Aptuitiv Studio Upgrades

We've implemented a new search engine into Aptuitiv that improves performance and capabilities.

We recently pushed out some new functionality to our Aptuitiv Code code base.

We've had some requests lately to add some flexibility to viewing member profiles in the administration for our Members app. We've pushed out a number of changes over the last week that make it easier to see the information that you want to see.

A few days ago we updated Aptuitiv to allow website visitors to be automatically logged into a password protected page or password protected directory based on their IP address. This functionality is currently only available to websites on the Pro version of Aptuitiv. 

Here is an example scenario where this new functionality could be used.

Say that part of your corporate site is a password protected extranet accessible at yourdomain.com/extranet and you are using Password Protected Directories to password protect the /extranet page and all of it's sub-pages. In the past all visitors would have to manually log in to access any of those pages. With this new functionality you can now allow anyone on your private network behind your firewall to be automatically logged in. 

We just made a change with our databases that will enable support for international characters (like Chinese). For quite a while now our database tables have had the UTF-8 character encoding… Read more...

One of the most requested features that we've received lately is being able to preview pages and Blog posts before they are published. We've also been wanting a preview feature for our blog for quite a while.  I'm pleased to announce that those requests have been taken care of.

When previewing a page or blog post you are actually viewing it just like you would on your live site. This means that all of your templates, styles and other site content will show on the preview page. Also, because the preview page doesn't require a log in, you can share the preview URL with your colleagues that don't have access to the administration.

Over the last few weeks we've pushed out some fairly significant updates to our Blog and Gallery add-on apps. We've improved support for tags and RSS/Atom feeds, added new APIs and have done a lot of "under-the-hood" code rewriting to make things more consistent.

Today we pushed out an update to one of the core features of Aptuitiv Studio to make it more accessible across different versions of Aptuitiv Studio. Up until today if you wanted to have multiple Blogs you had to be on the Pro version of Aptuitiv Studio. Not any more.

We just updated the Store shopping cart page to fix one long standing bug and to add a new feature.

For anyone who has mingled within the circles of search engine optimization lately you've probably heard about rel canonical tags. In a nutshell, rel canonical tags provide a way to work around duplicate content on your website. While there are other ways to improve duplicate content, rel canonical tags can be a last resort that just might help improve your search engine rankings. 

However, this isn't a post about what rel canonical tags are, there are already a lot of good resources out there. Rather, this is a post about how you can easily add a rel canonical tag to your pages with Aptuitiv Studio.

Over the last month we have made a number of improvements in Aptuitiv Studio to speed things up and to improve the efficiency of your workflows. Here are three areas that we've worked on recently.

There have been a few things about the process of uploading images in an app (like the our Gallery app) that have bugged us for a while and last week we set out to take care of those issues. The overall issue was that the process of uploading an image took too long. Well, I'm pleased to announce that we've implemented a couple of upgrades that dramatically improve the image uploading experience.

Earlier this week we released an update to our Members app that allows you to import new members from a CSV file.

A few weeks ago we introduced Content Snippets, a great way to share editable snippets of content throughout your website. Content Snippets can use a single rich text editor or use a Content Layout. However, sometimes you want to create a Content Layout that can only be used for Content Snippets or just for Pages. Well now you can.

We just added the ability to export your orders as a CSV file from the Aptuitiv Studio Store app.

If you've edited any pages in your website recently you might have noticed a new section of Pages called Content Snippets. I'm going to explain what Content Snippets are, why we created them and what you can do with them.

When you're creating emails using Aptuitiv Studio Campaigns you can now include information about the campaign in each email.

Our Campaigns app is still relatively new and we've been working hard to add new features to make it a more robust email campaign tool. With that goal in mind, we've recently added the ability for the campaign recipients to view a copy of the email in their browser. All you have to do to enable that is to put a simple link in your email template.

Last week we introduced a small change to editing app layouts that should make things easier. In the past if you needed to change the template that an app layout used you had to create a whole new layout. That's not a terrible thing, but it was a bit inconvenient.

One of the major features of Aptuitiv Studio is the ability to create custom administration forms for pages and apps to fit the data requirements of a particular website.

For example, if you have a page that needs more structured content then a rich text editor can provide, you can create a Content Block Layout for pages and create the form fields that you need. There are the standard fields like select menus, text boxes, textareas and the like. There are also unique fields that allow you to select from a list of Snippets, Navigation Menus and Collection Widgets to include on the page.

We just published 2 small updates to the Forms app in Aptuitiv Studio. The first allows you to set one or more BCC email addresses for the administrator notification email.  The other allows you to choose whether or not you want to automatically include file attachments on the administrator notification email.

Sometimes you're building a website that needs to be locked down and secure. You need the entire website to be password protected and you need the entire website to use SSL (https).

Aptuitiv Studio makes it really easy to do that.  Under Site Settings there are 3 settings that can make an entire site password protected and use SSL.

As any good search engine optimization practitioner knows the title tag and meta description for a page are important for how your website performs in search engines. While the actual text for the title and meta description are the most important factors, the length of the text is also important.  We've now made it really easy to know how long your page titles and meta descriptions are.

