Squarespace Service Updates

We will be taking Squarespace offline for up to 4 hours on Monday, July 21st at 12:30AM EST for the largest release in the history of our organization. A few points:

While we have been testing this release extensively using live user data for over 3 months, be prepared for some unexpected behavior on Monday during the transition. I (Anthony ;)) will personally be here, along with everyone else at Squarespace staring at tickets and making sure every last problem is addressed. Please bear with us :)

We are introducing Version 5 templates. These templates take advantage of all new features in Squarespace V5 (multi-column, on-site editing, clickable style editing, injectable code regions). Your Squarespace V4 template will remain available, but will not receive all version 5 functionality (though it will receive some of it). In addition, Squarespace V5 templates will have code editing disabled. The V5 system is now so flexible that we see few situations where actual HTML template code must be adjusted. We’ll also be starting a feature on the Squarespace blog where I’ll accept challenges for things that you probably assumed you needed template editing to do, but can be done much faster with V5 and Javascript. We’ve interacted with numerous members of our development community during our beta and have ensured things like adding banner images and such are possible in V5 without direct code access.

Version 5 contains about 6 times more changes and features than any of our previous updates. The entire core of Squarespace has been re-designed. We’re saving the actual release list until Monday, but you can expect top navigation, multiple columns, editable journal entry slugs (with share this icons built in), live style editing, a revised website manager, a revised WYSIWYG interface (with full Safari support and video insertion capabilities), on-site module adding/editing, gallery image auto-resizing, and and over 70 completely new template variants that exploit every one of these new features. There isn’t a single screen that hasn’t been touched in some way.

We’ll post more details and videos on Monday. Thanks again for being a Squarespace customer. After spending some time in tickets this week — I think everyone is going to be delighted with the direction we’ve taken.

Small reminder that applies to so few of you: Though we announced this 3 months ago, if you’re a current customer on Internet Explorer 6 — you will not be able to access your site manager following this update. Please upgrade to any other free browser. Your visitors will be able to see your site in IE6, but you will not be able to log in to manage it.