Developers' Blog

Homebuild Update 1.7

Tuesday 22nd September 2009 11:30 AM

Our latest update to Homebuild brings several new page types to your CMS as well as several other exciting improvements.

New Gallery

We have completely rewritten the Homebuild Gallery. It now allows you to display your images in a number of different formats.

There's Photographer Style, featuring a dynamic, animated band of thumbnails across the top and a full sized image beneath. This one's great for quickly browsing through a large bank of images, looking briefly at many of them.

Then there's Catalogue Style. In this gallery, you see a grid of images, each with their caption, rating, views and comments beneath the thumbnail. Clicking on any image brings up a "lightbox" to show the full-size version. This gallery makes it easy to browse the information about each image as well as the picture itself.

Finally there's an animated Flash gallery called the 3D Wall. This one should really wow your visitors. The animated wall of thumbnails can be dragged around or spun and clicking on a thumbnail causes the screen to zoom in dramatically. Try it out!

Sitemap Pages

Allow your visitors to quickly find any page on your site with this dynamically-generated list of your site's content. Activate your sitemap in your tools pages. It can be found under Power Pages.

Clone Pages

Do you have more than one Homebuild site? If so, clone pages allow you to share information across your sites without having to type everything in multiple times. Update one page and all its clones another sites are automatically updated, too! Clone pages need to be activated by us, so if you have multiple sites, please drop us a line and we'll get you started.

New Document Uploader

Adding PDFs, Word documents and the like to Homebuild just became much easier. Now you can select multiple documents when browsing your computer and they will all be uploaded. No more selecting a hundred files one at a time.

Homebuild Shop : New Trade Account Payment Method

Shop owners can now set up trade accounts for their customers, which are automatically integrated into the shop. Trade account holders enter their account number at purchase time and then the details are sent to the shop owner so they can be invoiced.

Homebuild Shop: Terms and Conditions

It is now possible to ensure customers have ticked a box affirming that they have read your terms and conditions before proceeding to checkout.

Homebuild Shop: Improved Product Traits

You can now apply any number of traits (such as size, colour, style, etc.) to your Homebuild Shop products, and Homebuild will take care of managing how the combinations affect price and shipping charges.

Social Bookmarking Now Optional

Users of the Homebuild Blog can now choose whether to include the social bookmarking links at the bottom of the page. These links are included to allow visitors to quickly share your blog posts should they find them interesting but if you'd prefer not to clutter your pages up, you now have the option of hiding them.

And of course, this update includes the usual mass of under-the-hood changes. Most are either small improvements, changes to the interface or bug fixes that you shouldn't notice, but if you do come across any problems, please contact us as soon as possible so we can look into it.