Thursday, May 8, 2008
- Tim Wall
The hits just keep on coming here at Element Fusion. Our development team has been working hard on some great new features for our Water, Sky and LightCMS systems. And, in an effort to serve you better, we've decided to start announcing our feature releases a few days ahead of time so that you'll get the word before the changes hit your website. Therefore, keep in mind that the features listed below are not yet live, but they will be early next week.
In fact, the upgrade is scheduled for 7am CDT (GMT -5) on Tuesday, May 13th. The upgrade window is 30 minutes (though previous upgrades have always taken significantly less time). Your website will be offline during the upgrade process.
Now, on to the fun. Here's a look at the coming features.
Drafts with auto-save and version-tracking
This one is HUGE and will be making all of our lives much easier and a bit more fun as well. The text-editor now includes a "Save Draft" feature that allows you to save versions of your content as drafts without taking them live on the site. You can then restore any of your previously saved drafts at any time with a single click. Not only that, the system will auto-save your drafts for you every five minutes to avoid the possibility of losing your work. So relax. That big blog post you're working on won't disappear if the power fails. We're looking out for you.
- Protection against losing your work. The auto-save feature will save a draft of what you are working on every five minutes. So, you'll always have a back-up. Plus, you can manually save a draft as well at any time.
- Work on changes without taking them live. If you want to queue up some changes to your page but you don't want them to go live just yet, simply save them as a draft. Then, when you're ready to publish, just load up your saved draft and take it live.
- Recall any previous version at any time. A simple drop-down box displays every previously saved version of your content (see image below). Load one up with a single click.
The drafts functionality is available anywhere that the text editor is used. This includes all text-elements, blog posts and calendar event detail pages.
The bottom of the text editor now contains a "Save Draft" button and a drop down for loading any previously-saved draft.
Custom Robots.txt content
You can now add any content you desire into your website's robots.txt file. Simply visit My Website --> Settings and click on the advanced tab to add your content. This is extremely beneficial for those involved with search engine optimization. If you are not familiar with how to use robots.txt files, don't worry. You don't have to add any content in there, but it is available for those users who need it.
Force secure logins (LightCMS resellers, please read carefully)
To improve the security of our system, we have added a "force secure logins" feature to redirect all requests for the login page on your website (i.e. yoursite.com/login) to a secure page. To do this, we must redirect the login page to your site's publishpath.com domain. Our security certificate for the publishpath domain gives us the ability to offer security on every site using this method.
However, this means that when logging into and administrating your website, you and your users will be pushed to your publishpath.com domain rather than your custom domain. Because this may not be desirable for some, we have provided you with the ability to "opt-out" of the force secure logins feature. You can visit "My Account" and click the "Preferences" tab where you will be able to uncheck the box next to "Force secure logins" (see image below). Keep in mind that disabling this feature means your logins will continue to take place on unsecured web pages.
Attention LightCMS account-holders. We know that the private-label nature of our system is extremely valuable to you and that exposing the publishpath domain to your clients may not be desirable. Therefore, if you have a LightCMS account with at least one paid website, we will not be automatically opting you into this new feature on Tuesday. Your logins will continue to work as they do currently. If you wish to take advantage of the force secure logins feature (and you are ok with the use of the publishpath domain on your client sites), then you can opt into this feature on the "Preferences" tab under "My Account" (see image above). Every other account on our system, other than LightCMS accounts with at least one paid website, will be automatically opted into this feature on Tuesday.
Regarding login elements: Some websites make use of our login elements to add login functionality onto a specific page. This new feature will not affect login elements, only the login page accessed by using "/login" at the end of your domain. To make a login element secure, you would simply need to make the page on which it resides secure by visiting the advanced tab of "page settings." This would, again, invoke the publishpath domain as it does for any secure page on our system.
Should you have any questions about this or any of our upcoming new features, please contact us at support@publishpath.com.