We are in the process of installing a new Admin Interface for Gutensite, which will be much cleaner, and hopefully refreshing to all our clients that have been editing their sites for years. One of the exciting new features that we will be implementing is a visual "Site View", which will function as a way to see and edit all the pages of your site in a more visual and hiearchical way. You'll be able to use drag and drop reordering and we'll be simplifying the way you add pages and content to your site.

Many people who first start building a site are overwhelmed by the task of organizing all their content, creating container pages (categories), etc. The new Site View Interface will make that process more simple, by automatically creating default categories when you add new content and streaming the content to those pages automatically. This will make things simple for everyone and advanced users who later need to add further layers of organization with additional categories can do so as they need to.

This is the first part of a broader redevelopment effort which will be making content management and publishing much easier. It's part of a strategy that will begin to help you think of your website as a stream of interrelated content. Whether it's a PDF File, Video, Blog, Calendar Event, Images, etc, it doesn't matter. If it's related to other content throughout the site, based on matching labels, it should be accessible to your visitors without a manual process of tedious linking one piece of content to another. This process can and should be more dynamic and automated, so that you can simply add content to your site, and let the site publish it in multiple places where it's relevant.

More to come on these changes.

Facebook Connect is now integrated into Gutensite's account system. You can allow all your customers to create accounts on your site, with the click of a button, by importing their basic information from Facebook. This can greatly increase your conversion numbers, by making it super easy to join your website. If they are already logged into Facebook, they will immediately be logged into your site as well. You can also take advantage of Facebook's many social features which can make your website more interactive and viral. It's good for business and it's good for your customers.

When someone uses Facebook Connect on your site, we create a local account that is synced with their Facebook account, so you have all the data locally. Even if they decide they don't want to use Facebook anymore, they can continue using your site. If they already have a local account, they can make future logins more easy by going to their account settings and clicking the button that says "Sync with Facebook".

Right now, Gutensite's account integration with Facebook is limited to account creation and sign-in. But there are lots of other features that you can add to your site, e.g. publish announcements to someone's wall (so all their friends know about it), choose a list of friends to invite to come use your service, access photos and videos, access personal information like birthdays, interests, education, work history, etc. If you want to take advantage of these extra features, let us know and we can create a special project to implement these features with your website.

To activate Facebook Connect on your site, visit our FAQ on Facebook Connect.

We just completed a total overhaul to our Audio and Video players so that they now take advantage of built in HTML5 support for audio and video. This makes our player compatible with all modern web browsers, including mobile devices like iPhone, iPad, Android, etc. For older browsers like Internet Explorer 8 (which does not support HTML5 video), and Firefox (which supports HTML5 video but is not licensed to play the MP4 format yet), we will still provide the old Flash audio/video player (but with a new skin), so your visitors will not lose any functionality.

The old Flash player will play both the old FLV and MP3 formats (like it used to), as well as the new MP4 format (for progressive compatibility). So for greatest compatibility we recommend using MP4 format for all videos and MP3 format for all audio files. We also recommend converting all your old videos that were uploaded as FLV to the new MP4 format, so that they will be viewable on mobile devices that don't support Flash. But if you keep old FLV files on the site, they will continue to be viewed by any browser that supports Flash (virtually all desktop browsers, but not most mobile browsers).

See our FAQ for more information about Multimedia Formats.

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 had requests from several clients for a simple way to add effects to their pages, e.g. to allow a button to toggle open or close additional paragraphs of information.

So we've created a simple Javascript Library called Gutensite FX, based on the Mootools Library that is already running on every site. If Gutensite FX is enabled, you can add a CSS class to any element, and it becomes a toggle button. Add another CSS class to any other element, and that becomes the area that opens or closes. It's that simple.

We only have a couple simple effects in Gutensite FX for now, but we plan to add more later. Now that the framework is created, adding new effects would be simple.

See our Gutensite FX How-To on the subject for documentation and examples of how to implement this on your own site.

We have added additional module areas throughout the site, so you can now add modules to any sidebar, and any header or footer of a page. Plus on any basic page, you can put a module in the main column (above or below content) or in a side column (with the content to the side and the module in a small column).