We just published a small update to the form functionality in Aptuitiv Studio. If you have a form where your website visitors can upload files, the only way that you could remove those files from your website was to delete the entire form submission.

Not anymore.

Sometimes when you're building a form you need to set an id or a class on the <form> tag. That's usually done for styling or for attaching some Javascript to the form. It's now easier than ever to do that with Aptuitiv Studio.

We recently added another API parameter to the Navigation API in Aptuitiv Studio that you might find useful.

Last week we rolled out a small update to take care of something that has bugged me for a while. Say you were working on your blog and you wanted to take a look at the home page of the blog. In the past you could click on the "View my site" link at the top of the administration and then navigate to your blog. That works fine, but I wanted it to be even easier.

Sliced Design, one of our partners, recently contacted us with a great feature request. They were building a site with a contact form that needed to have some dynamic default values for some of it's fields. In the site they have links to the form that look like this: site.com/contact?name=Joe. They needed to have the "Name" text box automatically filled with the value from the "name" URL parameter.

Now on the surface this isn't that bad of a request. In their form template they could simply put in some logic to see if the {#global.request.get.name} value exists and then set the value for the Name field. Their request was to make this easier. They simply wanted to set the variable as the default value when setting up the form field.

For the last few months we've been working on improving the file browser that we use with TinyMCE in Aptuitiv Studio and I'm pleased to announce that it's now ready. We've been using the TinyBrowser plugin and while it does a good job and has a fair amount of functionality it also has a few shortcomings.

Breadcrumb trails are a great way to help your site visitors find their place in your website. They're especially useful if a visitor lands deep in your site from a search engine listing as the breadcrumb trail can give them a sense of where they are and an idea of the other content on your website.

We've recently added a few new features to Aptuitiv Studio that updates how it works with breadcrumb trails.

Recently we have introduced Tags and Tag Clouds into our Blog Add-on. This is a pretty exciting feature that we knew our Blog was lacking from some time now. Well it has finally come up in our development schedule and we think everyone will be pleased with it.

We recently updated our Blog app to make more RSS and Atom feeds available. Previously you could only get a feed on recent posts. We've quadrupled that and now… Read more...

We've recently started launching new websites at a staging URL under our generic domain "mysitestaging.com".  Using the magic of wildcard subdomains we can create a new website at… Read more...

To keep everyone in the loop here are some of the things that we are working on, or will be working on soon in Aptuitiv Studio.

We're pleased to announce another recent addition to the new social networking functionality of Aptuitiv Studio. You can now pull your Twitter feed right into your website and have full style control so that it fits beautifully into your existing design.

Aptuitiv Studio uses TinyMCE as the rich text editor and we recently upgraded it from version 3.2.6 to 3.3.4. For the most part the upgrade was smooth and from an end user perspective the way the editor works stayed fairly consistent. There was however one thing that was significantly different and that is the Paste as Plain Text functionality.

A common request for Aptuitiv Studio has been to integrate user permissions.  We had those capabilities in version 2 and have recently completed it for version 3. If you're on the Plus or higher version of Aptuitiv Studio then you now have user permissions.

The development of Aptuitiv Studio is mostly driven by the needs of our customers and recently a client had some special needs. We were working on a website for one of our partners and the section… Read more...

We recently published a new API for the Calendar that enables you to display a mini calendar grid anywhere on your website. We already have an API to display upcoming events but there wasn't any… Read more...

It's been a while since I wrote a post about the latest developments in Aptuitiv Studio.  It's not for a lack of updates.  We've been pushing out updates nearly everyday.  The large… Read more...

We've recently added support for some new tags in app content templates

When you're viewing your search reports in the Aptuitiv Studio administration you can now export the Recent and Popular search reports as a CSV file.  Simply click on the "Export" link in the upper right.

This morning we pushed out a small update that has a big impact to creating navigation items. 

In the past you had to either type in or paste in the URL for a link.  This often meant that you needed to have visited the page that you want to link to and copied the URL before creating a new navigation menu so that you would know what to link to.  There were other techniques as well, but to sum it up, it was a pain.

We've made it easier.

This morning we pushed out a small update to the Calendar app to make some RSS and Atom feeds available. You can have a feed to show recent events or you can use the feed to show recent events by category.

We recently pushed out a new update to our Forms app that is a part of the core Aptuitiv Studio system.  You can now save form submissions to view or export later.  When you create or edit a form simply set the "Save Form Submissions" value to be "Yes". From that point on all form submissions will automatically be saved in the database so that you can work with this later.

Even though it's been the holiday season lately, we've been hard at work adding new features and improvements to Aptuitiv Studio.

Ok, ok, so I guess this Social Networking stuff is here to stay huh? Correct. Now more then ever it’s important to have your company be discovered. Old marketing techniques like cold calling are going the way of the dinosaur and it’s important that your company is taking advantage of the exposure that can be gained through Social Networking.

We've been doing a lot of work on the search functionality of Aptuitiv Studio and I want to share some of the latest developments.