Edicy blog

First Edicy screencast is up

kajar@edicy.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you want to see the first ever screencast of Edicy in action - complete with soothing music and accented voice-over - check out our brand new tour page. The video is at the top on right hand side.

Frankly, making the video turned out to be a bit of a bigger hassle than we originally invisioned. But now that we have video making powers in our hands feel free to tell us if there is any other information that you'd enjoy seeing in video form, like for example tutorials on using some of the more advanced facets of Edicy. You can e-mail your wishes to me or leave them in the comments below.

Getting widgets on your website with Edicy pt. 1

kajar@edicy.com — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Widgets are a way to make your website a lot more interesting. Whether you want a clock, a counter on an RSS feed from another site on your page you can be pretty sure that someone somewhere has already built it and you don't need to start inventing a bicycle. But did you know you can use widgets with Edicy as well? Here's how.

First you need to find the widget that you want on your page. Or more precisely. you need the code that you can embed into your page. The code is something looking like this:

When you've selected the widget that you want on your page copy the code and go to your page. Then click the HTML icon on the little toolbar on your page (it's the icon on the bottom right).

Then just paste the code into the text where you want it and voilla, the widget will appear on your page.

Another option to get the widget on the page is to click on the video icon and paste the widget code into the window there. In addition to displaying videos from Youtube or Vimeo the video function can also display widgets.

So now you know how to get widgets into the text area on your page. In the next part of the series we'll show you how to embed them to other areas on your page as well.

Three good places to find widgets:

Google gadgets: This is a directory of gadgets you can add to your IGoogle page, but also on other pages anywhere. Currently there are 108673 widgets there so you can be pretty sure that you'll find something you need.

Widgetbox A large selection of very different widgets, the most popular of which is the good old Super Mario game that could be played from your homepage.

Google web elements Google recently developed their own widgets for adding your favorite Google applications like Calendar, News or conversations to your page. (note that the Google custom search element won't work with Edicy, for getting a search box on your site you have to enable it from site full view - elements tab).

Before we go, we'll leave you with a couple of wonderful widgets:

Building a multi-language website with Edicy

kajar@edicy.com — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:15:47 +0000

This is the first in a series of post discussing how to better use Edicy

As we've written before, Edicy speaks more than 10 languages and is looking to add more. But what if you want to create a website that would support as many languages or more? Edicy makes it easy, we have built in support for as many languages as you need.

First you create your website in one language: insert content, build up the menu etc. When you're done you can add a language either on your site's language menu or from the site organizer in 'site' full view.

When you add a language Edicy automatically creates the pages that exist in the original language for the new language as well. Now when you go to the full Site you can see from the site organiser the pages in the new language. The pages not yet translated appear in grey.

Of course you still have to translate the content of the site yourself - Edicy isn't yet smart enough to do that for you.

This set-up allows the visitors of your page to change the language of a page in the middle of browsing and still remain on the same page they started from. You can try it on our site - go to the Tour section and select different languages from the language bar.

If the page doesn't exist in the selected language you will end up on the front page of the site for that language. For example if you try to change the language of this blog, you'll end up at edicy.com, because this post is only there in English.

Another cool thing that the multi language platform allows you to do is language detection. If you come to a page running on Edicy for the first time, it will look at your browser's language settings and your location to determine what language to present the page to you. And if you change the language return from the same IP address the page will have remembered your settings. So hopefully that will present you and your visitors with the best available language on the page.

You can read more about how languages work in Edicy in our language FAQ.

Maintenance release notes for May 27, 2009

priit@fraktal.ee — Thu, 28 May 2009 06:01:12 +0000

This week's release is all about various bugfixes and stability improvements in text editor. This also includes changes in table-, photo- and map tools. File uploader and page loading time got some attention too.

