We’re very excited to announce that the kind folks over at XHTMLized have just launched support for YikeSite themes.

Here’s the deal:

You hand them a graphic file (photoshop, fireworks, illustrator, etc.) and they hand you back a YikeSite theme ready to integrate into your own website. No dealing with HTML or CSS and no dealing with cross-browser design issues.

A big thank-you to XHTMLized for adding us to the “Save as…” drop-down on their site.

We look forward to seeing your designs in YikeSite.

As a bit of promotion for your site, post your XHTMLized site here and we’ll do a feature article on all designs, comparing your uploaded design to the completed YikeSite integrated theme.

Last night we pushed quite a few changes to YikeSite. Here is a summary of the latest and greatest.

Theme Import/Export

You now have the ability to import themes that others have created. This is an open theme format that anybody can develop for. In fact, it’s so easy to share your themes that all you need to do is export your theme from one site and import it into another one. The file format is a standard zip file so you can also get in there and use your regular tools to code it up.

We will be launching a theme gallery with the winning themes from our contest very soon. The theme gallery will be a place where the community can share themes with each other.

Additionally, we hope this will create opportunities for theme designers to be able to sell their YikeSite themes.

Extended Trial

Our billing system is now integrated with Visa and Mastercard so we can now accept credit card payments. We have added 30 days trial to customers who have previously signed up for a pay plan and who wish to continue to try YikeSite. In about a month, you’ll be asked to enter your credit card information if you wish to continue the service, however you can also downgrade to the free plan for as long as you want. Thank-you to everybody who has shown interest in YikeSite over the last several months – we have really learned a lot and will continue to provide an awesome service for ya’lls.

Reorganized Editor

We have made a few changes to how the editor’s buttons are grouped. You’ll notice a “basic” and “advanced” tab which splits up the most used functionality into the main editor. If you want more advanced features, you can still access them by clicking on the “advanced” text.

Miscellaneous

Here are some of the highlights from this most recent changelist:

• Each account can have a time zone set. Initially, this is used for the new billing system but where we have any dates being shown, they will be localized to your time zone.
• In the theme editor, when you upload a file with the same file name it will overwrite the file instead of create a new one. This will save people some time when making small tweaks to the images of a theme.
• Uploaded files are now limited to 100MB in size.
• Fixed old URLs bug. When you rename a page, the page is still accessible by the old URL. Duplicates were being created on every save of a page rather than on just a rename. All duplicates were deleted for each site and the bug was fixed which should increase some site’s load times.
• Updates to the Unicode support.
• Many many smaller improvements, bug fixes and code tweaks.

Upcoming

More features and enhancements are planned to be rolled out throughout the spring and summer:

• Photo gallery feature
• Image resizing functionality for huge photos
• Basic blogging software
• Export site as static HTML
• OpenID support
• Forgot password feature (duh!)
• Stay tuned for more!

Today we migrated YikeSite into a UTF-8 database. This means that we should now be able to accept more languages. Basic testing has proven that you can input some pretty funky characters into YikeSite, save and display them.

You can also create page names with UTF-8 characters in them. One caveat though is that we base the page’s URL on the name and there are restrictions in what characters can be in a URL. We will try to convert your url to one as close as possible to the page name though and we’ll strip out any characters that don’t conform to a standard URL.

What You Need

1. Specify in HTML

In your theme HTML, put this at the top in between the <head> tags:

<META http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8”>

2. Specify a UTF Font

A safe one seems to be “Lucida Sans Unicode” and most people will have this font by default (and is specified in the default YikeSite theme). Lucida Sans Unicode has 1775 glyphs. Times New Roman, Arial, Courier and Impact should also handle most major Latin-alphabet, Greek and Cyrillic languages and all contain 653 glyphs.

Help Us Out

Please report any issues you may have with integrating other languages in your YikeSite pages. Just post a comment here and we’ll try to work it out together. Thanks!