We are excited to announce a powerful new "Staging" feature that allows you to preview exactly what your website will look like without actually revealing the changes to the general public. This allows you to test one page or redevelop the entire site and push it all live at once. This is a simple concept, but it comes in really handy.

The process is simple and can be utilized with any content, e.g. My Pages, Blogs, News, Promo Modules, Menu Items, etc. Whenever you are editing content you can set the status to "Offline" or "Live". This is located either in the "General" tab or the "Page Settings" tab. But in the status options you can also select several other options:

• "Staging": you will only be able to view this content item when you are browsing your site in "staging mode".
• "Live, but Inactivate on Staging-Sync": you will be able to view this content on the live site, but it will not appear when browsing the site in "staging mode" and when you push the staging content live this content will be inactivated.
• "Live but Delete on Staging-Sync": you will be able to view this content on the live site, but it will not appear when browsing the site in "staging mode" and when you push the staging content live this content will be deleted completely.

Anything that is "Live" status will appear on both the live site and the site when browsing in "staging mode".

Preview Site in Staging Mode

If you want to browse your site in Staging Mode so you can preview the new content alongside the current live content, simply click the big blue "View Your Site" button at the top of the Control Panel. This will open up your site and toggle on Staging Mode. You know you are in Staging Mode because there will be a small blue button at the top left of your site that says "exit staging mode". If you want to see the live site again, just exit staging mode and you are back to the live site.

Pushing Staging Content Live

Once you have everything looking exactly how you want it, you can either set individual content status to "live" or if you are a pro client and have made a lot of changes and you want to push it live all at once, you can use our one-click publishing to perform a "Staging Sync". This option is available under Admin > Tools > Staging.

Use Case

For example, if you are replacing a module on your home page and want it to still appear on the live site, but you want to test how it will look in staging mode, you can switch the current live module to "Live, but Inactive on Staging-Sync". This way, the old module turns to inactive when you decide to go live with your new module. (This keeps the two modules from fighting over which one gets to show up).

Great news for those of you that lack grand Pixar-esque imaginations. We've revamped the Switch Design Skins page in the Admin, so you can see the designs better and choose color themes. We've also added a button that let's you preview the design on your site before you save. This lets you browse through your website and see how everything looks in the context of your own content.

One thing to note, is that there could be some elements that will need to be adjusted once you switch designs, because different designs have different module areas and image sizes. But that's easy to fix by reassigning module areas and uploading different images for the home page or shell header if necessary. Easy.

The preview mode will last for one day, and then revert back to the original design. Or you can click the big "Exit Preview Mode" button to return to your existing design. No one else can see the preview, but you could send the link to a friend if you were so inclined.

So... we redesigned the Design Preview controls so that they float on the top of the page. We're also showing the colors of the different themes for each design skin (it's more visual). Have a look and play around with the different designs. It's all kinds of fun. Once you find a design you like, you can click the "Make a Site Like This!" button and you'll be taken to our Start form with that design combination already selected.

We've added Design Preview controls on all our demo sites, which let you see the same website in different design skins. Some of our skins have several theme options, and you can toggle between these as well. This is a great way to imagine how your site might look in different designs.

We've done a ton of updates to old and new design skins, and released them as 2.0 versions that are now the defaults. But if you are using a version of the free designs skins from before 1 week ago, or you have an old custom design that is perhaps getting out of date, is not HTML5 compliant for mobile devices, etc., we really recommend that you switch the design on your site to one of our updated free design skins. They have been given a lot of attention to detail at every level, e.g. the modules are styled to look good in every context, there are modules were they weren't availalbe before, the code is overhauled and more HTML5 compliant, etc.

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!