Wednesday
Anthony Casalena in | 41 Comments

Diving into V6: The Template Development Kit

By Anthony Casalena

If you've already signed up to the V6 beta test, hold tight -- no invitations have been sent out yet. We have begun deploying V6 accounts across the company, and we continue to iterate rapidly on the feature set. Over the next few weeks, we'll take a deep dive into some of the features that we've been hard at work on. Today, we'd like to underscore one of the foundational improvements to the core system: the Template Development Kit (TDK). Please keep in mind that the V6 beta will begin with the consumer experience, and we will be releasing the TDK later in the year.

V6's primary goal is to deliver the next generation of templates, and part of being able to deliver that is a complete rewrite of our template engine. The new system is extremely developer friendly. Our team has been hammering on it internally for 6 months ensuring that it has the inherent flexibility that developers want and need. Most importantly, when developing a new template, you only need to implement the parts of the platform that you actually want to use on your site. Therefore, templates can be as small as just a few files.

The core TDK includes:

  • Complete Control - You will have control over the entire HTML output of your site right down to the beginning and ending <html> tag.
  • JSON Everywhere - V6 stores every URL on your site as JSON objects. JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight text-based open standard designed for data-interchange. This means that your entire data set, just by being hosted on Squarespace, becomes accessible in a structured fashion. In other words, third party developers: go have fun.
  • Simple Templating Language- V6 templates are written using JSON Template. It is a minimal but powerful templating language that fits naturally with the native JSON output of V6. Template files use simple and readable syntax that is logical and editable by non-programmers.
  • Smarter CSS - All V6 CSS is processed using LESS CSS. LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. Variables allow you to specify widely used values in a single place and re-use them. Mixins allow you to embed all the properties of a class into another class by simply including the class name as one of its properties. You can also nest selectors inside other selectors, making inheritance clear. Lastly, operations let you add, subtract, divide and multiply property values and colors, giving you the power to create complex relationships between properties.
  • Desktop Development - You can edit Squarespace templates using your favorite code editor, right from your local machine. All files and resources are saved locally, and can be synchronized with Squarespace's cloud in a single click. Images will be conditionally uploaded to the server when changes are made, keeping everything speedy during development.
  • Single Template > Multiple Sites - Templates can be synchronized with a master site, then installed on multiple client sites. You can now update a single site and push changes to any number of sub-sites automatically with a single click.
  • Automatic Fonts - Need to use a Google font? Just use it. Squarespace automatically parses all CSS stylesheets and generates the appropriate headers to pull the fonts you use from Google's font directory. No coding required.

Our main point in discussing the template development kit is to underscore the thought and and amount of work that has gone into the fundamentals of the system from a developer perspective. By revamping our core, we are able to create things that were simply not possible to create using the our prior system.

Haven't joined the V6 beta list yet? Sign up below...

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Monday
Anthony Casalena in , | 40 Comments

Squarespace Fall Update

By Anthony Casalena

Not only has Squarespace been growing, but we're very close to launching some very exciting things that we think will make your lives easier.  Here's an update on what our priorities are at the moment.  We also figured since you've been so patient, you deserve a sneak peek. ;)

 Here's what's on deck for the current version of Squarespace: 

  • Autosave - Autosave has been in beta for the past 2 months. Autosave can be a catastrophe if not properly implemented, so we've taken our time to ensure it functions elegantly and out of sight. We've gotten some great feedback and are almost ready to roll it out to every user. You'll only see it in your post editor for now, but it has the capacity to be implemented in other areas.
  • Foursquare/Gowalla/Facebook Places Integration -  We're expanding our social widgets lineup with a brand new addition over the next 2 weeks.  Geolocation widgets will take your feeds from Facebook Places, Foursquare, or Gowalla and display them in typical Squarespace fashion. Fully integrated, customizable, beautiful.
  • iPad App - You've been asking for it since before the iPad came out. Well, we're happy to say we're almost done with it. It's gorgeous, and we think you're going to love it. For you road warriors, we think this'll really help in keeping your post frequency up.  Look for this within the next 3 weeks as we deal with app store approval.
  • Media Management Improvements - We mentioned this in our 2010 roadmap. It's been a while, and its come a long way. Before long, you'll see a brand new way of managing your photos & implementing galleries on your sites. Don't be surprised if this makes it over into other data types, either. This will be one of the fundamental blocks of the new Squarespace moving forward. 

