Moonfruit Site Builders Get Interactive Toolkit

May 28, 2007; 01:29 AM

Moonfruit Site Builders Get Interactive Toolkit

• New features allow user comments and email functions
• Membership tools allow site owners to manage their own members

London 24 May 2007 –Moonfruit, the provider of flash site building tool kit used to build over 1.5 million sites to date, has released product updates to enhance interactivity and social networking. The tool kit is available at no cost or on a subscription service and allows virtually anyone to quickly and easily design, build and manage their own interactive, graphically rich website. The product updates gives users access to three new features, ‘Comment’, ‘Mail to a Friend’ and member management tools.
 
Joe White, Managing Director, Moonfruit, said: “Moonfruit’s toolkit is designed to provide the fastest, easiest and most rewarding way for people to build and manage their own online communities. People have created some exceptional, award winning sites using Moonfruit, whether these are fan sites, small business and retail sites or private sites for family and friends. These enhancements will enable site leaders to make their online communities more interactive and dynamic as visitors can leave notes to each other and send pages to their friends. The membership tools allow each site to accept members and the site owner to manage their own member list.”

The release of the new tools is the latest in a series of upgrades that have been released in the past 6 months and follows the addition of a scaleable, multimedia video player that site builders can add to their sites in order to play video and music. Further updates are due to be announced in the next few months.

White continues: “We are working on a number of developments that we will be releasing over the coming months. These updates will be available to all of our users whether they are those that come to Moonfruit directly or companies that license our software to offer to their own customers.”
Further details on the new features include:

Comment
The comment widget lets site builders enable far greater user generated content and interaction on sites, which will keep people coming back for more.
• Key benefits:
- Visitors can post comments that are visible to everyone
- Several 'comment' widgets can be added to one page and given titles reflecting the topic e.g. 'what do you think about this video?'
- Comments can be checked before they are shown or deleted if inappropriate
- Comments can also be published to an RSS feed, which means that visitors can sign up to the feed and receive updates when new comments are added

Mail to a Friend
The mail to a friend feature gives all users a marketing tool they can put on websites which encourages people to spread the word about their site.
• Benefit:
- Visitors are able to pass the site address on to friends and contacts

Site Membership
Every new website built is set up so that visitors can 'join' the site and get a username and password.
• Benefits: The site builder can:
- Create 'members only' pages
- Set edit rights on pages for certain members to allow collaborative working/contribution
- Allow only members to contribute content e.g. comments
- Create member mailing lists to update people with changes, new pages, etc.