Pagelime Reseller Tools give you the ability to earn money by charging your clients for the CMS service. You set your own price, and we handle the billing, collection, settlement, expired cards, and everything else. You can make more money doing what you do best: designing websites.

Here’s how it works:

• You enable the reseller panel in the “manage account” area
• You go to a site’s settings screen and enable “resale for the site” on the new reseller tab
• Set the price and billing interval (monthly/annual)
• Your client is prompted to sign up next time they log-in
• After your client signs up, you can track client payments and your earnings on the reseller panel.

The entire process is white labeled, and we handle notifications for expiring credit-cards, declined payments, etc. automatically.

To learn more about how the system works, read the details on our reseller getting started page. We’ve also put together a Pagelime reseller FAQ page, that covers most of the general business questions we could come up with.

This is just an announcement post, and in the future we’re going to post some more thoughts and suggestions on how to use and resell our service in this manner.

As always, we welcome all feedback, comments, suggestions, and gripes!

Today, we’re releasing a new premium account feature: the Navigation Manager. Here’s how it works in one sentence: you tell PageLime where your navigation file is, you put the css class “cms-navigation” on the element that contains your navigation, and PageLime publishes your updated navigation code into the file. Keep reading for an in-depth tutorial.

Managing navigation with PageLime has always been a super simple task: put some “cms-editable” tags on links, make the navigation file a server side include, and publish away. For most sites this works great. But what about sites with deep hierarchical menus? Well, it still works but now you’ve got a lot of bubbles on the screen. We’ve published some thoughts on this before in this post, and this is one of the reasons we’ve developed the Navigation Manager.

The Navigation Manager is a bit more involved than simply putting a CSS class on a DIV tag. First, you must use an include file for your navigation, so that it is shared across your entire site. In the future, we will probably do away with this requirement, but for the time being, it’s the simplest way to ensure it gets updated on all of your pages.

Once your navigation file set-up in an include, you must wrap your navigation HTML code in an element that has the CSS class “cms-navigation”. This is how PageLime knows where to publish updated navigation code. For example:

<div id="top_nav" class="cms-navigation">
  <!-- navigation will come here -->
</div>

OK, with the above two steps complete, you now have to enable the “Navigation Manager” feature on the site features screen.

Once the feature is active, you will see a new site dashboard item: “Manage Navigation.” When you open it up for the first time, you will be prompted to configure your navigation settings. Here’s what you’re going to need to do:

1. Tell PageLime where your navigation file is. (for example: /includes/header.php)
2. Enter your navigation code into PageLime, so we know what format to use when publishing.

Step 2. might look a bit intimidating, but it’s actually super simple. In the code editor box, you can enter some pseudo-code that tells PageLime how to render your navigation. There should already be some sample code that you can use in there. When you hit publish, PageLime will take this code, and merge the navigation data into it, and then publish it into the DIV tagged “cms-navigation” in your navigation file.

The pseudo-code is based on the popular Apache Velocity template engine. You can read their user guide for an in-depth overview of everything you can do, but you really don’t need to do that. Take a look at the code below to learn some basics:

#foreach( $navItem in $navItems )
  <div>
     <a href="$navItem.URL" class="nav-link">$navItem.Title</a>
     #if ($navItem.ChildNodes.Count > 0)
       <div class="sub-nav">
         #foreach( $subNavItem in $navItem.ChildNodes )
           <div><a href="$subNavItem.URL" class="subnav-link">$subNavItem.Tile</a></div>
         #end
       </div>
     #end
  </div>
#end

The areas highlighted in bold are the pseudo code that renders the navigation data into the HTML. So let’s step through what’s going on:

• The first line basically says “for each navigation item in the group of root navigation items, render the following”
• Then, we have some HTML code, which has some special tokens that will get replaced, such as $navItem.URL and $navItem.Title
• Then we loop through all of the sub navigation items for the current $navItem and render the subnav.

OK, now you can save your settings and you’ll be taken back to the navigation manager. You can now start building out your navigation, and save your progress. Once you or your client are ready to push the changes out to your site, hit the publish button and you’re done!

