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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.
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!
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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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Receive new comments by email
March 5, 2009 by Jean
A new functionality recently made it to the news pages (aka blogs) of all UGAL websites: visitors who comment on a news can now choose to receive an email when more comments are posted.
Embed any type of widget
February 22, 2009 by Jean
We we launched the latest version of our Rich Text Editor, we chose to disallow widgets from being embedded in pages created with UGAL. Mostly for technical and for security reasons. As widgets become more popular some have actually proven to be useful for business websites. So we have decided to open the gates, and the Rich Text Editor now allows you to embed any type of widget.
Display Breadcrumbs on your website
January 16, 2009 by Jean
Breadcrumbs are links displayed on top of your pages that show the position of the current page in your website structure. The visual clue is very effective at helping your visitors navigate and understand your website.
The functionality is now available for all UGAL websites.
Create an Intranet
January 8, 2009 by Jean
Big day for UGAL today. After many months of development and testing, we are happy to bring live a new feature for your website: Intranets.
An option for all our customers (planA, planB and planC), Intranets allow you to protect your entire website or portions of it and give it "member only" access.
Introducing product options
December 11, 2008 by Jean
UGAL was recently upgraded and now supports product options. When a product has multiple options, your visitors are given the choice of which one to put in the shopping cart, directly from the product page:
New version of the Rich Text Editor
October 28, 2008 by Jean
Our Content Management System has been updated over the last few days with a new version of its Rich Text Editor. The update is automatic and free and is now available to all the websites created with UGAL.
