Monday, February 23, 2009  

The next generation of EditMe Skins is now available in a beta release. The purpose of the beta is to give customers interested in testing the new skins access as early as possible. Only a single design (based on the Acton Blue skin) is available at this time. In the coming weeks, we'll be releasing the additional color schemes from the Acton skins and designs based on the Brighton, Newton and Classic families to provide an upgrade path for sites comfortable with those designs. New and original designs based on the Yorktown layout will also be released over time.

The goals of the Yorktown Skins are to make better use of screen space, standardize EditMe's front-end user experience, improve ease of use and provide more finely tuned customization options. Here are some highlights:

• The page content area is wider to take advantage of higher resolution screens, and the header area is shorter to provide more screen space to content.  
• Tool links are now all visible rather than nested in drop down menus. Tool links are grouped by function and displayed in contextual locations rather than all at the top of the screen.  
• A powerful (though still somewhat experimental) Style Editor has been introduced to provide significant customization capability without getting into CSS code. The Style Editor is available in the Look & Feel menu of Site Settings. You will need to install the Yorktown Skin on your site to test this feature.  
• Fewer CSS background images makes changing colors much easier than in the Acton skins. For example, the background color can be easily changed without leaving a colored edge around the content area.  
• The Yorktown skins are based on a considerably more robust style sheet foundation (for you geeks, it's YAML 3.1) that resolves many of the formatting inconsistencies experienced in the Acton and Newton skins. This foundation also makes it easier to provide alternate layouts (such as one and three column layouts).  
• A much requested option to hide the tool menus for anonymous users has been added. When a user is not logged in and this option is enabled, the only tools link is a small Login link in the footer area.  
• The Skin Settings page has been made a standard part of Site Settings (see the Look & Feel menu) so that a link in the front-end navigation is no longer needed.  
• CSS3 rounded corners are used for browsers that support them (Firefox, Chrome, Safari). This gives the site an attractive modern look in these browsers without requiring background images that lock in color choices. Internet Explorer users will see square corners instead.  
• The Skins were developed to serve XHTML 1.0 valid content. Though invalid content can still be entered into the editor and via include tags, the layout itself is creates XHTML.

Beta Testers

If you are interested in helping us test the new skins, you can simply install the new Skin into your site. If you would like to test on a copy of one of your existing sites, please contact support and ask for us to make a complimentary copy for you to test with. Be sure to include the name of the EditMe site you want copied. Note that these sites will be deleted at the end of the beta testing period.

The kind of feedback we're looking for during this beta period is:

• Comments on the location and look of the tools links.
• Testing of the new skin on existing site content - is formatting broken or does it look wrong when the skin is applied to existing site content?
• General feedback on the Style Editor and whether any bugs are found when using it.
• Testing and feedback on the Yorktown Settings screens.

If you come up with new feature suggestions during testing, please put these in the Suggestions forum of the support wiki. We do not plan to add any completely new features during the beta test.