You now have the ability to add custom content to your left and right columns.

This option can be found in your administration area under the site customisation menu.

This release also includes further preparation for eCommerce solutions and plugins but this is preparation work only and there are no eCommerce functions to play with just yet.
The first phase of eCommerce and plugin functionality involves changes to the user maintenance in the form of roles.
This user role functionality will support options for you to maintain customer details, members details (If you opt for the membership plugin) and so on.

eCommece is coming shortly

The word “missing” in the heading of your website for the banner now shows our logo image for those sites that have not set an image of their own.

I forgot to mention with the last release that you can now add custom content to your contact us page

The administration control panel now uses our own theme instead of your websites theme.
This makes all sites admin areas looking consistent across all sites so you will no longer see the effect of your change when you apply a new theme.
the point of this update is to make it easier for users to support each other. It’s much easier to deal with issues when they look the same in all sites.

We will be launching cloudcitysites soon and opening up to the world. Watch this space!

First off, a “website layout” link under Site Customisation.

Click on this to go to a page similar to the themes main page.

Click on “new website layout” and you go to a page where you can set the width and height of your website, recommendations are provided on the page. Name your layout and select the tickbox if you want to make the layout the default layout.

Setting the width or height or both to anything other than the default will give you a border around your site. This means that there are many ways to make your website look different to other websites.

You can create a number of different layouts and activate whichever one you want at any time.

Note. When setting the width or height, only use a number. Don’t put px or %, or any other characters in the box – it won’t work!

You can see your changes as they’re being applied in the webpage template above the boxes.

There have also been improvements made to the “editing theme” page. You can now set the background colour of your website. This will be the colour of the border around your site. You can also choose a content border colour. This will put a border around your content area. If you choose a different colour to the content area you will see the border with rounded corners. To give the appearance of disabling this, you can choose the same border colour as the content area.

You can now choose to put your logo in the center of the header or to the left or right. Likewise your website title, if you use it, and also the position of the top menu bar (link tabs) if you choose use it.

All changes can now be viewed in the website preview in the right hand column. Main site colours change as you select the different colours and font colours are shown when you save the page.

Custom Pages:

The major change since my last post is the wysiwyg editor. This makes adding content to your website very easy indeed. Take a few minutes to go through all the options and it will be apparent that you now have the ability to add almost any type of content, put it into tables, wrap text around pictures, upload pictures and photos from your desktop, add html code directly into your site, easily create links and much much more!

You can choose to have the link in your page in the left nav bar, in the tabs across the top of the page, both or neither. Neither is a good way to link to pages from inside your content without creating long lists of links in the nav bar or across the top of your page.

Another very important update is the ability to name the page anything you like, while choosing a different name to appear as link text. This is an enhancement for better seo’d pages, so now for example you could create a page called lovely_cheap_round_blue_widgets_for_sale_at_bargain_prices, while the link in navigation could just say “blue Widgets”. This is better for the search engines to find and avoids having long titles in the nav bar and tabs. It also allows you to change the link text if you decide you don’t like it, while still retaining the same url, so links won’t break and people will still find the page if they’ve bookmarked it. So you could change “blue widgets” to “round widgets” as you build your widget empire and the link will still work ok.

You now have the functionality available to create a basic personal, ecommerce or affiliate store, optimised for the search engines, looking different to other cloudcitysites websites and with w3c compliance for free!

Finally *phew!* There are now some additional links in the admin tab bar, one for “blue sky” and one for “help forum”. We urge you to sign up for blue sky and the forum for free promotion for your site, to find out about cloudcitysites and to seek help or advice on anything related to cloudcitysites.

The cloudcitysites website builder will very shortly be released to the public, so you currently have a good opportunity to get in early and become established in what we are confident will be a large and rapidly expanding network.

This update includes 1 major change and 1 major new function as well as numerous minor updates largely related to the administration area with better descriptions for options and minor layout changes.

You now have a new feature called “Website Layout”
This feature allows you to set a border around the edge of your website which produces a very different looking website and combined with the themes options you now have a large number of ways to customise your site

The website layout feature works much the same as the themes feature in that you can set up numerous layouts and choose which layout you wish to apply.

Custom pages and SEO friendly URL’s.
You now have the ability to supply a url value for your custom page that you can set independently of the link text for the page.
This is a major enhancement and allows you to set the text on your menus to whatever you wish, without breaking any links you may have placed in your custom pages to other pages on your website.
All existing custom pages have been set to use this new url. You are advised to check your pages and update any links you may have added to use the new url format. Your current links should not be broken but they are not SEO friendly.

One of the major benefits of this change is that no matter how many times you change the text in your links for your pages any visitors that have bookmarked your pages will still be able to find them.
The url’s now take the form of yoursite.cloudcitysites.com/content/show/your_custom_url

This also means that you can change your link text for your menus without worrying about SEO and any effect this may have making it OK to use a link text of “Apples & Pears” for example without needing to concern yourself that search engines would not be happy about this.

A url is automatically generated for you but you when you create a new page based on the link text you enter.
To use the above example
A link text of “Apple & Pears” will automatically generate a url of yoursite.cloudcitysites.com/content/show/apple_&_pears
Replacing spaces with the “_” character.

There is more work to be done in this area such as replacing & with the word “and” but until this is done you can edit your URL once you have saved your new custom page and set it to whatever.

We now have the ability for visitors to cloudcitysites.com to sign up for a new site. The function is currently disabled and hidden however whilst we finalise the deployment process.