Complete release notes

Fixed problems in file uploader where some users were unable to add new files occasionally
Fixed file uploader status indicator
Fixed aligning and formatting first text blocks in Firefox and Safari browsers
Fixed deleting a photo from text area when there were no text content around the image
Improved page loading in slower browsers and computers
Improved site organizer tree for better handling long page names and deep site trees
Added new accessor into custom template code to access all blogs on site through {{ site.blogs }}

Who's using Edicy?

kajar@edicy.com — Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Today I wrote a (hopefully) nice e-mail to many of our more active users, asking for testimonials about using Edicy. But in order to do that I had to dig myself pretty deep into our userbase and came up with some quite interesting things that I'd like to share with all of you.

Right now Edicy speaks 13 languages (English, Chinese, Russian, French, Spanish, German, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Italian, Portugese and Estonian) and we have pages in each and every one of them. Our users come from all over the world, altogether 121 countries are represented in our userbase. Which means we are over the half-way line of getting an Edicy user out of every country in the world.

The most active users have made thousands of changes to their pages. The leader in this category is a page from Australia that has made a whopping 2132 edits. That's a lot, considering they only started the site in February.

It's a fascinating world of Edicy users out there that I'd like to introduce you more to. So we'll try to get permission from some of the more exciting pages and bring them to you.

In case you would like to respond to our survey, here it is. You can send the reply to my e-mail kajar@edicy.com.

Dear Edicy user,

We would like to ask you for a favour. We are compiling a testimonials section for the Edicy website with opinions from our users. If you have a couple of minutes we would greatly appreciate if you could send us a few words about using Edicy.

How did you hear about Edicy and why did you decide to start using it?

What do you feel are the strong sides of Edicy?

What improvements would you suggest for Edicy?

How has Edicy helped you do your job?

Thank you ever so much for taking the trouble to respond!

Edicy to be incubated

kajar@edicy.com — Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Last week Edicy got a speed boost, this week we are being seedboosted. Confusing? It really isn't. Edicy has been included into a freshly started international business incubator by Arengufond - Estonian Development fund, which is basically a state-owned investment fund.

What does it mean? According to the guys at Arengufond they "offer support through guidance and action, but unlike traditional technology and entrepreneurship incubators will provide neither rental space nor technical support services. SeedBooster will house a company up to a period of one year in the course of which all forces will be joined to develop the project further until it is mature for investment."

We at Edicy are certainly excited to get this opportunity and hopefully the boost in the form of guidance and action will be of use to us.

We've been selected into Seedbooster with two other companies: an analytic tool for gauging software writing, Programeter and a developer of a wireless sensor network for the security and energy sector and border protection, Smartdust Solution. Both of them are clearly very capable start-ups, as evidenced by the decision they've made when choosing their website operator - both run on Edicy.

Lastly: if my picture or name seems new to you it's because it is. I've been working for Edicy for two weeks now as the new marketing/sales/PR guy. If you want to get in touch with me - and nothing would make me happier - you can write me at kajar@edicy.com or reach me via the username kajarkase on either Skype or Twitter.

Edicy got a speed boost, Release notes for May 12, 2009

priit@fraktal.ee — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We've been doing some nice improvements recently in terms of page load times in Edicy to keep up with the growing demand of our service. First and foremost, we implemented page caching for public pageviews and therefore gained approximately 60x faster page load times. Your site visitors will appreciate that. Also, we made some tweaks in site admin area where pages load up to 2-3 times faster than they used to be.

Of course, this is only the beginning in the field of making Edicy faster and more stable. We're monitoring the service constantly and already have a number of ideas where we can optimize things to deliver you a better web editing experience.

Other bug fixes and minor improvements

Better link handling in text editor
Improved sitemap.xml generator
Improved and clarified error and confirmation messages
Improved site and page keywords handling
Fixed issues with custom blog template handling
Fixed blog date setting in blog article properties dialog
Fixed broken "Tell a friend" dialog, yaay!
Fixed "Recent files" screen
Fixes in photo gallery with less standard filenames
Minor improvements in page url generation for better search engine optimization
Minor fixes in image previewing under media view

How to create a great website, pt 4: Creating design

tonu@fraktal.ee — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

If you aren't a designer then there's no need to bother yourself with designing your website on your own. There are two wiser and more effective ways to get the work done -- hire a great designer or pick a ready-made design template from a design stock. And be cautious. Good design doesn’t mean special effects, mind-blowing graphics and a growing number of designer-wannabes visiting your site.