Here are some additional things you can do:

• On the “navigation settings” screen you can lock the root nodes of the navigation, so that the primary navigation can only be edited by the administrator. For example, if you don’t want your clients to change anything but the sub-navigation, you can lock them on the settings screen. (Additionally, any sub-navigation node can individually be locked by editing it and checking the “lock this node”).
• You can re-order the nodes by dragging them by the globe icon and dropping them in the desired space.

Hope that was informative! As always, post questions and thoughts in the comments below or in the forum.

This tutorial is a supplement to our larger tutorial “How to Make a Pagelime Site with SiteGrinder 3, you can see the full tutorial here. However, this tutorial is not SiteGrinder specific and can be used by anyone who wants to learn how to manually add editable classes through Pagelime.

Ok, so you’ve just published a really SWEET website from Photoshop using SiteGrinder and you REALLY want to manage it with Pagelime, BUT, you forgot to add the CSS “editable” class tag to a region, in this case, an image, and you want to be able to edit this image using Pagelime. Have no fear, for Pagelime can solve all of your problems (as usual). Let’s take a look at how this can be done in just a couple of steps.

Our sweet page, sadly, the image isn't editable!

1. Navigate to the page with the region you want to make editable within PageLime.
2. Open the “Page Tools” drop down menu on the top right of the Pagelime navigation/edit bar. Click on “edit code.” This will take you to a new page, showing the raw HTML of your site.
   

   Click the "Page Tools" drop down to get to "edit code"

3. In the box with your colored HTML, scroll down to the location of the image (or other tag) you want to change from un-editable to editable.
4. Inside the <img> tag (or other tag, <p> <span> <div> etc…), if it does not already have a class= section, create a new section for class= and add editable as a class tag. (If the element already has a class tag with a class defined, simply put a space after the defined class and then add in editable.) Make sure the element you’ve added the editable class too, also has a unique id. This is important because Pagelime needs to be able to identify which area it’s editing. If you do not see an id="IDNAMEHERE" then add an id tag with a unique name. The id name should not be used as an id name anywhere else on the page, and cannot have any spaces. Your final mark-up should look something like this:<img id=”myImage” class=”editable” src=www.pagelime.com/myImage.gif alt=”imagedescriptionGoesHere” />

   

5. Once you’ve done that, click “upload page” and the once uneditable area now becomes editable!

To get started with SiteGrinder, download the demo today!
This tutorial was brought to you by the Pagelime team in conjunction with the really cool dudes over at SiteGrinder/Media Lab. This article was co-authored by Adam Dexter and Awesome-Intern Tyler Shambora.

For months folks have been asking when we were going to get our stuff together and start offering Pagelime in multiple languages. We’ll the wait’s over, and as always we tried to raise the bar on internationalization for a web-app: We have developed an interface for you to translate Pagelime into any language or language-culture combination right from your account management dashboard!

In your account settings you can set a default language for all users in your account from existing translations. You can also set a language for each user you create in Pagelime - simply edit a user and select the desired language from the drop-down.

We currently have the following languages, which have all been submitted by actually PageLime users:

• English (ahem)
• Spanish
• Swedish
• French
• Dutch
• Italian

If we don’t offer your language or culture specific translation (such as French-Canadian instead of just French), you can go into the Manage Languages section from the Account Dashboard, and create a new translation! When creating a translation, you have to specify the language you’re translating into, and simply proceed through the list of terms and phrases that need to be translated. Once you are finished, you can submit your translation for approval, we will approve it, and it will become available for use in Pagelime. In order for the translation to be approved, all of the phrases must have a translation! Your progress is auto-saved as you go, so don’t worry about losing your work at any point, you can come back and finish your translation any time.

If a language already exists you will not be able to create a duplicate, but you will be able to create a culture specific version of the language. For example, there are subtle differences between English spoken in GB and the USA, so you could create a Brittish English translation. In this case you do NOT have to translate all of the phrases, but ONLY the ones that are different, as the rest will be inherited from the base English language.

Important note: For now we only offer the translation for the client areas of Pagelime. The account management areas will remain in English. We’re working to add these fields to the translation list, but it would make it much harder for you to submit a custom translation file (there would be a lot more to translate), and most folks care about what their clients see.