Basic pages already allow you to add a lot of extra specialty information under the "Extras" tab, such as pull-out quotes, headings, sub headings, info lists, etc. These show up in a beautiful 3/4 column layout which adds a lot of visual interest to your site. But now you can also add modules to those areas.

A common usage of this feature is to place a module that displays upcoming calendar events from a particular category, related to the page. Or to allow dynamic content by displaying the latest blogs in the sidebar. We hope it gives you a lot of new options.

We have upgraded the default calendar functionality so that when an event is clicked in the Calendar or List view, it opens up a nicely designed "lightbox" with all the details for the event. This can be closed and the visitor is still on the original calendar page. This makes viewing calendar events more convenient. Previously we had a details preview that popped up and the visitor had to then go to another details page, then return to the calendar, etc. Our upgrade provides a much more streamlined workflow.

We also took the time to upgrade the design of the details page, in case anyone visits the page directly.

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.

Theoretically any access to Admin pages or Admin functionality should be initiated from the gutensite.com domain, e.g. http://www.gutensite.com/admin

This has always been enforced for regular admin pages. But there were cases where this was not strictly enforced, e.g. the API used to be able to be accessed through yourdomain.com/admin/api/admin, however we are now strictly enforcing it to ensure that the administrative functionality is protected and necessarily secured by an SSL connection that we maintain. So the API URL for the Administrative access should be gutensite.com/api/admin, but the API URL for regular site access (if you are using that) should still be yourdomain.com/api/site since that is based off the specific domain.

We deprecated several old URL formats for accessing core pages (this does not affect Friendly URLs). The old formats included: (1) www.domain.com/index.php?ct=site.contact, (2) www.domain.com/?ct=site.contact or (3) www.domain.com/site.contact all of these methods were very old and should not be used anymore. The correct format is www.domain.com/site/contact, and so we updated all the instances where the old method was used.

Our CMS will still correctly recognize the old formats 1 & 2, but not 3, until the next upgrade. But any pages using the old method should be updated ASAP.

If your site is getting a 404 page not found error, please send us the URL of the page that is not loading, as well as the URL of the page you were on (with a description of the link that you clicked).

After several years of unstable builds with our current JavaScript classes and functionality, the amazing Mootools team has released the latest version, 1.3 which includes great backwards-compatibility with all of our scripts: old and new.

All of the functionality added recently including the TimezonePicker, newest Uploader, and several others heavily depend on the newest builds of Mootools in order to function at top speed and reliability. Though long overdue, this update will provide an excellent boost in all areas possible to JavaScript-related functionality.

Selecting your timezone can oftentimes be a daunting task because of all the options with cryptic-sounding GMT offsets and no real visual representation. We have taken the time to create a completely visually-oriented Timezone Picker with the following features:

• Map View of the World: Upon hovering over each section of the world, it will highlight the segment of timezone area associated with it.
• City Markers: Clicking a portion of the map will insert a marker (red dot) to the closest city of your clicked point. There are 397 cities mapped out to their corresponding timezone.
• Daylight Savings: The closest city will determine the timezone offset. In some cases, there are states/countries that have different timezone rules for Daylight Savings Time (DST) so this gives the option to specify very specific locations.
• Choose Closest City: A select box will be populated with cities within a certain vicinity of the current highlighted city. This will allow you to further specify a city close to you without having to click exactly on the map where you wish it to be. Examples of this feature helping would be in Europe, where there are many close-clustered cities that may be hard to click perfectly on.

In order to support international language foreign characters, we've converted to support UTF-8. This should be a seamless transition for all, but it required quite a lot of changes to our code.

POSSIBLE BUGS

If you notice some strange looking characters on your website, or RSS feeds, or API interactions, this would be the cause. Tell us immediately.

TECHNICAL CHANGES

• Changed php.ini default_charset=utf-8
• Databases Converted to Charset=utf_8 and Collation=utf8_unicode_ci (should have been lossless and not messed up any data)
• html_entity_decode() converted to use "UTF-8" for output.
• HTML metada charset changed to utf-8
• form.class changed to not htmlentities() encode everything in database, but instead only htmlspecialchars()