What makes a great design?

 Design is good when it keeps you away from thinking. No it doesn’t mean design is a stupidizer. It’s just that your target audience is after the content, not design. Design should only support content, give it a form. Good design doesn’t necessarily impress. But it definitely doesn’t disgust either. Good design leads you to what you are looking for.

Aesthetics is a question of taste. Taste is subject to disputes. Some of us like ornaments, some hate them. Some of us like gothic letters, some say they are ugly. I like brown palette, you dig blue colours. There is no bullet proof choice for aesthetics.

But design as a form, as a layout of content and functionality is a question of understanding, not taste. Cut thinking out from understanding the layout of your site and you have reached bullet proof design.

Great design is about being handy, not about being being just “beautiful”. Design isn’t art, it’s usability. Design is the fork between the eater and his food. Design carries content and functionality.

Autopsy of a great design

There’s a number of design rules one must pay attention to when creating a website. Here’s the most general list of them. Website design must be:

Intuitive. As said before, design mustn’t make you think. Buttons must look like buttons, links must be easy to hit, menus must be in conventional places. Menu and button texts should also be “designed”, they ought to be short and understandable.

Fitting. Design has to suit its content and it must be built to work on different screens. No holes in layout, no crowded spaces allowed. It should feel as if the design was tailored for its content.

Welcoming. Sites have two kinds of visitors. New and returning. First group needs much more “design attention” than the other. Returning visitors already know your site’s specialities. Newcomers on the other hand need to be carried around or they’ll be lost. Build a landing page with a general intro (what’s this site about), blocks introducing the most important parts of your site (key products, clients or team members), block of latest news, contact info.

And then there are those words that usually come in the mind when talking about design. Aesthetics, uniqueness, impressiveness, beauty. They are the dot on the i, no the i itself. These additional values make a design great. But a design can be “okay” or even “good enough” without them. Look at Craigslist or Google for example.

Do it “yourself”: design from a stock

So what to do it you have no time or money for a special design tailored uniquely for you? There are thousands of ready made design templates out there. Just google for “website templates” and you’ll be overwhelmed. Most of them are total crap, true. But still hundreds of usable options remain.

There are both free templates and those that cost a little. In tools like Edicy and it’s numerous competitors, design stock is part of the service. Then there are the websites devoted to offering templates, by thousands. It usually requires help from an IT guy to make those work on your site. But it’s an easy task for any techie.
 The rule of thumb is that simpler templates with less sections, less pictures, less colours are better designs. It takes a designer to chop down useless components from a crowded template. On the other hand, adding a missing block of text or illustration to a simple design should be doable -- if you stick to just adding content not trying to design anything.

Template customization

A good affordable alternative to creating a design from scratch would be hiring a freelance designer. He would browse the stocks, find a template suitable for you and customize it according to your special needs.

Conclusion

As said in the previous posts -- whatever you decide, don't try to be perfect. Don't waste time and energy fine-tuning the details forever. Get your site published quickly, no matter if it sports a unique design, a standard template or a customized one.

Help us translate Edicy!

tanel@fraktal.ee — Mon, 04 May 2009 08:19:52 +0000

Creating a website is easy with Edicy and it should not require users to speak English to do that. Our goal is to make website building experience pleasant for those who do not know English that well. But we can't do it without your help - we are looking for people who would like to help us on translating Edicy into other languages.

Our translators community is growing quite well alongside with Edicy. Currently we have very helpful guys who translate Edicy into Italian (Pier and Martino), Lithuanian (Ieva), Greek (Μιχάλης and Pantelis), French (Jeny), German (Arne and Edvard), Spanish (Jepser and Eneko), Latvian (Kaisa and Kārlis), Icelandic (Ólafur) and Danish (Rikke). Thank you guys!

Who are we looking for?

As you may have noticed some of the languages available in Edicy are translated automatically but we don't want keep it that way. There are also many other languages that are not even present in Edicy yet. So, if you speak English, but it is not your native language, you like Edicy and want to make it better in your native speaking, then you're just the one who we're looking for!

