Wow-wee! As previewed last week, the new WebEden control panel and editing tools are now live, in Beta. Its an exciting time for us, and for you too (we hope!). This control panel is the result of months of hard work, and is the biggest update so far.
For those of you who missed the preview, this is what it looks like:
As we said, its the largest overhaul to the edit environment in the last 5 years, and sets up our website building platform for future development too. The long awaited HTML widget is now out of beta, works in all browsers (ooooohh), and opens up libraries of additional content. And you can now copy an entire site too…
New Toolbar (beta)
Some are calling it WebEden SiteMaker5, some call it WebEden+, all we know is we call it the New Toolbar. It’s been launched as an opt-in beta version, which means it’s fully functional, you can choose it, you can use it, but you’re not forced to. We’re looking for feedback - good and bad (constructive) - so that we can polish it off for a final release at a later stage. But it works and in our testing so far makes things far quicker and easier to do.
To get to it, login to your site and go to ‘View’ –> ‘New Toolbar (beta)’. Your site will reload in the new environment but you can revert to the old style toolbars at any time. The advantages of the new Toolbar are:
- Use the full screen browser for editing - you can move edit tools outside the boundary of your site
- Zoom in/out while editing - you make your site bigger/smaller to help ’see’ it in full glory
- Sticky edit tools - the Toolbar remains at the top and the Editor will remain on screen as you scroll up and down
- Show off-screen objects - if you drag something off your site (outside the boundary), you can choose to hide or display off screen objects (new under ‘view’)
- Detailed insert menu - more objects can be added in one click, including some new HTML snippets (’Insert’ menu)
- Quick pages menu - includes quick ways to add pages, copy pages and change page length, plus edit meta data (for search engines) more quickly (see ‘Pages’ menu)
- Links to other services - Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AdSense can all be viewed without leaving your site (new ‘Services’ menu)
The major drive for this change was to better organise the features available and create the structure so that we can expand services further in the future. WebEden has grown to include so many features over the years, sometimes the most important ones get lost, so this is an opportunity to re-present them for how they are used today. When we started many years ago we built a ‘Page editor’ whereas today WebEden allows the management of your website over its whole lifecycle. From initial build -> monitoring traffic and performance -> developing community -> monetisation -> ongoing updates.
Copy/transfer site
Some new features in the ‘Admin’ section are the copy site and transfer site features. This allows you to create a copy of the design and structure of your site which you can use as the basis of a new site. Please note this isn’t a complete copy like backup, as some data is not copied, e.g. individual posts in comment feeds or forums. But the text, images, design, structure, etc., are all applied to the new site.
The transfer site feature allows you to transfer an existing site (or a new copy) to another user of WebEden.
Both features have been asked for many times, both by customers that want to build more sites themselves and by resellers who find they want to build similar sites for clients in similar industries over and over. These new features will help make that easier to achieve.
The HTML widget
You can’t add HTML to a Flash site, don’t be ridiculous! Or can you ;-) ? Some of you will have been using the Beta version of this widget for some time now, but for others this will be new. The HTML snippet widget allows you to paste in HTML code (or markup for the purists out there) that you might find elsewhere (Amazon affiliates, Youtube videos, Twitter feeds, etc.) into your WebEden website and use it seamlessly with our other features. The changes/improvements for this release are:
- The widget now works in all major browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and on PC and Mac
- Works with all HTML snippets (probably - we can’t find any yet it doesn’t work with, but I’m sure you will ;-)
- Some regularly used services (Youtube player, Twitter feed, etc.) have some preconfigured widgets (snippets) available to help you get started (use the ‘Setup’ tab to get the HTML code)
So this new feature makes available all Google Gadgets, all Widgetbox widgets, all Amazon widgets and more. Happy hunting!!
But remember, this still only works if you have the Flash 10 player!! Currently FP10 has around 86% penetration according to Adobe but growing by 3-4% per month.
Product selling page templates
There are now some new product selling page templates with suggested layouts for creating easy to use product pages on WebEden. You can do this in the ‘Add page’ option in the ‘pages’ menu.
For those of you waiting, these are not the long awaited e-commerce updates, so apologies about that, but we are still working towards that goal and the interface lays yet further foundations for the e-commerce tools that will require these new technologies to work as well as they can.
If you’re not sure how, you can watch a video tutorial on how to switch to the control panel.
Anyway, so that’s about it. We hope you enjoy it and let us know what you think! Enjoy!
