Viviti Blog

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!

Vivitians! Invite your friends!

2008-09-19T05:09:05-07:00

It's an exciting time for us here on the development team as we move closer and closer to "open beta", which means that soon the doors will be flung wide for all who wish to sign up, and soon there will be no more beta invites.

Now is the perfect time to use the 10 free beta invites in your account. The lucky few thousand of you who've received beta invites have the unique opportunity to share Viviti with your friends and family before the general masses storm the gates, so excersize your priviledge! Send your beta invites before they're no more, and let some other lucky ones try Viviti before we open it up.

How do you exercise this divine right? Simply log in to your Viviti account, but don't click the "Edit My Site" button right away. Instead, look on the right hand side of the page and click the "Send Beta Invites" button. You'll be prompted to enter an email address, so do so, and away you go. It's as easy as pie.

Happy web site making, and thanks for making Viviti all that it is today!

New Build Released - 0.1.5

2008-09-12T11:08:31-07:00

It's out! We apologize for the slightly longer than expected delay, but we hope you will find it worth the wait. This has been a very large release with over 80 bugs fixed, significant speed improvements and a lot of new features, components, and UI improvements.

Some of the new components have already been talked about on the blog, but there are a couple we never got around to announcing.. the full list of new components is below.

Paypal - Sell items on your page using paypal.
Google Maps - Display a map to any location you want.
Form Builder - Allow users to submit feedback via a form on your website.
Ebay - Add a list of items for sale to your site using your eBay account.
FriendFeed - Display a feed of your data from your FriendFeed account.
Delicious - Show bookmarks from your del.icio.us account.
Upcoming.org - Display events for a city, or watched events from an upcoming.org account.
BlogRoll - Create a list of your friends blogs, and include the date updated, or even the most recent post if you want.

We've made some significant improvements to the component management interface as well. Now when adding new components you aren't asked if you want to add to all pages or just this page, instead we show indicators on the page and let you pick in the same step as deciding where to add the component.

If you have nested pages (yoursite.viviti.com/products/widget) you also get the option to add to just the pages in that path. This means you can create groups of pages, and add content that will appear on just that group of pages in addition to adding content to every page on your site, and to specific pages only. This also works on dynamic pages, for example you can add content that will show on all blog posts.

We also made it so when dragging components you can now drag them between "All pages" and "Only this page". A lot of people asked for this, and it should make working on your site much, much easier. Previously you had to delete the component, and then re-add it! Another neat little feature we had requested was the ability to drag components to the different pages via the Page drop down, so we added that too.

To make customizing themes easier, we created the ability to replace images in the themes. This will effect any image that is an IMG tag in html (not css background images, as those are used for layout purposes). We've modified most of the themes to use IMG tags, so you can now point at images in your layout and if it's replacable, you will have the ability to select your own image.

To the Blog service we added spam filtering, the ability to disable commenting on posts after a set period of time has elapsed, announcing/ping service for new posts, global comments feed, tags option to the blog archive component, multiple categories per blog component, and a easier way to edit and remove blog posts without having to view the post itself. Phew. That's a lot of blog upgrades :)

We didn't stop at the blog though, there is now syntax highlighting in the edit theme form, and a syntax highlighting option in the visual editor in case you want to post code snippets on your website. Pages can now be password protected, and we created a nice page manager to easily edit, delete, and create new pages. Searching was added to the file manager, and the file manager will show EXIF data of uploaded photos. We added a page description (for meta tags) and Sitemap XML option for those that want to improve their SEO, and the ability to customize your favicon (we even provided a nice set of default choices).

We've made various other tweaks and updates, and added a bunch of new themes (now over 100), but that should be the more noticable stuff! We hope you guys enjoy it, we're certainly excited to get this release live!

If you encounter any problems with this release, try clearing your browser's cache and refreshing the page; otherwise, report bugs in the Viviti forum.

Upcoming Features: Ebay Listing

2008-09-05T14:25:10-07:00

We're getting very close to the next release, but it's not quite ready yet. Here is another sneak peak at an upcoming feature that will be useful for anyone who sells on eBay, the Ebay Listing component.

This does pretty much what you would expect, allowing you to display items from your eBay account on your website. You can select which items to display (store, auction, fixed, all, etc.).

Upcoming Features: Map Component

2008-08-19T17:07:31-07:00

We're hard at work finishing up new components for the next release. One of the components we're particularly excited about is the Google Maps component:

We are planning to make this new release available in the next two weeks. We'll keep you posted with details on new components and new features between now and then!

Upcoming Features: Form Component

2008-08-11T10:28:46-07:00

Over the past few months, one of the most often-requested new features for Viviti has been a form component. We are currently working on a fully-customizable form builder slated for inclusion in the next release.

When you add a form component to your site, you will be able to specify a destination email address, and Viviti will automatically send form submissions to this address.

Upcoming Features: Paypal Component

2008-08-06T13:05:52-07:00

We're hard at work on the next version of Viviti. It isn't ready for release yet, but we are planning to include several new components that open up new possibilities for Viviti websites. Here's a screenshot from the upcoming Paypal component, planned for inclusion in release 0.1.5:

The Paypal component allows you to sell products or services on your website quickly and easily. Using this component, you can place a "Buy Now!" button on your website, which links to a Paypal checkout page allowing visitors to pay for your items via credit card or bank transfer.

More news on the upcoming release will be available soon!

New Build Released - 0.1.4

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

We've been busy in the last month with today's release. Containing over 80 fixes, improvements, and new features, a lot of beta tester feedback has gone into this release. Thank you beta testers!

The first thing you'll notice is our tool bar redesign and new status bar. The tool bar has been reworked to give quicker access for adding content components and clearer separation between web site related and content specific items. The new status bar will tell you how many blog comments you have (I love this feature), give you notifications from Viviti, and let you switch editing modes for previewing or bug checking.

We've done a bunch of improvements for those of you using the Blog, and added 3 new Blog related components which allow you to display a blog search, recent comments, and archived posts anywhere on your site.

There is also a new option located in My Website -> Blog Settings that allows you to show Social Bookmarking links with the metadata of each blog post. You can select which ones you want to display, making it easy for visitors to add your posts to services like Digg, Delicious, and more.

We've almost doubled the number of themes in our gallery now, and while we haven't implemented all the themes people have suggested, we have implemented a bunch. We will continue to keep adding more to our gallery, so keep the suggestions coming in the forum. Some other new components allow you to easily embed Flickr Photos, YouTube videos, and most recent updates from Twitter:

Here is a quick list of a few other things we've implemented that you've been asking for:

RSS Component updates more frequently, and works with more feeds
Layout Mode added, allowing you to work on your site with all the content stripped out (easier editing, fixing broken blocks)
Permalinks can be customized now when creating new blog posts, and will work with international characters.
Preview mode to quickly view how your site will look logged out, with editing features disabled
Font and Font Size added to visual editor
Single image component to quickly add just one image to your site
New searchable component browser

For those who are still waiting for beta keys, we'll be sending out a new batch very soon! Have fun with the new features everyone!