Currently our website and ~1300 phrases inside Edicy are waiting for your proofreading (in the case of automatically translated languages) or your translations skills (new languages). The number of phrases is growing almost every week by ~20 additional ones.

Languages we're currently focusing on:

Portuguese
French
Spanish
Chinese
Norwegian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Icelandic
Italian
German
Arabic
Your mother tongue!

What's in it for me?

As a motivation package for active helpers we can offer a free Edicy Pro voucher for 2 years plus everlasting glory, honor and fame!

If you would like to contribute, you speak one of the languages in the list above or would like to translate Edicy into your whatever-it-is speaking language, don't hesitate to contact us at support@edicy.com.

How to create a great website, pt 3: Writing content

tonu@fraktal.ee — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Websites are created to provide content to it's visitors. Content is king, they say. Everything else (design, system) is just the packaging. Content is normally what your site visitors are looking for. So the key for creating a great website is to provide accurate and interesting content -- texts, pictures, audio or video.

To be more precise, content must be accurate and easy to digest, interesting and memorable, work well for search engines and it must also be fresh and updated. Once your content is already so good, then why waste your talent by using it only once, only on your website?

Accurate and easy to digest

When writing a piece of text, try to think like your readers. Write to your customers, visitors of your site. Use accurate wording. Straight-to-the-point texts and descriptive, short menu items work best. Cut corporate gibberish, talk like your customers would. Otherwise they wont find you in the first place. And if they somehow still stumble upon your site, they still wouldn't understand your talk. That's why they wouldn't stay.

People don't read websites. They "scan" the screen until finding a relevant phrase. If there is too much text to scan or they don't see what they are expecting, they move on. Break your texts up into short sentences and small paragraphs.

Choose headlines carefully. Any headline should say as much as necessary and as little as possible about the page it summarizes. Again, choosing right language is important. "How to make paper flowers" -- for children's origami site, but "Origami folding instructions: rose" -- for specialist series. "10 fresh typefaces" -- for typophiles, but "10 cool new fonts" -- for everyone else.

Use relevant imagery. A picture is worth a thousand words. So if possible, leave some paragraphs unwritten and use an appropriate picture or a video instead.

Organize your site structure wisely. Use common menu item names (Home, Products, Services, News, About us, etc). Limit site menus to a maximum of 6-8 items on each level. Standard human brain just won't get hold of more at a time. No, you don't have to reorganize your business because of that. Just group your 25 products into 4 sections. Whether you do it by product line, target group, year or something else doesn't matter much.

Interesting and memorable

To get people to link to you and to get your visitors to return, the site must be adding value. Instead of pushing your marketing message, provide your visitors something that draws them back for more. A blog where you speak your mind

openly would be a good start. Detail rich product catalogues would be another. The more content you provide, the bigger is the chance someone finds it helpful. Of course if it's still well organized and easy to digest.

Be memorable. Transform your core message into a slogan, a brand. Something that is easily remembered, sounds unique enough, is short and clear. "Books for the enlightened few" -- for an arrogant science publisher. "Slow life with mozzarella" -- for a small Italian cafeteria. "Frogs meet children" -- for nature classes. Learn from advertising but don't try to go deep if you don't think of yourself as a copywriter.

Use illustrations to colorize the otherwise dull-looking blocks of texts, video / audio to grab wider audience. Not everyone likes to read these days.

Don't speak alone. Collect customer cases or testimonials if your business is about offering a service. Collect product reviews if it's about selling products. But be cautious. There's a fine line between helpful user opinions and stupid praise.

Works for search engines

About 40-50% of the visitors to a well organized website is driven search engines. Other half of the traffic is made up of direct visitors and those coming from sites linking to yours. Therefore it's crucial for any site to appear in the search results and be interesting enough for others to link to it.

Search engines are still no good in indexing video, audio and picture content. First and foremost you need to have textual content which Google would show in its search results. You need to include appropriate keywords in your texts that would match search terms of you potential customers.

