We’re excited to announce the latest feature in datAvenger: drag-and-drop uploading in the Assets tab! We’ve made a short video to show how it’s done:
Using this new addition is really simple. Just drag files from your computer right onto the datAvenger screen to add them to your site. You’ll see a yellow border around the area where you can drop the files, and a message will appear in the bottom corner to let you know the progress of your upload.
Drag-and-drop uploading works in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome. If you’d like to use another browser or can’t upgrade to the latest version, you can still use the “Upload additional assets” link to add files to your site.
And you thought we weren’t going to get you any presents this year. Boy, were you wrong! You were all good boys and girls this year, so we have three new features just for you.
List view
You may have noticed some new buttons under the Content and Asset tabs. These buttons allow you to switch between the default Thumbnail View (See #1) and the fancy new List View (See #2). In the Content tab, List View condenses your website’s pages into a two-column list, allowing you to see and manage more pages at the same time. The same menus are available in List View as in Thumbnail View such as Edit, Edit Metadata, and View. It also works in the Assets tab, hiding the thumbnail of each asset to create a two-column list of all of the assets that have been uploaded to your site.
Under the Asset dropdown, your documents show in one section, and images in another
Create a link to an image
Not to be confused with displaying an image on a page, linking to an image will direct the viewer to the image itself – outside of the website. This can be helpful if you want a small image to be a link to a larger version of the same image, or if you want the viewer to be able to see the image but don’t want to include it on your page. We’ve expanded the Asset dropdown from the Insert Link window to show documents in one category, and images in another.
Anchor tags
The anchor symbol next to Meaning means that this has an anchor attached to it. The "Meaning" link above it links to this anchor.
You asked, and we listened. Insert anchor tags with ease with the new Add Anchor button and the new dropdown menu in the Insert Link window. For those of you who aren’t familiar with anchor tags, they are a different kind of link that allow you to link to a specific area on a page. Anchors are really helpful for long pages like Glossaries and FAQs.
Say for instance that you have a glossary on your site, divided up into sections by the first letter of the word. The page would consist of 26 sections, with the corresponding letter at the top of each section. If you added an anchor to each section heading you could
The new "Anchor on Page" dropdown will detect what anchors you have placed on a page and allow you to link to them.
then list each letter at the top of the page and link to the section headings farther down the page. When a viewer clicks on a letter, it would “jump” down to that section of the page. Many sites with anchors also include a “back to top” link to bring the viewer back to the original list of links.
Want a new and easy way to move between views of Content or Assets in your datAvenger admin area? Simple! Just use the up, down, page up, or page down keys while you’re viewing either the main Content or Assets page. The ‘up’ and ‘page up’ keys will move the view to the previous page (just as if you’d clicked the ‘<< previous' link). The 'down' and 'page down' links will move to the next page (just as if you'd clicked the 'next >>’ link).
We’d love to add more keyboard shortcuts to the datAvenger admin area in the future. Have a suggestion for a shortcut you’d like to see? Let us know!
Ever since we launched the latest version of datAvenger, we’ve been asking what our users would love to see in the product. Lately we’ve spent some time going through the list of features you want to see, and we noticed pretty quickly that there were a few specific requests that appeared over and over again.
By far the most requested feature was an integrated way to search a datAvenger site. Good news, search fans: we’ve just added a way to search your datAvenger site, and the search results will even appear right inside the look and feel of the rest of your site. The search will return results for all pages on your site, whether or not they appear in your site’s navigation. We’ve even added search right into the Theme Builder theme; if you build your site using the Theme Builder in the Settings tab, you’ll have search added automatically.
If you have a custom theme for your site and would like search added, please get in touch with us. We’d be happy to give you your very own site search box in datAvenger!
We’re excited to announce the addition of a new module to our datAvenger collection: a gallery!
The aim of the gallery is to allow you to create a gallery of your photos, illustrations, or other images as simply as possible. We let you choose as many of your uploaded assets as you’d like to display in your gallery, and we also give you the choice to pick a size for the images in the gallery, an option to show image thumbnails (smaller versions of the images that are always viewable), and an autoplay option that turns your gallery into an auto-rotating image slideshow (we even give you the choice of how long you want each image to appear before advancing).
Have a bunch of images you want to display? Contact us and ask to have the Gallery added to your site!
One of the biggest additions in the latest update to datAvenger is the ability to control your site’s navigation. To modify your site’s nav, head into the Settings tab and click the link under ‘Your Navigation.’ There are two ways to do navigation in datAvenger: automatic and manual.
Automatic navigation control
Automatic is the no-worries approach to creating usable navigation on your site. When the automatic mode is selected, datAvenger will fill your site’s nav with all of the pages on your site in alphabetical order. The best part about automatic navigation is that it will automatically update whenever you add a new page on your site. (The ‘404′ and ‘XML Sitemap’ system pages will not be displayed in nav.)
