Version 5 Face Lift
It seems the Squarespace team have breathed new life into V5 of the Squarespace world. A host of updated templates makes life easier (and better looking) for newbies and folk looking to have great looking blogs harnessing the world class Sqaurespace Platform.
For us though, working 'under the hood', one of the useful improvements is that made to the CSS editor.
The editor now 'undocks', so you can see what you're doing, and you can alter the proportions of the editing window to better suit text editing. I know you can cut and paste into a proper text editor, but I'm not always at the same machine so I never know what tools I've got - so the bundled tool is the one I tend to use by default.
In the new Custom CSS Editor.
- Search and replace
- Comments
- Colour coding
- Line Numbering
- Indenting and Outdenting
- Colour schemes
I think overall the way the style editor works is a big improvement and will make life just a bit nicer!
- Collapseable Style editor to enable a better review of the impact of the changes you are making.
- Detachable
- Resizable
There is one slight negative (Isn't there always?): An old friend has gone from the CSS editor: There was a line of tine white text on the black background, that told the user which module, ID or class of an element on mouse over any page element. It's a small thing but if you make a lot of per page style edits, you need to use a browser plugin to identify the module and class of page components.
Other Changes include a myriad of new fonts -
Autosave in the Blog Editor
Along with word count, character count and the nature of the CSS Class you are using echoed in the editing window.
Here's what Squarespace have to say:
DEVELOPER-FRIENDLY CSS EDITOR
As web designers and developers, we know how limiting it could be to write and edit CSS within a small window. Now you can do it all within our beautiful new editor; pop out the entire window and see everything at once. The new editing toolbar allows you to find & replace, undo & redo (even post-save), insert style variables, and format your code like a pro. 3 new color themes are also available for easy-on-the-eyes editing.
AND MUCH MORE...
- Add style to your blog post elements with 8 new icon sets, available in both black and white and 4 different sizes.
- Keep the background image but change the color thanks to alpha-transparent PNGs available in many of the redesigned templates.
- Customize buttons, like “search” and “submit”, right within Fonts, Colors & Sizes.
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