Texts that are interesting and appropriate in the eyes of your potential customers, work similarly well for the search engines. Write interesting content, so that people link to your site. It both increases the traffic from linking sites and improves your placement in Google's results.

More on this topic in a separate post on May 21st (Growing traffic).

Fresh and updated

Engage your visitors with the content so they feel like returning -- content must not only be interesting, it must also be fresh and up to date. A good blog, an ever-evolving product section, links to new reviews etc. Site must be lively. It must feel as if someone is working on it constantly with passion. So do it.

Fresh content also helps to gain better placement in search results.

Reuse your content

If your content falls under the above mentioned categories then it's a truly good content. Maybe a portion of it is good enough for using it many times? Once on your site, second time inside your company newsletter or brochure, third time as a part of your presentation at a conference. Why not also as newspaper articles or even as a book -- if there's a portion of unique philosophy in it.

How to create a great website, pt 2: Gathering team

tonu@fraktal.ee — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Websites are built up from a number of different bricks. By the end of the day you'll need design, content (texts and pictures), promotion and some technical things like website address, hosting and system for managing content. But most of all you need to get it done. You need decisions, not discussions.

Don't gather a large team just to wash off your responsibility. Don't waste time writing content for weeks, designing for months.

Build your site quickly, don't try to be perfect. In timely world, there's no need to polish every detail. Just get it done. Publish your site on day one even if it's still small and imperfect. Thereby your site starts serving visitors on day one. You get into the business on day one.

Decide alone, don't wait for anyone to miraculously appear with better decisions from the sky. Don't distract your clear thinking with doubts. People never agree with each other anyway.

Recruit only the best to give you great advice. But do not share decision making with them. Democracy sucks in web creation. Great advisors are another story. Listen to them, get your basics right. And then shoot. Do it. Move on.

As Seth Godin puts it, firing the committee is the deal braker. They also say that camel is a horse designed by a committee.

Should I grab a ready-made design or hire a designer?

Design is classically a luxury item. People die of heart attack when invoice from the design agency arrives. But the market has gone through a major diversification. There is no need to have this choice of "to have a design or not to have it" anymore. You can always have a great design. Prices range from completely free designs (templates) to super expensive works, built exclusively for you by industry's best boys.

The question is therefore only about the size of your budget. Most of us have a meager budget if any, but we still want to have a unique design for our sites. If one really can't stand having a standard template and your budget really is low, there might still be a chance. There's a golden middle way -- hire a freelancer who is good both at design and coding. Let him individualize a free template for your site. Should be a half day's work.

Who should do the writing?

You can't have a content downloaded from a content stock for free. That is the hard part -- you need to write the texts yourself or hire someone to do it. Good news is that simple, short, to-the-point texts work best. So most of us can get it done well enough. And don't forget the pictures. Pictures of your team, product, office or anything else illustrating your message.

What to do with the technical stuff?

Binding the design and content together and launching it as your website used to require a lot of assistance from IT guys. Domain names, hosting, PHP, CMS and other creepy acronymes.

By today, this has become the easy part. There is no need for getting your hands oily anymore. You can build your site by yourself with different website building services. No need to distract your neighbour's 10-year old IT guy of-a-son. Build it yourself, it's rather simple. If you have a custom design, let the designer integrate it with that service.

Promotion

Question about how to man the promotional boat to carry your newborn website is more about general business philosophy than about building a great website.

To cut it short -- study the basics of online marketing. Need for it comes along with every website that wants to live. Study how to get better position in Google's search results, how to analyze your traffic, how to spread the word and how + when to advertise. And then either bootstrap and do the work yourself or if it really isn't your cup of tea, find someone to do it. A website likely becoms a failure without promotion.

How to create a great website, pt 1: Introduction

tonu@fraktal.ee — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Building a great website takes passion. It also takes great copy, good design and a lot of time. These are all luxury items, so it would be wise to optimize the effort. We've put together a series of articles on this very topic. During the next five weeks, we'll tell you the whole story.

