Our latest upgrade to the Homebuild system has mostly concentrated on improving Homebuild's performance. To accomplish this we have made improvements throughout the platform Homebuild runs on as well as to Homebuild itself.

We have upgraded the Homebuild servers to the latest hardware, upgraded the operating system, upgraded PHP (the computer-programming language Homebuild it written in), added various technologies to cache and speed up Homebuild pages; we have even upgraded our connection to the internet to allow for massive amounts of bandwidth without Homebuild slowing down.

Which all contributes to a massive 200% - 300% speed boost for Homebuild!

As well as the usual under-the-hood improvements, there are some notable additions to Homebuild itself inthis update.

Homebuild Shop: Google Base Integration

Shop owners are now able to have their products appear in Google search results. By adding your products to a Google service called Base, your products can now appear alongside others in Google's shopping results (just hit the "Shopping" tab when searching in Google).

Shop: Expanding Menu

Previously, customers navigated the shop by clicking into categories and products in the main listing. This allowed the maximum screen space to be given over to products. We have added a second option, however. Shops can now include an expanding side menu, allowing customers to quickly "drill down" through their categories to find the product they want. Existing shop owners wishing to include this new option may require a new template for their shop to allow for the reduced space left for product listings. Contact us and we'll talk you through your options.

Google Analytics: Track Downloads

You can now see which files your visitors are downloading in Google Analytics (previously you could only see which pages they looked at).

Better Tooltip Popups for News and RSS Pages

We have implemented a new type of popup for calendar-style news and RSS reader pages, bringing a fresher look and more reliable positioning to your pages.

Although, we have tested the new setup thoroughly, with such a massive overhaul, some bugs may have slipped through. If you find any problems, please let us know immediately and we'll fix them.

We have just moved Homebuild onto a new, much-improved server, in addition to upgrading the Homebuild code to the latest version. This is a large and complex upgrade, so please let us know immediately if you notice and bugs and we will endevour to get them fixed as soon as possible.

Thank you, and we hope you enjoy the speed and functionality improvements with Homebuild.

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.

You may have noticed more new features and improvements appearing in your Homebuild site over the last few days. Most of the new features are part of our ongoing improvement of the Homebuild Shop.

Here's a rundown of the changes we've just released.

Shop Sub-Pages Now Allow Formatting

You can now format the contents of these pages just as you would a standard dynamic page. Add images, links, even video... everything you need to help your customers make a purchase decision.

Improved International Shipping and Handling Options

It is now possible to fine-tune your international sales. Set shipping and handling options - including weight tables - for each region of the World to ensure you are charging the right prices for these services.

New Shop Category List Sidebar

We have introduced a new sidebar box for the shop which shows a list of specific categories. This is designed to channel customers to the high-margin or high-profile sections of your shop from every page.

Shop Tree View

Managing your inventory just became much easier with the Tree View. Move products between sections, duplicate them, even move categories at a time with a simeple drag-and-drop interface. Also useful for visualising your entire category sructure at a glance.

Tools Page Sectioned Up

When editing the settings for your shop, you will now notice that the page is divided up into sections, making the various options more easily found, cutting down on scrolling and preventing users from being overloaded with choices.

New Recent Posts Sidebar for the Blog

This change is for the Homebuild Blog. We have added a new sidebar showing recent posts. Now the items in the archive can be reached from any page, and it is easier for users to see what you have been blogging about without digging through old posts.

New Breadcrumbs

A much-requested feature. Add a breadcrumb trail to our site so visitors always know where they are.It appears on every page of your site and you can change the format betweeen plain text, clickable links and drop-down menu in your tools pages (there is a new "Breadcrumbs" page available under the "Menu & Footer" section of the tools menu).

Of course, there are also the usual under-the-hood fixes and improvements bundled into this update, as we try to make Homebuild as stable and easy to use as possible. If you experience any difficulties, please don't hesitate to contact us. And you are equally welcome to contact us with suggestions for improvements and new features as well.

We continue to make improvements to the Homebuild Shop. With this upgrade, the following enhancements were added:

Product Search

You can now search for products within a shop. Even better, the shop uses smart searching, so matching products pop up as you type. This not only allows customers to jump to the product they're searching for but to browse the shop by typing in a few letters or a partial name and see all matching products, regardless of category.

Bounce-Back

After your customers add a product to the basket, you can now redirect back to one of seven different pages, such as lists of your recommendations, best sellers, sale items or products similar to the one they bought. You can also choose to send them to the cart to prompt a purchase decision, or back to the original category so they can continue shopping.

Replace Category Name with an Image

Some customers wanted to use an image instead of a particular category's name, such as when the category represents a particular brand with a well-known logo. This is now as easy as clicking a button.

Hide Product/Sub-Category Headings

Showing the titles reading "Products" and "Sub-Categories" is now entirely optional. Make your shop appear however you want.

Position of "More Details" Link

You can now have the "more details" link included in the short description of your products either follow on from the text or appear as a seperat elink with matching icon.

Formatted Product Descriptions

You can now format the text of your product descriptions in the same WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor used elsewhere in Homebuild.

Payment Options Sidebar

To encourage trust, you can list the payment options your shop accepts in the sidebar. Displaying the logos of world-spanning institutions helps reinforce the trustability of your own site.

As well as the shop, we have also introduced two additional improvements to Homebuild:

Google Gears

Homebuild is now integrated with Google Gears, which speeds up the site. Spend less time waiting and more time doing when you're logged into Homebuild.

Embed Videos

You can now easily add visdeo to your Homebuild pages. Either upload videos from your own computer or link to them from popular we-based video hosts such as YouTube, Google Video, Daily Motion, bliptv, etc.

As well as these, we've made a lot of improvements under the hood that will add to the stability and usability of the Homebuild platform. Enjoy!