Viviti Blog

Movember!

2009-11-03T11:47:00-08:00

Movember is the month formerly known as November where men start clean shaven and commit to growing a Moustache. That’s right, we are bringing back the Moustache this November to raise funds and awareness for men’s health – specifically prostate cancer. We've decided this year to help raise money for this cause, and in the process to grow some really great moustaches!

If you want to help out, we've got a good Movember team going and you can check out our progress and donate to the cause:

Happy Movember :)

Great new updates made live today!

2009-11-02T17:29:00-08:00

We're starting the new month off with a bang (no, not halloween fireworks) and are pleased to announce a new release today! This release brings with it some new features, as well as bug fixes and enhancements - big and small - to help make building your site and using the editor and components faster and easier than ever! Among the list of updates, these include:

Brand new Flash Component to make embedding Flash easier than ever!
Fixed an issue causing an error when posting blog posts to Facebook while Facebook is having connection issues.
Fixed issues with editing images added as 'original size' in image editor, and then modifying them later.
If a Form Component has a 'Email' field, it will be used as the reply-to.
The Audio Player Component now only requires a single click to change songs through the playlist.
Better handling of third party services failing (FriendFeed, Digg, Youtube, Facebook, Bitly for Twitter).

The full release details are here.
As you can see, several of the changes within this update, such as the Flash Component, were greatly requested by members and many others are now in place to guard against external site errors causing issues with your website. We're also continuing to work on some back-end framework so we can eventually offer even more cool features you've been requesting, such as the ability to backup/restore your site and pages!

Also new today is an awesome new theme for our Documentation Wiki! We've recently updated the main page to make getting answers even easier than before, so take a look and let us know what you think!

Awesome updates released today!

2009-10-14T17:37:00-07:00

As you know, our developers have been working tirelessly to bring the best new offers and content available to all users. With these efforts, they have made a new release today that includes the following cool new features and options, among others:

6 new themes (Free Radicals Red, Free Radicals Green, Kappe House, Boxes Blue, Characterized, Hiller Windmill)
New option to allow blog posts to be announced via your Twitter account!

Twitter Component now has an option to hide statuses starting with an @reply
Fixed a bug that prevented the page selector dropdown from scrolling
The Visual Editor now displays 'Loading' text until it's finished loading
You can now link multiple Facebook accounts!
New Updates section in account overview area, giving you the option to subscribe to or opt out of our newsletters
New Facebook Status Updates Component! Display your recent status updates from Facebook on your website! Visitors can also visit the update directly on Facebook by clicking it's time stamp below the update, to comment on or like it.

And finally, $25 in Free Facebook Ad Credits available for business plan users! Existing business plan users should also expect an email with their code.

Take a look at the release notes for this release for a full list of bug fixes, enhancements and features!

New release!

2009-09-22T16:14:00-07:00

Today brings another new release - anticipated by many members! This release brings lots of improved functionality to existing areas, as well as a few new cool features and enhancements. These include:

15 New Themes!
Facebook Integration - you can now link your account with Facebook and announce blog posts to your Facebook wall!
Fixed a bug with the basic uploader which prevented users from uploading to an image gallery without flash installed.
Fixed a bug that prevented IE8 from displaying custom favicons.
You can toggle between Visual and HTML mode via tabs in the upper-right in the Visual Editor.

An issue causing some accounts to stay deactivated from trial expiration to stay deactivated after payment has been fixed.
The Image Gallery Component on newly created websites is now set to a collection to prevent all uploaded images from appearing in it.
Files uploaded with spaces will now have the spaces converted to dashes (to avoid problems with urls).
Live help added as a test. You can find this area in the "upgrade now" section of your account. Ask your billing and other Viviti questions to a live support representative!

Of course, as you read this, our developers are continuing to work hard on the next batch of new features and tools for Viviti members, so keep an eye on this Blog and our releases page for details! For a full list of new items available with this release, take a look at the release notes.

A new video tutorial and some tips & tricks..

2009-09-03T13:00:00-07:00

As another installment of things you may not know about Viviti and other odds and ends to let you know about:

Did you know you could create a custom error page for your site?
Also possible is the ability to create custom lightbox dialogs

Lastly, we bring you a new video tutorial addition to our list of tutorials on our Wiki. This one covers How to Upgrade and goes through the process step by step!

We've got much more on the way including tons of new video tutorials and a big new release coming soon. Stay tuned!

Search engines, grouping pages, and trial explained..