Edicy is a startup, a small and energetic company. Most of our customers are of the same size. Edicy itself is firtstly meant for small companies. That's why we'll talk about small business websites. Not that NGO's, government agencies and enterprises live on another planet. It's just that this advice here is not for those to swallow without chewing.

The themes and dates of the posts will be:

April 20th: Introduction
April 23rd: Gathering team
April 30th: Writing content
May 7th: Creating design
May 14th: Building functionality
May 21st: Growing traffic

In a nutshell, creating a great website goes as follows:

Build your site quickly, the details don't have to be perfect. In timely world, great is enough. Just get it done.
Decide alone, don't gather a big team to distract your clear thinking. People never agree with each other anyway. Recruit only the best to give you great advice, do not share decision making. Democracy sucks in web creation.
Content is king. Think like your customers, write simply and shortly. Be visual. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Promote. Get it out in the wild once it's ready. If it's great, it tends to spread. But you still have to work hard. Without promotion no one knows how great it is. And there will always be loads of other great sites yearning for attention.
Congratulations, your job is done. Or... is it? Sad news is that it will never be. Once your attention runs down, your site dies alone. A truly great sites needs updating, developing and caring, forever. But it's actually the fun part. No need to avoid it.

Check back on the dates above to get closer look into the science of great website creation.

Build forms with Edicy, Release notes for April 14, 2009

priit@fraktal.ee — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Today we're happy to announce form builder in Edicy. Now you can create forms with ease to gather user's feedback. And everything happens right where it should -- directly on page. Along with other minor improvements, this week's release also brings us fresh new design template called Daejeon.

To get going, just create a new form (or use the form you already have) in desired content area and start adding fields onto it. We added a new form toolbar where all sorts of form fields can be picked, such as checkboxes, radiobuttons, select fields, etc. Once you've added the fields, their properties can be edited in widget that pops up when you click on a field area.

To rearrange or delete form fields, move the mouse cursor over the left side of field area and buttons to perform these actions will appear -- just like they do with content areas.

Gather the feedback

Edicy had this one before, but just to remind you -- all submitted forms appear as tickets on the tickets screen site admin area. There you can browse individual tickets or download them all together in CSV format.

Complete release notes

Revamped photo editor. We polished the user interface and fixed number of issues related to crop and resize functions. Also, now you can always revert back to the original copy of the image.
Added new Daejeon design template
Added keyboard shortcut to trigger save -- use Ctrl+S on a PC or Command+S on Mac
Table tool now creates tables with the 100% width by default because it is the most common use case when creating tables. Width can be always changed from table options widget.
Improved Google Webmaster Tools verification handling
Fixed minor issues with sitemap.xml and robots.txt files
Fixed issues with blog article comment forms

Have a great design. Edicy design examples renewed

tonu@fraktal.ee — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We have redesigned the design examples section of edicy.com. Designs, featured sites and custom designed sites are now all togeteher on the same page. Carousel browsing was so 2008, so we dropped it and chose something new for the spring season.

The idea was to give quick overview of Edicy's design capacity. You can choose your Edicy site design from our ever-growing stock for free and play with it's colours and other elements should you feel like it. Or you may build a design on Edicy completely on your own from scratch.

By the way, you can also order your website design from our design team.

PS. You were right, yesterday's post was an April fools joke...

Edicy going Internet Explorer only

tajo@fraktal.ee — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:58:59 +0000

It is no surprise to anyone who has ever tried to build elegant web applications or even just a simple web-site that different browsers display pages differently. To work around these issues, developers have to use an exhausting amount of different cheats and "hacks" and sometimes even these don't work. To ensure that Edicy-experience is the same for everyone, we're pleased to announce that starting next week, Edicy will only work in Internet Explorer.

After months of deliberation and negotiating with the development team at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, we decided that Microsoft's Internet Explorer offers us just the flexibility, security and no-hassle development powers that we need every day.

It is a big leap for us, but this transformation will make Edicy even faster, easier to use and, most importantly, make the Edicy experience the same for everyone. We will roll out the changes in the coming week and starting 6th April, 12:00 CET, all other browsers besides IE will be unable to display any page created in Edicy.

