Squarespace Service Updates

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.