Scheduled Maintenance: Monday, January 5th, 1:00AM - 3:00 AM EST

Squarespace will be offline for a short period of time on Monday, January 5th between 1:00AM EST and 3:00AM EST as we upgrade core networking equipment. This will likely last only a few minutes, but we’re giving ourselves some extra time to verify that there are no issues.

Thanks for your patience.

New WYSIWYG Editor Release

After a successful beta period that helped us polish off the new WYSIWYG Editor, we will begin rolling it out over the next few days.  We will start with a subset of users and slowly ramp up until everyone has it, making sure there are no problems along the way.  The new editor can be identified by a completely new toolbar layout with additional buttons.  Please clear your browser cache to get the new editor.

The new editor is based on proven core technology, TinyMCE, that is widely used across the Internet.  It is the most stable and feature rich core available having been developed over the course of the last 5 years.  It has allowed us to provide more features and fixes for some common problems that have been reported about the current editor.  These include:

• Undo / Redo
• Spellcheck
• Word Count
• HTML Source Quickview
• Full Justify
• Indent / Outdent
• Microsoft Word / Web Content Paste
• Stability / Cross Browser Improvements
• Numerous Bug Fixes

Update (10/22): The new editor has been released to all users.

Peer1 Power Incident Friday, October 10th at 7:30AM

(Anyone writing in to support got an immediate response on this, but we were waiting for a complete explanation before posting.)

For a period of one hour on Friday, October 10th at 7:30 AM, Squarespace sites were unavailable due to a UPS power outage at Peer1 in New York City, which is our network provider. While Squarespace itself implements proper power planning to ensure that most of our core systems are spread between two power sources, the outage affected Peer1’s core networking equipment which routes data to their entire New York datacenter. When the UPS failed, taking the routing equipment with it, all websites at the datacenter (including Squarespace) were taken offline. The outage lasted one hour.

Upon restoration of power and bringing their network equipment online at 8:30 AM — Squarespace immediately began serving traffic again and all was returned to normal. Squarepsace was alerted to the situation by our external monitors within 60 seconds of the incident, and we were on site while Peer1 restored their equipment.

If anyone has any questions about planning, backup, or redundancy — please write in to support to have them answered. We take this sort of thing extremely seriously, and attempt to provide total transparency regarding the systems you’re hosted on and how things here operate.

Seeking More Beta Testers

The beta test of the new editor is well under way and we are looking to open the beta to more people.  Volunteers can email me at dchew at squarespace dot com and I’ll enable their accounts.  Thanks! (Update 10/10: Thanks for the great response.  We’ve filled up all the slots so that’s it for this one!)

Beta Testing New Editor

We’ve got a new version of our WYSIWYG editor ready for testing, and we’re going to be selectively enabling it on a few individuals accounts before beginning to go live with it across the system. Email me at a at squarespace.com if you’d like your account enabled early. (Update 9/23: Thanks guys. More than enough testers! You’re all quite fast :)).

Manager Cleanups

Over the next few days, the following items are being renamed and clarified in the site manager:

• RENAMED: General File Storage shortened to File Storage
• RENAMED: Domain Mapping renamed to Custom Domain
• RENAMED: General Configuration renamed to Website Settings
• RENAMED: Basics tab of Website Settings renamed to Header & Footer
• RENAMED: Blog import / export renamed to simply blog import
• RENAMED: Quick access URLs renamed to Tools & Goodies
• MERGED: Audiences and Audiences Permissions merged into a single page called Member Permissions
• ADJUSTED: Code injection points moved to separate section in Website Settings
• MOVED: Blog export moved into blog configuration screen
• MOVED: Affiliate tab moved into Billing tab
• MOVED: XML Feeds moved to a tab within Journal configuration dialog
• MERGED: Open/Review support tickets merged into a single tab

Should you wish to suggest an additional area for clarification — just write into support. Thanks!

Editor Roadmap / Known Issues

Okay — wanted to post about the state of the WYSIWYG editor, what we’re aware of, what we’re working on, and what we’ll be doing over the next week.