You can download Internet Explorer here.

Management of content areas improved. Release notes for March 24, 2009

priit@fraktal.ee — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The most important improvement in this week's release is a feature to add multiple blocks of content into single content area on page. For example, a photo gallery and feedback form can now live happily next to each other. Alongside with this improvement, we also made it possible to drag these content blocks around on the page. And if you get bored with that, it is now much more easier to remove content from page.

Since removing and relocating blocks of content is a task that will be used rarely, we decided to hide the tools to reduce the clutter in page admin mode.

To drag or delete content, move mouse cursor close to the upper-left corner of content block and buttons will appear.

Buttons to add new block can be found if you move mouse cursor near to the lower-left corner of content area.

Complete release notes

Better content block management system
In News & Blog section, there is a new button to delete all spam comments under selected article

To publish or not to publish - You decide!

priit@fraktal.ee — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:41:08 +0000

In Edicy, all the changes will be automatically and continuously saved but to show these changes to public, they need to be published because sometimes you don't want to show the working drafts to the site visitors. Until now, publishing content was little bit confusing. We did our changes in Edicy, logged out and, boom, everything was gone. What!? Oh, you had to press publish button before logging out... It had to be changed.

Meet auto-publishing

While surfing around your site, doing some spel checknig or other minor changes in text, these changes will now be published automatically and are visible to public site visitors immediately.

When you start off with new page or blog post, publishing will switch off automatically so there is enough time to write draft and review everything. When you're done, turn publishing on for this page and new content will appear on public site.

"But... I don't want to publish"

Want to keep it for yourself? No problem. Hit the publishing button so it appears in orange (OFF) state and it will remain so for the rest of the editing session.

Table editor is now available in Edicy. Release notes for March 17, 2009

priit@fraktal.ee — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Table editor, yet another long-awaited feature is now available for all Edicy users. Along with tables, this weeks release brings many other improvements to Edicy. For example, we've been working hard to improve usability, overall speed and performance. We fixed compatibility issues with Microsoft's upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and more.

Enhance your content with tables

Adding tables to your textual content is easy. Just find the table create button in text toolbar and choose the initial table size from grid.

When you click on any existing table in your text, a small additional toolbar will be displayed right next to the text editor toolbar. Here you can perform ordinary table manipulation tasks such adding or removing rows or columns.

Change table options

In table toolbar, there's also a button to access and modify hidden options of your table. Here the width, border, cellpadding and cellspacing options can be changed for table.

Click on any table cell you want to modify and within the same options dialog, the width, height and vertical alignment of table cell content can be changed.

All changes in options dialog will be affected immediately.

Other notable improvements

After we added table create button to the text editor toolbar, it now had a room for one extra button. So we decided to add Indent and Outdent buttons which are quite helpful when working with bulleted or numbered lists.

We also rebuilt the design management from the ground-up. Switching designs is now much snappier. Owners of sites with customized designs now do not have to worry about losing their designs during switching.

Another small improvement is HTML cleanup tool. Sometimes HTML code can get messy when editing it inside browser. You'll find this in HTML code editor window.

Complete release notes

Table creating and editing features
Added option for "Open in new window" in link editor
New indent and outdent buttons in text editor toolbar
New HTML cleanup tool in HTML code editor
Added drag and drop flash movies into text areas
Edicy is now compatible with Internet Explorer 8
Improvements in design management
Improved displaying files and photos in media panel
Fixed issues with removed files in photo gallery
Fixed small issues with video embed tool
Fixed minor issues in designs
Fixed issues with uploading files without extension, other minor file uploader stability improvements

What next?

We are already working on another release but you should definitely go to Edicy Uservoice account and vote up the features you think that should be completed next.

Media sets, form-to-mail, a lot of fixes. Release notes for Feb 8, 2009

tonu@fraktal.ee — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A number of users have already so large amount of pictures and other files uploaded to their Edicy sites, that it became increasingly difficult to get quick overview of them while editing. Therefore we launched a feature that lets you group all your media into sets -- both photo albums and sets of PDF documents work well in Edicy.

