration form all by the press of a button!  Once you enter the preset you just need to finish setting it up by entering your email and some other things depending on the form.  Instructions are provided at the top of the form which you simply delete once ths form is ready
    • You can now create checkbox groups!  To create a checkbox group, enter the same group name for any checkbox you want in the group.   When someone send the form to your email the group heading will appear and any options they selected in that group will appear under the heading.  The only limitation, which is because of how checkboxes work, is that if no checkboxes in the group are ticked, the group heading will not appear in the email (which doesn’t really matter since they didn’t tick any options!)
  • The pathbar at the bottom of the rich text editor will now show the link destination when you have it selected or the cursor is on it.
  • SEO TIP: Added to Insert Link, to the link and tooltip.
  • SEO TIP: Added to Insert Image, to the tooltip.

Product Module:

• Product Settings
  • Important Change!:  There is a new product settings section where you can configure your product display and tax settings.  You should make sure this is configured correctly to suit your products.
  • These new settings will be reflected on your website.
• Product Editor
  • Added a new field for product keywords, this field has 2 purposes.  Firstly if you enter keywords here they will be used as the keywords when this product is viewed in productview.  Secondly these keywords will be used in the product search which we will be adding to sites down the track, an effective internal site search.  So keep the keywords relevant to the product.
  • In addition to the new product keywords we have optimised productview to help out the search engines.  The product summary will now be used for the page description and the product name will be the page title.  Keep in mind with the summary and keywords - since it is a bit of work keeping on top of these for every product, if you leave it blank the default keywords/description from the productview page.  You can find the productview page in the blue Special Pages folder and edit them there.

Membership Module:

• General Changes
  • Added Address to the default registration form.
• Member Settings
  • Added a New option to enable/disable website registrations.  Members will only be able to sign up on your website if this is on.
  • New option to enable/disable custom form registrations.  If you create a custom registration form in the form builder and want people to register from there you need to turn this on.  If you are just using the default registration form then it is best to leave this off for extra security.
• Member Profile
  • There is now an entire new section called “Member Profile”.  Here you can setup custom profile parameters such as special interest, or anything you can think of like ‘like whats your favourite color?” etc!  This system is extremely flexible and allows you to collect absolutely any information from users when they sign up.   These are custom elements and are in addition to the default email, firstname, lastname, address etc.
    
    Any custom elements added here will appear on the default registration form and in the user profile.  You can select which items the user is allowed to edit in the profile and which are required when the user registers. 
    
    The custom elements can also be used with custom forms, simply create the correct element with the same name as the profile property, this is a little more advanced but most users will find the default register page suitable, and it is recommended to use that instead if it suits your purpose!
• Member Groups
  • Swap Group and Move Group are now active.  These allow you to swap all members from one group to another, or move the group and its extensions as an extension of another group
• Member List
  • Important Change!:  Any members that are manually added via the member list will have the ‘accept newsletters’ and ‘accept emails from admins’ set to yes. 
• Member Mailer
  • We have implemented a new compliance check system which must be carried out before you can enable the member mail.  This is in place to protect you from accidentally spamming incomplete mailers.  The system includes some self checks, an email verification test and final confirmation.  Once the mailer is enabled it can not be changed without going through the compliance checks again.
  • We have added some more information including Mailer Status, and the number of members the mailer has been sent too.
  • The mailer system which sends the mail has been improved with queue checks to ensure members only get the mailer once.

Bug Fixes

• If you have a link selected in the rich text editor and press the insert link toolbar button, it will now correctly fill out all of the existing data for the selected link including URL, Title and Target.
• Adding images to the watermark folder was incorrectly disabled
• We found a bug causing a problem when sending a form to multiple emails if spaces were used, this has been fixed. 
• Some buttons in the rich text editor were inheriting the styles from the selected template, this has been fixed.
• Correct the text displayed when moving a template
• Fixed a bug with styling where special panels such as the login panel were not using the panel template styles.
• Fixed a bug in template layout, where selecting a preset wouldn’t update the pagesize width, pageheader height and pagefooter height.
• Fixed a display bug when changing item categories, the list of categories now scrolls correctly
• Fixed a bug in the Rich Text Editor when entering a link without a full URL.  It will now prepend the link you enter with the url for the current site, previously it was automatically prepending the Website Builder URL.
• You can no longer move categories or extensions to their own children, causing them to dissapear.

Annoyances Fixed

• Double clicking images now loads the image information so that it can be changed without having to find the image in the library again!

Known Issues

• There are current no known issues (apart from some very little things), if you have any to report please let us know. 

Known Annoyances

• If you find anything that annoys you while using the website builder please be sure to let us know.  We use the system for our own websites and occassionally come accross things that could be simpler or are just plain annoying, so they go on the list of things to fix!
• In the Rich Text Editor sometimes it decides to scroll to the top, this is annoying and is being investigated
• In the Rich Text Editor the arrow keys don’t always move the curson down over paragraphs, this strange behaviour is behing investigated also.