Now for some thoughts on how we approached translation and why we community-sourced it

Why have we waited so long to offer translations?
Pagelime is a product that is constantly growing, and we try to rapidly adapt to user needs as more feedback comes in, and we continuously refine our user experience. We had not reached a point where our user-experience was cemented enough for us to feel confident that we won’t be adding, removing, or changing labels around - something that would be quite hard if we had dozens of languages.

Why did we allow users to submit and manage translations?
We have a global community of users, and it was the fastest way to get the widest possible coverage. I’ve had mixed experiences with translation agencies back in my website development days, and after seeing the success facebook has had with community-sourcing translations, we were convinced that this was the way to go. This was actually a more expensive option than just paying for translations, as the number of engineer man-hours that went into this system was way more expensive than just paying for translators. But, we feel that this will pay off in the future, as we’re planning on adding a lot more optional and labs features to the system, and we wanted to have a flexible way for the community to translate these when they are ready to use them.

Let us know what you think, and definitely let us know if you’re thinking of submitting a translation!

Dear PageLime users, we’ve recently looked at our cloud hosting energy bill, and after sifting through our accounting, determined that our main expense is air conditioning. This is unacceptable, and we decided to proactively move our entire hosting operation to a custom server facility to be built here. This move will literally cut our air conditioning costs in HALF, and allow us to offer better long-term service to our customers.

Obviously this move will take some time, so expect a few months worth of down time while we put together the expedition and explore possible approaches to what we determined to be the optimal location for the new facility. We’ve also been advised that this area does not have high speed internet access, but only AOL dial-up. While we don’t expect this to be an issue, we are building a backup cloud infrastructure, as outlined in the image below:

We’re commited to offering the best service on the market, and as such we will continue to find new ways to innovate and improve our web-app with great ideas like these. If anyone’s interested in joining our mountaineering expedition, please leave your contact details in the comments, and we’ll get in touch. Survival rate is very high… but iPhone 3G coverage is poor.

Happy April 1st.

A few months ago we rolled out repeating regions, and ever since, we’ve had two types of bubbles: edit bubbles and repeat bubbles. This was fine for the time, as these two were separate features. Over time, however, most people are starting to use these in conjunction, so we decided to consolidate the bubbles and use this as an opportunity to redesign them.

As you can see from the picture attached to the post, the new bubbles will range from the super simple edit bubble, to the full blown combination repeat/edit bubble. The repeat controls do not show until you mouse over the little blue arrow that suggests there are more options on this bubble than just editing.

The new bubbles will be black with a grey outline and a glass effect. This style will provide the best visibility on both black and white pages while remaining color agnostic (we love the lime green edit bubbles, but sometimes it just interferes with a page design).

On a final note, this style will allow us to add more features to the bubbles as we build them. For example, we’re planning drop-in modules like image galleries, calendars etc for more advanced users. The bubble design will be flexible to accommodate sites ranging from the simplest ones with just a few editable areas, to more interactive ones with additional modules.

As always, let us know what your thoughts are in the comments or in the forum.

Pssst… take a quick look at one of the things that’s been keeping us busy over the past few months: PageLime Touch.

Yes! It’s the rumored and long awaited PageLime iPhone app. On the preview site linked below, you can watch a video showcasing some of the user experience and functionality. Just like our web-app, this version of PageLime will be fully brandable for our Professional users.

Check it out, get excited, and let us know what you think:

Click here for a sneak peak of PageLime Touch

So PageLime works great when you need to make changes to content, images, or links on your site. But what if you want to add a new link to your primary navigation? In this post we’re going to outline some thoughts about the approaches we’re thinking about for solving this problem.

There is currently no simple (native) interface in PageLime to manage navigation. Instead, you can put the navigation into an include file, put some cms-editable and cms-repeat classes on the navigation elements, and let your clients manage it this way. So, essentially you’re creating editable regions that are shared across multiple pages, and allowing your clients to duplicate and sort them (sort of like a top nav right?). This is what we’ve been recommending for the past couple of months (since repeatable regions became available).