• By mid week, expect to see the full justify and the undo/redo option. Server side spell checking (which we don’t recommend using) will return by the end of the week. Again, spell checking wasn’t removed — all major browsers support this internally (with the exception of IE7, but Google toolbar provides spell checking there), and we wanted to shift people towards doing this. This decision was based on the lead of most other modern web applications today (see Google’s Knol) that assume spell checking is handled in the browser. In browser spell checking is more reliable, accurate, can use custom dictionaries, etc. For the other items, redo/undo is also handled by Control+Z in the interface, and full justify was moved to Fonts & Colors. Given the confusion, we’re going to revert to the way things were.

• We hope to have auto-saving for entry drafts in by the end of the week, which will fully remedy every situation where you could potentially lose a post due to a network timeout or internet issue.

• If you are having trouble uploading images, and you’re in a member account, make sure the member account actually has permission to upload images! We’re seeing a few bugs in the error messages describing this, but Squarespace is actually doing the right thing by blocking the upload. It’s just reporting it wrong.

• Some individuals expressed interest in the percentage based resizing feature — but we’re not sure why. When posting an image to your blog, the V4 interface required three steps: First, you add the image, then you calculate the right ratio to get the image to reduce properly, then you insert the image and actually see if the image looks right. We’ve brought that to one step. The preview is real-time (so you can see what it ACTUALLY looks like in the post), and you don’t have to do math to figure out how big the image should be. If your blog is 500px wide, you resize to 500 each time. This makes it much easier for very consistent looking pictures and thumbnails.

• To create a link on an image, the feature is in the “Additional Options” tab of the image editor. This is an improvement over V4, where it was impossible to tell if an image was linked properly or not. Now — you can be absolutely sure. If it’s in that area, it’s linked — otherwise it’s not.

• We’re aware of a bug where image alignment options appear to be getting cleared on load for older content in IE7 only. A patch for this is going live Monday evening.

• We’re aware of another bug in Firefox involving selecting an ENTIRE paragraph at once, or selecting multiple paragraphs and pressing the link button. Please just select less than the entire paragraph to sidestep this bug for the time being.

If you’re experiencing something that isn’t on this list — please write us immediately with some details on your issue (a so we can remedy things.

Update on Friday, August 15, 2008 at 03:56PM by A. Casalena

Had some feature creep on this. The changes listed are still queued, and we’re modeling things after what Google is doing in their editor across their product line.

August Bandwidth, Storage and Pricing Updates

Now that we’ve refreshed Squarespace with V5, it’s time to refresh our pricing plans too. We’re doing two things:

1) Tonight, bandwidth and storage packages across the system are being raised significantly. Here’s the new breakdown:

• Basic — 1GB Storage, 75GB/mo Bandwidth (1,250% increase)
• Pro — 2GB Storage, 125GB/mo Bandwidth (1,562% increase)
• Advanced — 3GB Storage, 175GB/mo Bandwidth (1,458% increase)
• Business — 4GB Storage, 300GB/mo Bandwidth (2,000% increase)
• Community (formerly called TierII) — 5GB Storage, 400GB/mo Bandwidth (1,300% increase)
• Elite — 20GB Storage, 1TB/mo Bandwidth (500% increase)

The point of our bandwidth pricing is to be reasonable, not to actually place a limit on anyone. Squarespace is a premium service and you should feel quite free of these constraints. If you have an account with normal traffic, and you’re even close to these limits, write in and we’ll help you optimize your site to send less data. If that’s the case — your users will probably notice a massive speedup in your page loads.

If you have previously purchased a bandwidth upgrade from us, and need a refund — there’s no problem! Just write into support and we’ll handle that for you.

2) Our pricing, in light of version 5 as well as these bandwidth changes, is being raised slightly. New pricing follows. The new pricing will go into effect for accounts purchasing service AFTER August 15th 2008 at 11:49PM. As has always been, all old accounts will receive locked-in pricing. Here’s the pricing after the 15th:

• Basic — $8/mo
• Pro — $14/mo
• Advanced — $20/mo
• Business — $30/mo
• Community — $50/mo
• Elite — $200/mo

Note: Slightly adjusted since our original posting.

