Website development and hosting service, Squarespace has finally released version 6 of their software. Squarespace lists the following as new features for this release as:
- Templates – Our launch templates are of unparalleled quality – ranging from visually robust portfolio templates to minimalist blogs. These are not ordinary templates. Squarespace 6 templates are visually rich, created by an all-star design team and powered by the latest web technologies. All of our templates come with unique built-in mobile experiences, so your website will look great on any device.
- Layout Engine – At the heart of Squarespace 6 is LayoutEngine, a revolutionary new page building technology that allows anyone to create graphically rich, magazine-quality page layouts within the browser that can scale to any screen size, from mobile devices to desktops. Traditionally, the designs that LayoutEngine can produce required not only a high level of design expertise, but a high level of programming experience. Now these designs can be built in minutes by anyone who can drag and drop content blocks on to a page.
- Social Integration – Squarespace 6 makes it exceptionally easy to automatically push your posts to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, enable social sharing buttons for your visitors, stream content onto your page from Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and publish pages and galleries directly to your Facebook page.
- Improved Importing – Squarespace 6 contains importers for WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous, Blogger and Squarespace 5. Imported blogs will perfectly retain their original URL structures, and we will download and re-host your media on our platform to ensure a seamless move.
- Media Management – Never resize an image again. All media on Squarespace 6 is resized into multiple forms upon upload, and our system intelligently selects the appropriate image size to display to your visitors. Also, we allow focal point selection for galleries, so if you’ve selected a template that needs to crop your images, we will be able to ensure an appropriate crop every time.
- Developer Platform – While our release today is centered around the consumer features of Squarespace 6, there is a star underneath it all. The developer platform we’ve used to create every website on our platform, ranging from our homepage to every one of our templates, will be available shortly and will enable developers to control every single line of HTML on a Squarespace site.
In a surprising move, Squarespace will continue to support v5 sites and users can run sites in parallel if they choose. Alternatively you can upgrade your site to v6 but will need to choose from one of the new templates.
The new Squarespace 6 is available today starting at $8 per month. If you sign up to an annual subscription, you’ll receive a free custom domain.
More info @ http://blog.squarespace.com/introducing-squarespace-6
