New features were deployed this morning on the Water, Sky and LightCMS products. Congrats to our development team for a blazing-fast upgrade process and downtime (approximately 6 seconds!), as well as a great list of new features. Here we go ...
iCal integration on the calendar element
The headline feature for this update is on the calendar element. Now you can subscribe to any hosted calendar system that supports iCal. Our calendar element will display events from your iCalendar source and keep itself up to date automatically.
What this means is that you now have more options in how you manage events on your website. You can use our built-in calendar element tools to create events, or you could choose to use an external calendar software (like Google Calendar, .Mac, Zvents, 30 boxes ... etc.) to manage your events and then have our system display those events on your website. You could also subscribe to any public iCalendars and bring those events onto your website instantly.
All you have to do is click the "settings" button on any calendar element on your site, then choose the "advanced" tab. You'll see a section for "Calendar Subscription" and a field to enter your external iCal feed URL (your external software like Google Calendar will provide you with the iCal URL). Paste it in, update, and you're done!
Our system will refresh against the iCal feed once per day. If you need to refresh it manually, you can do that as well, also from the advanced tab.
One other nice feature is that once you've subscribed, you can override the title and description of the events by editing them within the Water, Sky, and LightCMS systems. Just edit an event like normal and you can add web-only content to an event for display purposes. The event still stays connected to your iCal source. Keep in mind that if you ever unsubscribe from the iCal source, all events related to the iCal source, even content added through Water, Sky or LightCMS, will be deleted.
Drag and drop reordering on the Photo Gallery
This is a nice little treat. You can now reorder images in your photo gallery by simply dragging and dropping them. Nice!
Vastly enhanced menu tokens
For those of you who build your own HTML / CSS templates for our system, we have made some huge improvements for you. Our menu tokens have been overhauled to provide more options with new attributes and better CSS hooks. We will be posting more about these changes in the future as we get everything solidified, but here's a brief summary:
- A class of "hasChildren" has been added to the markup on menu items that have children, even if those children are not currently displayed.
- A class of "level2" (or whatever level number is correct) has been added to the markup of the unordered list element surrounding each menu level, making it easier to target menu levels.
- The sectionmenu token no longer displays root level menu items in the absence of sibling or children pages, making it easier to utilize this token in more situations.
- The globalmenu token now includes a "showLevels" attribute which allows you to specify exactly which menu levels to display. Please note: we are still ironing out a few details about how the "showLevels" attribute works. We recommend waiting a few more days
before you try and implement "showLevels" onto your
templates. We'll post further information about how to use this attribute once everything is finalized.
Photo Gallery display based on browser size
When clicked, photo gallery images will now display up to the size of your browser (with a max of 1600 pixels either dimension). Previously, the size was capped to fit an 800x600 display.
Other minor improvements
This release also rolled out some behind the scenes changes to make things more efficient, faster and better than ever.
Enjoy!
We hope you enjoy all of the new features and improvements. We look forward to bringing you more in the days ahead.
Posted on
Tue, March 4, 2008
by Tim Wall