Update on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 08:25PM by A. Casalena

The changes have been applied, and all bandwidth upgrades have been nullified across accounts, since essentially they’re not necessary anymore. Thanks guys! Let us know if there are any questions or if anything looks strange.

Update on Friday, August 15, 2008 at 03:57PM by A. Casalena

We’re actually going to push the cutoff to Tuesday, August 19th at 11:59PM. We want to get an email out to everyone on a current trial so there’s adequate time and nobody is caught off guard. If you are still caught off guard, drop a line to support after the cutoff date (if your trial was created BEFORE the 19th).

V5 Update

Hey Guys,

We’ve patched over 25 bugs since our release 48 hours ago. This is an update post to let everyone know where we’re at on things. Thanks for everyone’s kind comments and for bearing with us during this large release.

1. We just (as of 4:19AM EST on July 23rd) released a final patch for the “Operation Aborted” messages some users were seeing in IE7 when editing journal entries from very slow computers. Clear your cache to ensure you have our updated code. Other patches were issued to IE7 to remove opacity effects to ensure editing speed. We of course intend to fully support IE7, but due to the limitations of that browser, we’re going to turn off most of the visual components that make V5 so smooth — as we need to ensure a speedy experience. Safari and Firefox 3 are currently blowing IE7 out of the water. While you’re not required to download either, we’d recommend giving them a look!

2. We’re aware of an issue with date selectors in journal entries occasionally loading improperly after an entry is saved. This issue only affects loading — your dates will be correct when saving. We will have a patch shortly.

3. We are addressing a number of WYSIWYG related issues, especially one involving multiple images inserted directly next to one another, and another involving sentence splitting under certain editing situations. Many more WYSIWYG updates are coming. Issues involving linking and selecting files from General Storage are entirely resolved.

4. Server-side spell checking was knowingly removed in V5, but I think we’re going to add it back just to deal with the confusion some people are experiencing. Spell checking is fully implemented in Safari, Firefox 2+3, IE8, and Opera. If you’re in IE7, the Google Toolbar provides spell checking. The benefit of NOT doing this on the server side (as we did in the past) is improved speed, spell checking across all boxes (wysiwyg and textarea), improved accuracy, language awareness, and saved “add to dictionary” entries between systems. Therefore, we strongly recommend you use your browser’s spell checker — but we’ll give the server side as a fallback shortly.

I do also want to mention that we’ll be establishing a more effective email channel for our communications in the future. We should have given more of a heads up to our non-developer customer base on this release — and I don’t think our service posting reached enough people for how large our change was. I apologize for our communication here. We’ll do better.

Squarespace Version 5 Has Arrived!

It is with immense pleasure that I present to everyone Squarespace Version 5.



This release is a monumental achievement in our company’s history — a history that I’ll be writing about in a lengthy post mid-week after some time frees up. We’ve been intentionally very quiet about this release, because we’ve essentially re-written the core of Squarespace from the ground up and are introducing a groundbreaking interface. Not a single piece of Javascript from the old system remains. For those of you that have been with us a while — this update is approximately 10 times the size of anything we’ve released in the past. I hope the wait has been worth it.



I believe the interface we’re presenting here is unparalleled on the Internet today. You will all ultimately be the judge of that — and I look forward to hearing from everyone regarding what they think of our new product.

Here are the details:

• All new Squarespace layouts support 1, 2 and 3 column configurations, as well as top navigation variants. Yes, every single new layout in our system can be configured to use any of these options.

• 58 new style variants. Yes, 58. Each of these layouts fully supports all V5 navigation options.

• Completely re-written WYSIWYG editor. The WYSIWYG editor now supports Safari. We’ve also implemented custom, inline image and link editing dialogs that are not only faster, but much, much clearer than our previous dialogs. We’ve also added the ability to directly resize images to a particular width. You can also add scripts and videos to your WYSIWYG content extremely easily via the built in buttons.

• Four new editing modes: Content, Structure, Style and Preview. Click the buttons in the upper right of your site manager to smoothly move between editing any aspect of your site. This lets you interact with your site content very rapidly without accessing your website manager.