2009-08-13T16:20:00-07:00

If you've been following our Releases page you can see that we made a small release recently, and another is on the way. While we work to get these latest new features, bug fixes and enhancements out to you as soon as possible, here are a few things to know about Viviti - some of which appear to be unclear to some members and can be considered tips in getting the most from our services and help get visitors to your site:

We don't automatically submit websites to search engines at this time and note that over time, they will locate your website and index it accordingly. If you'd prefer not to wait, you can submit your website manually by visiting the appropriate location on their website. Some good places to submit your site to are:

Please note that your site will not likely show up in search results immediately! From Google's submission page:

"Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear."

Grouping Pages with Different Navigations can be useful in many cases. Check out the Wiki page for an explanation and steps for utilizing this with your own pages!

If your free trial has expired or is expiring soon, all that is needed to continue managing your site with us is to simply choose the hosting package your site is to continue with. By no means will you be charged (if you have only ever used the Trial package, we don't even have your billing information!) upon expiration! You will only be charged if you decide to upgrade and complete the payment process. We offer an advertisement supported free package, as well as a variety of paid plans which you can choose from by clicking on "Upgrade Now" in your Account Overview to continue managing your Viviti site. It isn't necessary to wait until the trial expires and you can do this at any time during the trial period!

We hope this clears up any confusion and answers these common questions. All of this information is available on our Wiki (mostly in the FAQ area, which is updated often) so be sure to take a look there for help with any topic or question!

Huge new release!

2009-07-27T17:21:00-07:00

As mentioned in the previous blog post, a big new release has been in the works and is available today. This release brings with it an extensive list of new features, enhancements and bug fixes that make Viviti better than ever!

Here's a short list of highlights:

Website design services!
Ability to modify your websites <head> tag from website settings, allowing you to make global changes that aren't affected by theme changes or custom theme uploads.
Optional "follow me" link to twitter component.
5 new themes!
Large library of stock photography incorporated to help you build your site (for all paid accounts).
3 new components - a much requested Page Counter, Twitter Follower, and BookFresh!

Sitemaps are now auto-discoverable by search engines, which will help sites get indexed better and quicker.
Improved Site Statistics. Statistics will be more accurate because bots and spiders will no longer be calculated into hits/visits. The overall statistics will seem lower, but will be considerably more accurate.

For additional release details, check out the Release Notes on our general Releases page.

Odds and ends..

2009-07-14T11:51:00-07:00

While a new release is expected next week with great new features, enhancements and bug fixes, there may be a few existing features and developments that have flown under the radar. This post will cover some of these to expand your Viviti knowledge and take advantage of some of these lesser known tricks and resources.

Did you know you can AJAXify your Viviti site, or make all of your pages load via AJAX? It's as simple as adding some simple JavaScript code utilizing the built in jQuery.
The Digg Component now allows visitors to your site to visit an article directly by clicking it's title, or view the associated comments page on Digg.com to Digg or comment on it.
To help with some common questions you may not find an answer to elsewhere in our Wiki, we have created a FAQ page. This page contains many of the most often asked questions sent to us. As usual, if you still have a question not answered here or elsewhere, or want to suggest an addition to this page, just contact us!
The most recent addition to our list of Video tutorials covers creating a Blog. There will be many more additions to this area to come and we'll announce them here, so stay tuned!

More updates made live today

2009-06-29T15:53:00-07:00

Today brings more new features, enhancements and bug fixes as we work to improve all things Viviti at a rapid pace. Notable new things with today's release include:

Many Internet Explorer specific bug fixes.
New Paypal Component features such as shopping cart and donation support.
The ability the manually refresh Blogroll and Feed Component feeds.
The Digg Component can now filter by subtopics (eg. Science/Space, instead of just Science).
Added referrer tracking to website statistics. You can now see where your visitors are coming from!

The rest of the release notes can be found in it's Release History.

We love getting your feedback regarding current and past releases and suggestions for future releases, so let us know what you think and what you'd like to see!

Brand new components and features

2009-06-15T17:11:00-07:00

Another new release is live as of today and brings with it a lot of exciting new features and changes! Here's the breakdown:

New Components: We've added a Digg Component as well as a Reddit Component to our suite of social networking components by popular demand!

Check them out in action in the Social Networking section of the example Viviti site!

Site Statistics: Another popular request was user viewable site statistics. The wait is over and you can now view a variety of detailed statistics for your pages. Head over to the Statistics Wiki page to learn more!

These are just the highlights - a bunch of other features, enhancements and bug fixes were also included, such as the ability to add attachments to a support ticket! This is useful when a screenshot of your issue would help us in resolving it, for example.

A complete list of changes can be found in the release history for this release.

New features available today

2009-06-01T14:11:00-07:00

Among the bug fixes and enhancements released today, some new features are now available to offer further functionality to you in building your Viviti site!