You are of course welcome to sign up for as many free sites as you wish to have but as soon as we go live with the project then we will have to implement a use it or lose it policy. Paid for sites would not come under this policy on the basis that if you want to pay for a site then it can sit there for ever doing nothing

We are suggesting that a free website has a 3 month life span and if it has not been customised within this time frame it will be removed after eMail confirmation. A removed site can always be re-applied for

Finally a note regarding eMail notifications.
This will be the last eMail notification that you will receive directly from me regarding website updates.

This change is in preparation for moving towards a site owner being in control of what updates they wish to receive and when they wish to receive them.

You will notice that there is a change to the editor in the custom page maintenance. The new editor is quite a heavyweight solution packed with functionality but does take a slight delay before showing up. New features of this editor allow the uploading of images directly from your local computer rather than having to link to hosted images.

Bugs fixed include an Internet Explorer problem trying to download a file when a sidebar menu item is clicked and url’s not changing when visiting a page.

Some web 2 effects have been added to make the page loading a little smoother and the rounded corners have been removed from the heading and footer areas in preperation for a nicer layout design.

A new background colour option has been added to the themes and Themes are on the agenda for a major overhaul.

Your admin area is situated at http://www.yourwebsitename.cloudcitysit … admin/home or http://www.yourwebsitename.com/admin/home if you buy your own domain name.

Admin Maintenence:

This drops down to 2 submenus:

Users
Contact details

Users

This is where you can change your username or password and add other users to your site.

Contact details

This is where you can fill in any information about you that you want to appear on the “contact” page of your website. Remember that if you are selling products on your website, you will need to fill in a real address and landline phone number to comply with UK distance selling regulations. (you will also need to fill in the “About” page, situated in the custom page section and maybe create a page that states your terms and conditions).

*The “link text” is what you want your email address to appear as*

Site Customisation

This drops down to 2 submenus:

Custom Pages
Themes

Custom Pages

This is where you add or delete pages on your website and can go to edit page.

Edit:

You can choose to show the page links in the navbar (down the left hand side), across the top of the page in tabs, both positions, or you can choose not to show them at all. (This is good for linking to pages from within the content area and helps to avoid having loads of links down the left hand side or across the top).

Link text. This is the name that you want to call your page and becomes the name of the link.

Custom Page. This is where you add the content to your page, either using the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor or you can use html. You can also upload pictures and add simple payment buttons for a basic ecommerce store.

Save. Save your work!

Themes:

This is where you can get creative and add different designs to your website!

Click on “new theme” to get started. Once you’ve added a few themes, you can press the activate button to change your website. You could have a Christmas theme for your website, or a sale theme, or anything else you like, and swap between them just with the click of a button!

You can edit or destroy your theme. Click on destroy to delete it. You will have the option to delete it or cancel, in case you pressed the destroy button by mistake!

Edit:

This takes you to the theme creation area.

Browse: Upload your header image from your desktop. Currently the upload doesn’t automatically resize your image, so try to keep it to under around 1000px to avoid your website scrolling from left to right.

Banner Position: Decide if you want your banner logo on the left, in the middle or on the right of your website.

Heading Title: This appears in the center of the header area. If you don’t put the name of your website in your header logo, you can put it here. Or you could use it to say “Merry Christmas”, or “Sale now on” or anything else you like.

Scroll a bit further down.

Theme Name: This is the name of your theme that will appear on the themes admin main page. Choose a descriptive title so you know what it is when you want to change the look of your website.

Colours: These are the background colours of the various sections of your website, like the left and right columns, the main center area, the header, footer and side menu. If you know hex code, just type in the colour number without the # (hash). If you don’t know hex code, just click on the box to the right of the colour code to open up the colour picker. Pick your colour and hit OK.

Fonts: These are the sitewide fonts choice for your website. They should all be websafe. ie visible in any browser. You can choose the font colour for your main content area, your navigation area (links) colours and the colour of your header message.

Update: Don’t forget to save your work!

Logout

Logs you out of your admin area and sends you to the login page.

This has highlighted a further requirement for testing. Once we are live with the projects issues that effect these sites in this way can not be allowed to happen again. You are all early adopters of these sites and your continued support is
extremely valuable to us. Once we go ‘live’ we would really appreciate volunteers to continue with early test releases prior to major rollout. We will be setting up a forum for people to volunteer for this (Paul?) shortly with a private feedback area to deal specifically with pre-release issues.

We would like to move to a reactive release process at some point whereby site owners will be notified of new functionality being available which would allow site owners to choose when to update their sites rather than to be given them automatically but this functionality is not going to happen quickly.

The main differences include the ability to add contact details for your website. and these details will replace the current Contact menu on your public site. The administration panel options for you to imput these details can be found under the site administration menu.

Also included is the first implemetation of web 2.0 effects. This is quite a technical solution and is only a first draft so please bear with us as we work to improve this functionality.

Minor enahancements include a change to the way a new theme is created to provide sensible colour defaults rather than the horrible orange colour that appeared.

I hope you like your new improvements and there will be more on the way. We are setting up a forum to enable site owners to interact with us and each other, feedback bugs, enhancement requests and generally chat amongst yourselves about any aspect of what we are doing. Details will be following shortly.

I will be working on cleaning up the site contact maintenance at the same time so hopefully I can get a general all sites release out by the end of tomorrow.

I’ll then start work on the right side panel customisation.