• Sidebar sections can be configured to selectively display. For instance, you can set certain content to appear only when your Journal is active.

• Automatic dropdown navigation creation. You can create drop-down navigation effortlessly by simply dragging a folder module into any top navigation area.

• Style editor completely re-designed. You can now click any single element on your page and visually adjust its size, height, color, and other properties. No digging through selector lists.

• Website manager completely re-designed. All website manager options are now cleanly presented, and all sub-navigation menus were removed. You are now one click away from any administrative function on your Squarespace site.

• You can drag and drop any page or section directly on your live site. You can configure page settings from the front of your site. You do not need to access architecture anymore. All page operations (adding, removing, re-ordering) can be done by simply entering structure mode from the bar on the top right. All page configuration has been moved forward to the front of your site as well.

• You can preview your webpage without logging out of Squarespace. By pressing preview in the upper right, navigation and other Squarespace items will slide away — allowing you to see how your visitors will perceive your site.

• Width and color adjustments can be previewed in real time. Drag any slider from the style menu and view your site’s content re-render in real time. You can precisely measure width adjustments and other changes. Your banner width is also displayed directly from the style menu — removing the need to compute this with an image editor.

• Injection points added for easy code insertion. We’ve introduced a feature into General Configuration called “injection points”, which allow you to insert HTML code above your layout, or below it. This greatly simplifies the process of adding banners and other content. You can also use this to inject shockwave flash code for your header image.

• You can now specify per-page headers and stylesheets. Advanced accounts can set stylesheets and banner images to activate only on certain pages of your site. This means your site can now contain a variety of layouts within a single site.

• Style previews are now more accurate. No more guessing from color boxes — styles are now previewed using a miniature version of your site.

• Fonts & colors selector improvements. Fonts and colors now contains more options at your fingertips, and the interface has been greatly simplified. Our color picker control has been expanded, and widths can be adjusted using sliders.

• Live previewing of all styles. You can very easily preview styles on your actual live site. There are no separate design modes for creating styles. Everything is done on your live site.

• Two stage tagging in Journals. We have added tags in addition to categories in our Journal system. You can use tags to quickly categorize your entries, and these tags are searchable in the same way your journal categories are searchable.

• Journal post appearance can be greatly customized. You can drag and drop any post elements (date, author, categories, share this button) to new positions directly from the Journal configuration screen. We’ve also added a “share this” button for individuals looking to add sharing to their posts.

• Added “Group By Day” to Journals. Added “Share This” button to journals. Added “Disable Comments in X Days” to journals. Added ability to position prev/next links in journals. Self explanitory :)

• Removed awkward word wrapping on system generated emails. We now let the email client handle word wrapping.

• Added one-click form data downloading. Directly from the configuration screen, you can now download the XLS files that are backing forms.

• Calendar/category selectors completely re-designed. The category and calendar drop-downs are now much more consistent with the remainder of the interface.

• Massively improved importing tools. Blogger importing can now be done without having to export or change a single thing from blogger. Wordpress “xml” importing is now supported (we say “xml”, because for some unbelievable reason, Wordpress .xml files aren’t actual parsable xml files — we work around this issue for you).

• Forum module re-designed. We’ve come up with a cleaner presentation for forum modules that mirrors most actual forums, and the forums we have in use on our own site. We’ve added the ability to lock posts in forum modules, and the ability to move threads between forums.

• MediaRSS is now supported for all Squarespace galleries. This enables compatibility with many, many third party flash products such as PicLense and SlideShowPro. We’ll be putting tutorials for this online in the future.

• Galleries can now have a maximum width set. This means when uploading images from your digital camera, Squarespace can resize the original images to a more appropriate size for the web.

As always, clear your browser caches to ensure you receive the updated code. If you experience problems (and there will be some small problems!) — please write in immediately.



I also want to mention that we will be planning a small price increase that will go into effect in about a month. This will not affect existing users. We’ll post details on this soon — and as always, everyone will get a chance to register at current prices to lock them in forever.