These include a new image hover toolbar in the Visual Editor. If you hover over an image it now gives you options to edit, delete, and align the image in a variety of ways.

We also added option for creating links inside the Visual Editor (found in the Content Block, Youtube, Single Image and Blog components, among others) that open in a new window - a feature requested by many members. This feature is also available while adding links to external sites in navigation (via the Navigation component or the Navigation section of your Toolbar).

New changes are live

2009-05-13T21:55:00-07:00

We have recently released a whole new set of bug fixes, features and enhancements which improve functionality and ease of use, and make Viviti an even better experience overall for members! These include:

14 New themes!
Improved theme filtering.
Modified Theme Selection dialog to make it easier to see what the themes look like when changing or selecting a theme.
Improved component selector, changed from grid to list view.
Extensive upgrades to the backend resulting in improved performance and page load times.
Visitors can properly delete Blog comments after posting them, for a short period of time.
Improvements to Blog post comment spam filtering.
Javascript files can now be edited from the edit theme source code editor.
Improved dialog responsiveness, load time, and the 'Loading' text is now visible when waiting for a dialog to load.

For a complete list, check out the Release Notes for this release over on the Viviti Wiki!

Did you know...

2009-04-30T11:23:00-07:00

Here are a few interesting things that might help you out while using Viviti:

Dragging Components between Pages

If you add a component to the wrong page, or simply decide you want it on a different page, you don't have to delete the component and then add it again.. You can simply move it! To do this you just grab the component as if you were going to drag it somewhere else on the page, but instead drag it to the page dropdown in the toolbar.. it will open and you can simply select a different page. When you let go it will ask if you want to move the component to that page, or just copy it. For more information, there is an article about it on the wiki!

Turning your Nested Navigation Menu into a Hover or Dropdown menu

We've had a bunch of people asking how to make their nested navigation menus into hover or dropdown menus, so we have made an excellent javascript available within your theme. This requires editing your theme source code to do, but if you are comfortable with that we suggest reading the tutorial to get started!

Using the Collapse Components toolbar for easier editing

On the statusbar there is a button that allows you to collapse all the components on your page. This accomplishes a couple things things - by collapsing all the content it makes it much easier to move components around the page. It can also allow you to edit or remove components that may be broken and hard to find, or simply have no visual output (for example an embeded javascript counter). For the advanced user it also provides a quick reference of all the CSS ID's for CSS or Javascript work. As usual, you can check the page on the wiki for more information!

Our Wiki has a lot more information including instructions on how to create your own custom theme, Tips on building your site, and for those that want to keep up to date on new features, bug fixes and upcoming changes to the system, we have a Release Notes page that we keep up to date as we move Viviti forward.

If there are other things you want to know how to do with Viviti, let us know!

Viviti is now out of Beta!

2009-03-30T21:12:00-07:00

We're happy to announce that today we pushed up the new release, bringing Viviti officially out of beta status! A big part of this release was getting all of our hardware in place, and implementing the tweaks, fixes, and polish brought to our attention by our most excellent beta testers.

We have already applied a custom package to all the beta tester accounts so you guys won't have any ads on your websites. For those of you who need a larger package, we'll be sending a thank you email out shortly that will include instructions on how you can get a discount on any upgrades as a further thank you for helping beta test Viviti!

We also managed to get some cool new features into this new release, some highlights:

Random option added to the Photo Component
Multiple websites (in supported packages)
Import blog posts from Wordpress
Audio Player Component
Twitter and RSS update speed improvements
New account manager
Help & Support Center
Readonly component for theme designers (info at the bottom of this page)
Ability to have full blog posts on archive pages
Customizable length of summarized blog posts

Thanks again for all your help, we hope you'll keep the feedback coming. We're already getting started on the next release, we still have lots to do!

Viviti is Growing Up to Become a Real Business

2009-03-23T09:41:00-07:00

Well, it's been a fantastic year of growth for Viviti and we're nearly ready to release Viviti as a full-featured, non-beta product!

Viviti has grown to over 10,000 beta users and more are signing up every day. Over the past 12 months we've collected and applied a ton of feedback, so thank you to everyone who's sent us an email, found a bug, or contributed to the user forum. We couldn't have made Viviti what it is today without your input and support.

How is Viviti becoming a real business?

Viviti will no longer be offering free, unlimited use as it has been until now. Starting soon, every Viviti account holder will be required to be part of one of our subscription plans, each with a varying monthly cost and unique set of features. We will still be offering a free version but it will be ad supported.

What will happen to my account?