This cool new tool can be found when maximizing the media panel into full screen view. Also, you can choose which collections in the media panel you'd like to see at any given moment. Just filter the view from a simple dropdown box.

Another much anticipated feature is that form submissions are now sent to your email. Of course, you can turn this feature off anytime.

Also, our revolutionary in-text image editor is now usable by Internet Explorer (version 7) users too!

Complete relase notes

New features:

Build media sets and filter them in panel view
Send form submissions to your e-mail
Drag & drop image thumbnails into text by pressing ALT key while dragging

Improvements:

Added image tool for IE7
Improved language removal
Improved site organizer
Improved user invitation process

Bug fixes:

Removing all languages now possible
Fixed issues with deleting page on-site
Fixed picture aligning in IE
Link tool now gives suggestions again
Fixed issues with deleting pages with untranslated sub-pages
Fixed moving a page under an untranslated page
Fixed clickable area of "Add new file" under media tab
Fixed showing images under designs full view in IE
Added a "Front page" layout to every design
Automatically generated page path a bit wiser now
Made activation link in emails to redirect to login screen when account already activated

Add forms and receive feedback. Release notes for Jan, 20

priit@fraktal.ee — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Adding forms to site has been yet another feature that was asked too many times by our users. Today it is finally ready to hit the beta. Now you can set up feedback forms and site visitors can finally tell what they're thinking about you.

Currently forms are limited down to two predefined forms - feedback and subscribe to newsletter forms. So right now it isn't possible to customize form fields. But we're working on it. Still, if you just can't wait any longer, just contact us and we can configure you a form to your liking.

Check the feedback

To see what visitors have submitted, just go to site admin area and you'll see a number of submitted tickets in there. On tickets screen, you'll find all tickets that have been submitted and each ticket can also be seen in detail. In addition to that, it is possible to download submitted data as downloadable CSV-format to fill all your data-analyzing needs.

Complete release notes

Added forms feature
Added lithuanian language
Optimized loading speed of media and blog scroller views
Improved site visitor language and location detection
Improved favicon.ico uploading
Fixed issues with dragging images to text
Fixed blog article list order in admin screens
Fixed minor issues with creating new pages from site organizer

Edicy blog

First Edicy screencast is up

Getting widgets on your website with Edicy pt. 1

Three good places to find widgets:

Building a multi-language website with Edicy

Maintenance release notes for May 27, 2009

Complete release notes

Who's using Edicy?

Edicy to be incubated

Edicy got a speed boost, Release notes for May 12, 2009

Other bug fixes and minor improvements

How to create a great website, pt 4: Creating design

What makes a great design?

Autopsy of a great design

Do it “yourself”: design from a stock

Template customization

Conclusion

Other stories on creating a great website:

Help us translate Edicy!

Who are we looking for?

Languages we're currently focusing on:

What's in it for me?

How to create a great website, pt 3: Writing content

Accurate and easy to digest

Interesting and memorable

Works for search engines

Fresh and updated

Reuse your content

Other stories on creating a great website:

How to create a great website, pt 2: Gathering team

Should I grab a ready-made design or hire a designer?

Who should do the writing?

What to do with the technical stuff?

Promotion

Other stories on creating a great website:

How to create a great website, pt 1: Introduction

The themes and dates of the posts will be:

In a nutshell, creating a great website goes as follows:

Build forms with Edicy, Release notes for April 14, 2009

Gather the feedback

Complete release notes

Have a great design. Edicy design examples renewed

Edicy going Internet Explorer only

Management of content areas improved. Release notes for March 24, 2009

Complete release notes

To publish or not to publish - You decide!

Meet auto-publishing

"But... I don't want to publish"

Table editor is now available in Edicy. Release notes for March 17, 2009

Enhance your content with tables

Change table options

Other notable improvements

Complete release notes

What next?

Media sets, form-to-mail, a lot of fixes. Release notes for Feb 8, 2009

Complete relase notes

Add forms and receive feedback. Release notes for Jan, 20

Check the feedback

Complete release notes