Also, one more quick note about where the majority of our efforts are flowing:

The Squarespace V6 team has been working extremely hard at getting together the fundamental building blocks of our completely new template and developer systems.  These changes are, to say the least, major.  New editing interfaces, new datatypes, more flexibility, developer control over template code, a new template coding system, and more are in the works.  We’re determining which of these innovations will make it into Squarespace V5 -- so stay tuned.

That's a quick snapshot into the next few months of Squarespace. Looking forward to sharing more with you!

Tuesday
Anthony Casalena in , | 85 Comments

The Squarespace 2010 Roadmap

By Anthony Casalena

First off, an apology. The past 6 months here at Squarespace have been absolutely incredible for us, but we really haven’t done a great job of communicating that excitement to our user base and letting you all know what we’re doing. We’ve signed a lease on our new office, expanded our team, and have made excellent headway on both scaling our system and other projects. I hope we can fix the communication gap, and I wanted to take a minute to update everyone on a number of fronts regarding our business and our plans.

First, our business:

  • We have grown. A lot. Squarespace has more than doubled in size in the past year in terms of customers, and tripled in terms of employee count. We remain the bootstrapped, profitable company we’ve been for the past 7 years and welcome the new members of our team that will help propel us forward. Our new hires have been spread across engineering, design, support, and infrastructure. While we have great capacity, we’re also supremely focused on making sure our robust site fabric and support scale up as we grow, to ensure we can provide our new customers with the same level of service we’ve provided our old ones for most of this decade. Our business now allows us to work on multiple projects in parallel, whereas before our team was mostly working on a single major release at any given time.
  • Hiring. We continue to be hiring experienced Java developers and talented designers here in New York City. Squarespace is an exciting and different place to work. If you’re reading this and want to learn more about what we can offer, or just want to drop in and say hello, please let us know.
  • Infrastructure. We have upgraded our infrastructure massively and continue to invest in our site serving fabric that powers our entire infrastructure. For those unacquainted, Squarespace is not shared hosting. All sites on our system use shared resources that scale with demand. Your $8/month site can serve millions if you need it to. We believe this fundamental infrastructure represents a massive step forward for publishers large and small on the web as infrastructure worries become a thing of the past.

Squarespace currently has a number of short term initiatives under way, and one very major long term initiative. Our focus is currently on the following:

  • Social Widgets (Very Soon). We are currently prepping the release of our social widgets features, which will allow you to integrate Flickr, Twitter, and more into Squarespace. Consistent with our approach, these widgets are being integrated with the core system, which means you won’t need to hack Javascript code and suffer long load times in order to get your social data on your site.  We’re importing your data over to Squarespace to ensure your site loads incredibly quickly under high traffic, or if an external service goes down. We want your Squarespace site to be the go-to point for your identity, so no matter what social network may emerge tomorrow, you’ll always be able to plug it in and keep your profiles across the web in a central space. This release was announced some time ago, but development was only able to commence more recently due to a few high-priority back-end items.
  • Media Management (Medium Term). We are midway though a redesign of our media management system which will create a much better way of managing the insertion of multimedia assets into your Squarespace site.
  • The Big Secret Project (Long Term). We do have one major item that we’ve been working on for months. We can’t release a lot of details on this, but let’s just say we’re personally bothered by how V5 handles:
    • Very complicated site structures, selective display, and page-level style sheets.
    • Template flexibility and portability.  It should be easier to create out-of-the-box page layouts, include widgets in various locations, and port templates from one site to another
    • The needs of developers.  It should be easier to exert fine-grained control to make changes in natural ways instead of applying CSS hacks.
    In the tradition of Squarespace V5, I can attest to the fact that this project will set a new bar for the interfaces you’ve seen from us, and on the web in general.

In addition to these more definitive items, a slew of updates to the commenting system, membership system, developer features, and more are planned that address items such as OpenID/Twitter/Facebook authentication, selective backend access for member accounts, and more.

We “eat our own dog food” constantly.  The site you’re looking at, as well as our front site and all of our other sites, are developed using the same tools you use on our system.  We’ve learned an immense amount since putting out V5 and redesigning our own sites using our own tools.

Anyone who has been with us over the years knows that while it always takes us a bit longer to make our releases, we’re insistent on experience and getting things right.  We will stick to this philosophy, but we now have the luxury of developing many things in parallel, so you’ll see more short term releases while the big things are in development.  As always, we can not cite specific dates for these releases.

We remain committed to solving the hard problems in layout, infrastructure, design, and UI.  These are the problems that drive us, and I trust our execution on the above items will be reflective of that commitment.

Thank you all for your continued support through this exciting time.