New Social Media Toolbar for vSites and other updates

by Dan Lenehan

I’m excited to announce that we deployed a release last night that included the addition of a Social Media Toolbar Module to vSites! The social media toolbar has been a much loved feature in our vMarketing service, so we figured it would be at least as popular and useful a feature in vSites. The Social Media Toolbar Module allows you to add icons for different social media sites to any part of your website, and then link each of those icons to your page on that site. Here’s an example of the toolbar added to a site header:

It’s a wonderfully simple way of engaging your site visitors and establishing a connection with them through social media. And with the existing Facebook Like and Twitter Modules, you now have a variety of tools at your disposal to optimize your website for the “Social Web.” You’ll find the Social Media Toolbar Module under the “Integration” column of the Add Module page.

Other new features and bug fixes in last night’s release:

1. We now generate an XML sitemap for all websites published with a custom domain name. An XML sitemap is a valuable SEO resource as it makes it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl the content of a website. You can view the XML sitemap for your website by entering http://[yourdomainname.com]/sitemap.xml.

2. We improved the Listings Module in a number of ways. Notably, we now allow you to choose a different account or sub-account under your user email to pull listings from. We also added the option to hide the thumbnail image for each listing and improved the photo display on the listing detail page.

3. We added Picnik image editing capabilities to banner images uploaded in the Header Module.

4. We changed the interface of the Page URL Settings screen to make it easier to understand.

5. There were a number of bugs related to formatting and content display in different parts of the application that we fixed.

Thanks to our wonderful users for all the feedback and feature requests you’ve given us. Several of them went directly into this release. Please keep the comments, suggestions, and questions coming!