Manual navigation control
If you want more control of your site’s nav, select the manual option. The box on the left lists the pages that will be shown in your navigation, shown in the order they will appear (top to bottom). The box on the right shows the remaining pages on the site. If you want to move a page to your site’s navigation, just click on it in the right column and drag it to the left column. To remove a page from nav, simply drag it from the left to the right column.
While you’ll need to come back whenever you want to change the navigation on your site, the manual option gives power users the ability to show only what they want.
If we designed a site-specific layout for you, you may not have the navigation control option available for your site. We can enable navigation control on most custom layouts, but there may be some exceptions. If you don’t have the navigation control option for your site and would like it, please contact us and we’ll discuss what we can do.
To coincide with our datAvenger name refresh, we’ve made a new walkthrough video for the datAvenger admin area. You’ll even be able to see some of the new features we haven’t discussed on the blog yet (but will soon!) including navigation control and theming.
Happy April! I just wanted to run through a few new additions and changes we’ve made to dA lite today.
This release includes some big new features for those of you with the Form page type. In addition to regular and long text fields, you now have a selection option. To add options to the selection box, just type one option per line in the field details area. You can leave a blank selection type by inserting a blank line at the beginning of the options box. When viewed on your site, this type will appear as a select box.
Form users also now have the option to redirect users to another page on the site after the form has been submitted. This is great for those times when you may want to create a “thank you” page for form submitters. If you already have forms set up on your site, users will be redirected to your site’s home page (unless you change the redirect for those forms, of course).
We’ve also improved navigation for sites that have more have more pages or assets than will appear on one page in the admin area (12 of either). In addition to moving to the previous or next page in the grid, you can now use a new page selector to jump directly to different pages:
Please note that the page selector is only available when you’re sorting the list by name in Content or Assets. If you choose to sort by date, size, or extension, you can still use the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ links.
We also fixed some bugs when dragging in form pages, previewing pages from the admin area, and a few other minor tweaks.
As always, feel free to leave your comments either here or using the ‘Ask for help or send us feedback’ link at the bottom the datAvenger lite admin area.
We just activated a new set of features in datAvenger lite having to do with asset management. We think these changes will really speed up the assets on your site: both for you in management and for the visitors who come to your site. You’ll now find three new features in your Assets tab: editing, resizing, and compressing.
Asset editing
You can now edit the name of your assets from within dA lite, a first for any Sephone content management product. Click on any asset in the Assets tab and you’ll be given the option to change the name of that asset. From that point on you’ll see the name you choose in the Assets list, and we’ll make a web-friendly version of the name you choose for the file’s actual name (for example, if you give a photo a name of ‘Nubble sunrise’, we’ll give the asset a web filename of ‘nubble-sunrise.jpg’). Search engines prefer descriptive names instead of those generic filenames you’ll find on digital camera pictures and the like (’IMG_0429.JPG’), so rename to your heart’s content!
You don’t even need to worry about your content. datAvenger lite will go through the pages on your site and change any references to the asset to the new name as long as you keep the checkbox on the edit screen checked.
Asset resizing and compressing
Have you noticed that JPEG images (usually photo files) take a little while to load on your page? That’s probably because they aren’t web-optimized. We’ve now given you the option to optimize these images right from the Assets tab.
There’s a new option in the context menu for JPEG files called ‘Resize / Compress’. Once you’ve selected that option, you’ll be given two new ways to save space and speed up the load time of your photos: you can resize or compress them.
To resize an image, just drag the slider to the left and right depending on the desired size for the photo. Smaller photos will take less space and will load faster on your pages. We find that most users never need a photo larger than 400 pixels wide if they’re using it on a content page; that might be a good dimension to use as a starter. Of course, you can always go back into the resize area and shrink it down again if you like! (You can only resize to a smaller size, though.)
If you want to keep your asset’s current dimensions, you can try compressing the image. This may result in a little bit of quality loss, but most users don’t even notice a change… and it will save you a ton of space in many cases!
We’d love to hear what you think about these new features. If you have any questions, please let us know as well.
You may have noticed some new buttons under the Content and Asset tabs. These buttons allow you to switch between the default Thumbnail View (See #1) and the fancy new List View (See #2). In the Content tab, List View condenses your website’s pages into a two-column list, allowing you to see and manage more pages at the same time. The same menus are available in List View as in Thumbnail View such as Edit, Edit Metadata, and View. It also works in the Assets tab, hiding the thumbnail of each asset to create a two-column list of all of the assets that have been uploaded to your site.
Ever since we launched the latest version of datAvenger, we’ve been asking what our users would love to see in the product. Lately we’ve spent some time going through the list of features you want to see, and we noticed pretty quickly that there were a few specific requests that appeared over and over again.
We’re excited to announce the addition of a new module to our datAvenger collection: a gallery!
