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Latest News
The software that powers your website is constantly updated with new features. We keep track here of the the major updates.
Comment Spam - Fight!
August 20, 2010 by Jean
A number of websites hosted on UGAL have been hit pretty bad by comment spam over the last few days. Yes, once more. The situation was so bad for a few sites that we had to completely disallow comments for those sites.
First, a big thank you to all of you for your patience. We know how spam is annoying and time consuming to deal with, and truly appreciate your patience while we were implementing new protections.
We are happy to announce that better spam protection is now in place for all our websites, and that comments have been turned on again for all. We are pretty confident that we are much better protected now, while keeping it as easy as possible for your visitors to post comments.
Now accepting Amex
July 20, 2010 by Jean
A quick note to let you know that UGAL now accepts American Express cards on top of Visa and MasterCard.
To update the credit card on file for your account, visit the "My Account" tab of your website and click the "Change Card" link.
Email support@ugal.com for any question or issue.
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Track what happens on your website with the new dashboard
July 8, 2010 by Jean
We are pleased to announce the availability of a new dashboard for your website. Available to the administrators of the website, the new dashboard is displayed as soon as you login to your website.
The dashboard offers a real time view of your website activity (e-commerce orders, news comments etc...) and origin of your visitors. Links to the latest news from UGAL are displayed too, so that you do not miss any new functionality.
Upload photos in batch
June 8, 2010 by Jean
A new version of the photo uploader for the product catalog and the portfolio pages just made it to your website. You can now upload of .zip files containing all your photos, making it much easier to add a bunch of photos to your pages.
The photos are dynamically added to the page as the .zip file is processed, and a report is displayed at the end of the process, showing how many photos were added and how many errors encountered.
The most time consuming part of the process is to actually upload the photos from your computer to your website. The speed of your internet connection is the most important factor there, and we recommend downsizing the photos to 800 pixels before uploading them. UGAL does not need larger files anyways.
Widgets unlimited
May 14, 2010 by Jean
UGAL has been supporting widgets for a long time, but in rather a limited fashion. We are very happy to unleash an important update today that allows widgets of any kind to be placed on any page of your website.
With this update, you gain even more freedom for organizing the layout of your website pages. You can display your latest news on your product pages, your featured products on your blog, a newsletter subscription form on your contact page. Etc... there are no limits.
The new functionality is available now for all websites.
Destination based shipping charges
March 18, 2010 by Jean
UGAL e-commerce websites now have the ability to quote shipping charges based on the destination of the order.
You can select which countries and US regions you agree to ship to, and how shipping charges should be calculated for each destination. For US based shops, domestic shipping has been split in 3 regions: Continental, Alaska and Hawaii.
Automated order confirmation emails
February 23, 2010 by Jean
Starting now, your website has the ability to send automated order confirmation emails to your shoppers.
The emails are formatted in HTML, and you can fully customize them using a number of variables for the order ID, customer name and order content.
Automated emails is a new UGAL feature. It is turned off by default to not interfere with your current order process.
Ogone available on UGAL
February 23, 2010 by Jean
Ogone is now available "out of the box" as a payment service for all UGAL e-commerce websites.
Ogone is one of the leading European Payment Service Providers with more than 20.000 clients across 35 countries. Connected to more than 100 banks, it is an excellent choice for our European customers outgrowing Paypal.
New checkout process
February 23, 2010 by Jean
Important updates to UGAL's e-commerce offering just made it to our servers and to your website. The shopper information (name, email, shipping and billing address) is now captured on your website before he is sent to the payment service to complete his payment. Shoppers on your website now follow a common checkout process, regardless of the payment solution they choose.
This is a "foundation" update that paves the way for many other improvements to our e-commerce solution.
Google Webmaster Tools update
November 27, 2009 by Jean
Google recently changed the way they verify websites for Google Webmaster Tools. We are now reporting this change to UGAL and request that you use the "Meta Tag" verification method instead of the "File Upload" method.
Read the details on how to verify your website with Google and why you should do it.
Note that this applies only for new website verifications. If your website is already verified using the "File Upload" method, you do not need to change anything, unless you want to re-verify your website.
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A search engine for your website
October 29, 2009 by Jean
We just introduced a new feature to UGAL: search. It lets your visitors quickly find the content they are looking for.
Enabling search for your website is easy, it takes 2 clicks. And your content has already been indexed, so it is ready to be searched.
New text editor: safely paste from Word
September 25, 2009 by Jean
A new version of the Rich Text Editor used to manage the content of your pages just made it to our servers and to your website. A number of bug fixes are included, and a great new feature: you can now safely paste content from Microsoft Word directly into the text editor. Yes, safely paste from Word. Gone is the "Paste from Word" button!
The update includes as well a new media plugin to better manage your videos, Flash and mp3 files.
Introducing the Admin View: better products management
August 13, 2009 by Jean
UGAL is a dashboard-less content management system: you can edit any page of your website by simply browsing to it and clicking the "Edit Page" link. The approach has one drawback in the case of large product catalogs: finding the right product page to edit is not always easy. And it lacks a consolidated view to quickly review the products in a catalog.
To address this issue, we are very pleased to introduce today the "Admin View" for product catalogs.
Forums email subscriptions
July 13, 2009 by Jean
When we launched the forums a few weeks ago, an important feature did not make it to the initial release: email notifications. This is now fixed, and members of the forums can now choose to receive an email next time an answer is posted to the thread:
Note that the website owner will be alerted every time a thread is started or an answer is posted to an existing thread. We might review the functionality if this generates too many emails to the website owner.
To happier forums!
New free website designs available
July 10, 2009 by Jean
Product specifications management tools
July 6, 2009 by Jean
A new interface to manage product specifications just made it to our servers. When you edit a product catalog, there is a new "Specifications" tab that allows to create, update and delete product specifications for the catalog:
New navigation bar management and sub-menus
June 25, 2009 by Jean
We are very happy to announce that the navigation bar for your website now supports sub-menus.
Sub-menus appear magically underneath the main menu item as soon as the mouse hovers over them.
We took advantage of time spent on this new feature to redesign the tools for managing your website navigation bars.
Google Webmaster Tools and sitemap.xml file
May 7, 2009 by Jean
Once your website is up and running, you will want to let search engines know about it so that they can start indexing your content. We have just released two new functionalities that will make the process easier and more efficient:
- Website verification with Google Webmaster Tools
- Automatic sitemap.xml file generation
Announcing forums
April 7, 2009 by Jean
After many weeks of development and testing, we are very pleased to announce that forums are now available as a new type of pages for your website.
The forums allow your visitors to start discussions on your website and to participate in existing discussions. By letting your visitors interact more freely with your website, a new dynamic is introduced. It gives your website even more potential to stand out.
Fighting spam - Let's try again
March 5, 2009 by Jean
A while ago we developed our own little in-house system to fight comment spam on UGAL. Using non rocket science, we were able to catch the vast majority of spam submitted to our websites. Unfortunately, we still have pages with tens of spam comments that our system is not able to catch.
So let's try again, with rocket science this time: as of a week ago, UGAL is using Akismet to detect comment spam. Akismet is a product of Automattic, the developer of Wordpress (the blog platform). Everytime a comment is made to your website, we run it through Akismet in the background to determine if it is spam or not.
The initial numbers look good, but we still have spam that goes undetected. Chances are that it is due to our implementation (we are supposed to report false positives to help the system learn from its mistakes, which we do not for now). We are confident that we will be able to improve the situation in the coming weeks. In the mean time, we encourage you to turn comments off on the pages targeted by spammers (they seem to always like the same ones).
A personal note to the spammers: me like you not.
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