We've added the ability for you to preview your blogs before they publish.

Batching your work is a great idea, so it is a common (and recommended) practice to write a week's worth of blogs and then schedule them to publish on specific days. The blog articles will not show up on your site until that date. But often times you want to see what it looks like before hand, or you want to schedule a third party social media tool like HootSuite to tweet and facebook the blog post on that day.

So we've added a link in the List and Edit view that lets you preview the article. Simply use that link to allow the third party to access the article, images, etc.

Voilà!

We've upgraded all the maps on your site to look much nicer, and they now include street view as well as the ability for visitors to find directions to your location.

And if you have a business or church with multiple locations, we now have a great way of displaying all your locations on the same map, and letting people choose which location they want to directions for. The Map and Directions page also displays the contact information for each of your locations so it's conveniently available without any customization.

To activate the multiple locations, simply add new "Location" modules with the contact information for each location. Then the Map and Directions page will pull that information and display it on the map. Done.

We've revamped our entire sign up process so it's easier than ever to make a brilliant site and get started personalizing it for your needs.

• Simple Fields. Now we only requires the most basic information required to create an account. We don't require you to enter a credit card, or all your personal information.
• Free 30 Day Trial. We now sign you up for a free 30 day trial of our Pro Site, so that everyone can take advantage of our free support to help you get started. You can downgrade to a free lite site at any time if you don't see the value of the professional features and support long term.
• Design Picker. We have a much nicer design picker now so that it's easier to see what the designs look like (home and secondary pages).
• Prepopulated Site. We now automatically build you a simple website based on the niche that you select. So if you are a polka band, we automatically create a portfolio to showcase photos and a media library to showcase your videos, etc. This lets you personalize things much quicker, by just reading the page on your site which has instructions of how to update the content in the Admin. Later when you get familiar with our Admin, you can edit/add as much as you want, but this way you have a good foundation to start from.

We're excited to let you know that we've added a very handy feature that lets you filter long drop-down select lists in the Admin. So for example: next time you need to add a menu link, and you have to choose the page to link to, you don't need to scroll through a huge list of all your pages. Instead, just start typing one of the words in the page title, and we'll filter the list.

We search for matches anywhere in the title, so you could search for "love" and we'll return "Why Clients Love Us", as well as "Love Is a Marvelous Thing". You can use the up and down arrows to highlight the option you want and hit enter, or choose the option with your mouse.

We hope you like it!

We've improved our algorithm for truncating text. There is always the danger that the preview version of the text you are shortening may have HTML in it, and if we simply truncate after X characters it can break the HTML (sometimes with ugly consequences). We had an imperfect work around for a while (that would strip the HTML in those cases just to be safe), but that meant sometimes the preview wouldn't have desired styling. So we just upgraded the function so that it detects and closes the HTML tags so that they are no longer broken. Nice little improvement.

We now have a default "Coming Soon" page that lists your basic contact information and a message to visitors that the site is under development. This page can be customized if a client needs it to be more branded. It's useful for clients that have an extensive development cycle and don't want their new site to be found by the public.

When the site is in development, it will automatically redirect all page requests to this coming soon page, unless the site is being viewed in our secure development mode. The site is also set to turn away prying search engines when set in this development mode.

We've added a new setting (accessible on the Admin > Site Info) page, to allow you to disable the Search Engine Sitemap. By default all our sites are SEO optimized, but in some cases, a client may not want the search engines to index the site (until they are ready). So this option will turn off the sitemap.xml data, which search engines use to provide a map of what pages to index. It will also add a meta tag that tells the search engine to go away for now and not index the site.

We have added support for a more visual calendar date picker to the CMS. So now when you pick dates, you don't have to consult another calendar to figure out what the date is of next Tuesday. The picker supports keyboard arrows for toggling the hours up and down, or specific number inputs.

We just integrated ReCaptcha's nifty Word Verification API into the contact forms for all our sites, e.g. Site Contact, Custom Forms, Comments, etc. They are kind enough to allow us to customize the look to be less obnoxious than their standard design (Thank You ReCaptcha!). One of the nice features is that it's handicap accessible, allowing the blind to "listen" to words, which is super cool. And the whole project, is an exercise in collective processing power of the internet. Everyone who verifies a word is participating in a project to digitize old books! They have two words they provide, one is a control word (which they know) and the other is a new word that needs to be digitized. If you get the control word right, you pass (you don't know which is which). But in the process you also digitize the new word, and when the new word gets a high enough accuracy, it gets added to the accepted words.

It's  a great little API. And now, hopefully people will not be getting as many scandalous random words from the dictionary, which was very common with our old method. Who knew the dictionary had so many naughty words.

A big thanks to City Church of San Francisco, who kindly subsidized part of the cost of this new feature to make it a priority on our production schedule. You can also anticipate a new "Forums" feature coming soon, partly subsidized by these good folks as well.

Similar to the Image Uploader we added a few months ago, we have now extended the functionality to work with documents and multimedia. Which means you can upload a lot of videos or audio into your library in one fell swoop, or upload a lot of documents at once, and watch the progress of your upload. This is a huge improvement in usability. But what's even better, is that you can upload the files to your Multimedia or Document library, while you are writing your Blog, adding your newest Property or Product, or adding any new page. You don't have to up add these to the libraries before hand, which interrupts your workflow. You can upload and add the new file to your page, all from the same interface. We hope it save you time, and is more enjoyable to use.

Extra Features Include:

• Easier "drag & drop" reordering
• File Preview with: file size and last modified date
• File type
• Thumbnail
• Category Filtering

We plan on adding these multiple upload features to the main Library upload tools as well, ASAP. But for now those are still one file at a time. But hopefully you won't need to upload that old way, since you can upload this new way now.

Also coming soon is a Slideshow Uploader, that will allow you to upload multiple images and create a slideshow instantly, which should also speed up workflow for related tasks.