However, we are thinking of ways to add native and transparent support for managing site navigation with PageLime, but still keep it simple and de-coupled. I’m going to outline two efforts we’re working on:

1. Navigation Editor

Pre-requisite knowledge: page includes (PHP, SSI, CFTemplate etc.)

So, let’s say that you’re the administrator for an account and you’re adding a site for a client that wants to continuously change their primary navigation based on new pages they create. Now, when you’re setting up a site, you get a tab called “navigation configuration”. This tab would look something like this:

Navigation Site Settings Wireframe

In the mockup above you see two fields: Navigation File and Navigation Template. The first specifies which file (an include) on your server contains your top navigation. This is the file that’s usually included in every page so that you have a consistent header / navigation experience, and so you can update things in only one place. The Navigation Template is the code that will be published into this file. Notice the bolded text in the mockup - you can see that there are some tokens you can insert and replace, so that PageLime knows where to render your navigation items.

OK. With the setup out of the way, the way you would actually manage your navigation would be on a screen loaded off the site dashboard. The screen would look something like this:

PageLime Navigation Editor Wireframe

Here, you can do a few things: you can drag and drop files from your sitemap into the navigation tree, and you can re-order/edit the links in the navigation tree by selecting them and changing their properties in the box on the top. Once you’re done with your navigation edits, you would hit “Publish” and your navigation would be rendered into the Template provided on the settings page, and published out to the file you specified in the Navigation File on the settings screen.

We feel that this is a bit complicated, so we’re still working on ways to simplify this workflow, and find other places where pages can be marked to be included in the nav (possibly from the page editor screen itself, and possible from the sitemap).

As is the case with most PageLime features, the navigation management feature could be turned on/off on a per site basis.

That’s about it for the first approach.

2. FTP XML Publishing

Pre-requisite Knowledge: XML, PHP (or other) scripting.

There is an experimental feature inside PageLime that allows you to publish your page content as XML instead of merged into your page content. This allows you to completely decouple your content from your pages by using a scripting language, such as PHP to pull up the content from the XML into your page.

Along with the page content, PageLime also publishes a page registry XML that you can write a script to render your navigation. Think of the whole set of XML files as a mini-database you can script against.

We’re still working out the details of the XML format and a PHP API that allows you to easily pull up page content and navigation data.

We realize that this whole concept goes a bit against the “simplicity” part of PageLime, but it should work completely transparently with the way you use PageLime right now. So, in addition to publishing your page content, PageLime could automatically also publish the XML file, so that you can create additional widgets and dynamic content.

…

That’s all for now. Hope that this has been informative in terms of the kind of features we’re thinking about, and how we’re trying to add features without impacting the super simple workflow for both designers and content editors.

Please leave comments below or add them to the forum, and we’ll make sure we incorporate your thoughts into the final design.

Whenever you open a page, or navigate to a page in the PageLime editor screen, it gets automatically added to the sitemap. A lot of folks never even use the sitemap, but out of those that do, a lot of folks pointed out that navigating to each page takes a bit if you want to populate the whole sitemap at one time.

Today we released a simple screen where you can select files from your FTP server to get added to the sitemap quickly. Administrators can see the new button: “Add existing files to the sitemap” in the right column on the sitemap screen.

As always - feedback is welcome, including suggestions and gripes :). Shoot us a note with your thoughts or add a comment below.

Most of you lime-loving PageLime enthusiasts were greeted by two things when you signed up for an account: a personal message from Tom, and the built-in demo site on your brand new PageLime account - itislimetime.com.

The site’s always been cheesy, had poor grammar / spelling, and terrible stock photos (the lime puppy? thanks Tom). Well it’s time we say goodbye and welcome our new site, presented as a side scrolling story of how PageLime began, full with the Lime King, the Lemon uprising, the Lime resistance, and much more!

This story is only the tip of the iceberg. In future editions we will reveal all kinds of shocking twists! Is the Lemon Lord actually Lime King’s brother? What other nefarious allies have the Lemons enlisted to subvert the resistance? Find out the answers to these and more in the next edition coming soon!

Enjoy.