07.01.2005
New Design Tools, More Storage, More Bandwidth
Posted by Deborah Schultz in Announcements
Over the past few weeks we have posted about the upcoming enhancements to the Design and Community Management features on TypePad. We are very excited to release these new enhancements today.
What you haven’t yet heard about are the many new enhancements and features we have sprinkled throughout the service. Most of these features are a direct result of your input and requests, and some are features we just thought you’d think are fun. (Doubling storage and bandwidth are two examples). We think your weblogging experience is going to greatly benefit from these enhancements, so enjoy! Here’s the list:
New Features
- Increased bandwidth limits and storage limits for everyone! All users at all service levels now have their storage and bandwidth limits effectively doubled. That’s right - doubled! So go ahead upload those photos. There’s plenty of room.
- New Instant Message status side bar – With the simple click of a button you can show your IM status in your sidebar content. Now your AOL buddies and Yahoo friends can see what you are up to.
Comment & Community Management
- TypeKey support! Weblog owners can now require their readers to comment via Six Apart’s TypeKey service prior to leaving a comment. This provides greater assurance that the comments you receive are genuine.
- Stop the presses, don’t publish that comment! Weblog owners now have the option to turn on default comment moderation for all posts made to any of their weblogs. With comment moderation turned on, new comments will not be visible to the public until they have been approved by the owner.
- Comment Notification Email improvements – Half the fun of weblogging is getting feedback from your readers. The new comment notification emails now include direct links to delete, edit, and approve comments, making it much easier to manage new comments straight from your inbox.
- More emails converted to HTML - The TrackBack notification email, and all the emails associated with the guest author invitation process, have been converted to HTML - that is, if you like that sort of thing.
- HTML or Plain Text emails - And if you don’t like that sort of thing, you can now elect to have emails sent in HTML or plain text.
Design
- More themes! We have added 15 new themes to choose from, including themes specially designed for knitting, new arrivals (babies, that is), and weddings. Also, users can conveniently select from any theme in our theme library when creating a new weblog, using our newly designed theme navigator.
- Custom CSS – Pro level subscribers can now easily extend any theme with any custom style information they choose. This allows you to tweak any aspect of your design without requiring you to convert your designs to advanced templates while allowing you to take advantage of all of TypePad’s easy to use basic design features.
- Copying advanced template sets - Pro users can now make copies of their advanced template set. Just navigate to “Manage Your Designs,” select the template sets to copy, and click “Duplicate.”
- Enhanced Design Area - We improved the weblog design area of TypePad, making it easier to use and navigate. You can now browse our themes by category, easily create a theme of your own using the weblog design wizard, and more easily customize your sidebar content selections.
Publishing & Configuration
- Publishing is more automatic - Now when you make changes to your currently selected theme you are no longer required to do a rebuild of your weblog to see your changes reflected. However, you may sometimes need to rebuild your archive pages.
- Rewritten weblog preferences page - The Weblog > Configure > Display preferences page has been renamed to “Preferences” and has been largely rewritten to be clearer and more intuitive.
- “Warning! You have unsaved changes.” Some of you may appreciate the added security provided by warning dialog boxes that now appear if you attempt to leave the advanced template editing screen with any unsaved changes.
- More Local Vendor options - Amazon France and Amazon Canada are now available as local vendor options in your Profile, allowing you to link to those vendors from your TypeLists and Wishlists. That’s pretty cool, ay? Oui.
- Easier localization - Date and time formats are selected automatically for you based upon the language you select for your weblog.
Account Management
- More detailed transaction histories - Now when you upgrade and downgrade your account from one service level to another, a transaction will be logged in your Transaction and Billing History.
- Mini-FAQs abound! Mini-FAQs and help text have been added to numerous pages in TypePad to provide more immediate and context-sensitive help. Plus, much of the help text has been revised to be clearer, more accurate and more up to date.
We hope everyone enjoys the many new features throughout the application, and we look forward to your ongoing feedback to continually improve TypePad.
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