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Triskaidekaphilia
It's been a few weeks since our last beta release, and we've been able to make good progress. Today's release is 1.0 beta 13 (hence the obscure title of this posting).
Of course we've fixed a lot of bugs, and finished a lot of incomplete features. And of course there are more of those to come.
In preparation for a Software Developers' Kit (SDK) so that other developers can build plug-ins to Sandvox, we've built a few new page and pagelet types (which we will make open-source soon) that we thought we should highlight here:
Contact Form: Visitors to your site can fill out a form to send you a message. This is handy so you can be contacted, but your email address is not exposed for spam harvesters. When somebody fills out the form, the message is posted to Karelia's servers, where we decrypt your email address and send the message on its way. You can set up your form to allow for a subject as well as a message; that message subject can be fixed, free-form, or a choice from a popup list. We're doing this as both a page and a pagelet so this can be compact or expansive depending on your tastes.
Site Map Page: For more complicated sites, this page shows an outline of your site's structure.
Digg List Pagelet: Keep your site fresh with stories you or others have dugg.
Flickr Badge Pagelet: If you keep your photos on Flickr, this will put a sampling of your photos in the sidebar.
Stickam Tool Pagelet: Just launched, Stickam puts a flash-based multimedia "stick" on your sidebar that plays music, shows photos, movies, etc.
del.icio.us Links Pagelet: Share the sites you've bookmarked with viewers of your website.
The amazing thing is that these kinds of pagelets can be built in a matter of hours. We are hoping that once we get this documented, we'll start seeing some new page and pagelet types that we haven't even considered.
So back to this Number 13 concept: did you realize there are thirteen pagelet types in Sandvox now? Could it be a coincidence? And we almost released on the thirteenth of the month...