If you currently have a Viviti account, we want to thank you for testing Viviti during it's beta cycle by giving you an ad-free plan, free of charge. That's right, you don't need to worry about paying a dime and no ads will appear on your site! We're giving away over 10,000 free accounts so every one of our beta testers can continue to grow along with us through this exciting new phase. For beta testers who want to upgrade to a bigger plan, we will give you the opportunity to upgrade your account at a discount. More details coming soon!

When will this all happen?

The changes can be expected to take place next week, and you won't have to do anything. Your accounts will automatically be upgraded and everything will continue to work as it currently does. Thanks again to everyone who's helped shape Viviti to what it is today, we hope you continue to build with us as time goes on!

Awfully quiet around here lately...

2009-03-13T15:34:00-07:00

This is just a quick post to let people know what's going on - we were expecting to be announcing an out of beta release date last week, but we are stuck waiting for something from an external company - Nothing major, but we can't launch yet.

That said, we are ready to go and in the last few weeks have migrated all the beta accounts to our final production hardware - some of you may have noticed brief periods of downtime while this transition occurred. We're pretty excited, and another announcement will be coming shortly when we have a final launch date!

That's all for now, but stay tuned!

Login changes

2009-01-30T13:57:00-08:00

We've pushed up some important changes that effect the login process. When logging into your account instead of using your websites address, you'll now have to use the email address used when you signed up. This change is required for the multiple websites per account feature that has been requested by our beta members!

This feature will be one of many enhancements to the system as we gear up to leave the beta process.

Thanks everyone!

Merry Christmas - and some updates!

2008-12-26T12:22:47-08:00

We all would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, or Happy Holidays if you prefer - and best wishes for the upcoming new year. We are excited here at Viviti for the the next year as we approach our out-of-beta date, which thanks to all you testers is not that far away... We will provide more details as we get closer!

In the meantime we have been workingon a lot of behind the scenes stuff, but today we pushed up some changes - a few things some people might notice are the beginings of our help system (little help icon in the status bar), organization of the 'My Content' menu (stuff you don't use hides itself to reduce clutter), improvements to the file manger to make the drag and drop stuff/organization stuff faster and easier to use, as well as a few bugs that people have reported on the forums have been fixed.

Thanks again to all you testers who are giving us valuable feedback in the forums!

Viviti Open Beta!

2008-12-01T17:17:00-08:00

We are proud to announce that as of today, Viviti is in Open Beta!

This means that now anyone can signup and check Viviti out without requiring a beta key. For those of you who have already been helping us test, Thank you, and we hope you welcome all newcomers! To celebrate the launch of Open Beta, we have put up a simpler, cleaner new website at viviti.com. We're not quite finished yet, so there will be some updates and improvements over the next week, but we hope you like the new site.

We're excited to bring Viviti to the world, and we hope everyone enjoys using it. As we continue developing Viviti we will be closely watching the forums for feedback, so don't be shy!

New Build Release - 0.1.6

2008-10-15T16:50:00-07:00

It's that time again! Most of this release was polish, optimization, and bug fixes - but we did get some cool new features added while we were at it. Some improvements made to the page management, which now allow you to password protect groups of pages as well as individual pages.

We've also improved the navigation management allowing you to link to pages outside of your site, files you uploaded, email addresses, in addition to pages on your site. This affects both the primary navigation of your site and the navigation component which you can add to sidebars.

Here are some other notable changes:

Updated the toolbar to make it simpler and easier to use.
Made content templates easier to use in the Visual Editor.
Cleaned up the "My Content" menu to make it easier to find what you are looking for.
Added "Copy Component" option - drag a component to another page in the page dropdown in the toolbar, and you can move or copy the component to the target page.
Auto complete added to theme and component filter forms.
Auto complete added to blog tags to make it easier to use tags you have used before.
"Add it here" buttons for adding components to pages tweaked to make it easier to tell what scope you are adding to.
Speed ups! Sites created with should now load much quicker.

For bloggers out there we made a bunch of improvements to the blog, one of the most requested ones was the ability to change the date of a blog post - so now when you go to create or edit a post you will see something like this:

For those people that want to write posts and have it auto publish on a certain date, simply set the Date Published as a date in the future, and it will remain unpublished until that date and then automatically publish for you. For users that want to switch from Blogger, we've added an automated import tool that will fetch all your blog posts, categories, tags, and comments from your old Blogger account. We'll work on import tools for other systems in the future.

To make managing comments easier we added some filters in the comment management dialog, so you can easily view only unapproved comments, only comments flagged as spam, etc.

Now that 0.1.6 is out the door we're already busy on the next release, which is likely to be the last release before we enter open beta. Have fun with the new stuff and as always, let us know if you find any problems!