Spruz Owners' Community For owners of websites powered by the Spruz Platform

Starting October 1^st Spruz will focus on premium services. Our goal has always been to provide the most flexible and robust content platform on the net with the best performance. In order to accomplish this we will be moving over to a premium only offering, so that we will be able to offer our customers a great service with a minimal cost.

Over the past few months we have come to the realization that the current, primarily ad supported, model does not bring in nearly enough revenue to support the needs and desires of you, our customers. We are proud to announce that you have made Spruz a network comprised of 45,000+ websites and over 700,000 members. As more users have elected to “grow yourself” and become members of the popular Spruz platform the main complaint is slow page load times and errors. The biggest drawback to offering free website to anyone, is the people that create a website in order to exploit people, the internet or us. This puts a large unneeded resource drain on the whole network that hurts everyone. We now know that to continue with a free, ad supported, offering is doing a disservice to all our users.

The decision to go to a premium service model has weighed heavy on us and was not made lightly, but the steps we are making now will allow us to focus on the kind of quality we desire to provide to each of our users.

You are free to call us at 877-MYSPRUZ for questions on upgrading your website.

Some Key Features of Spruz powered websites:

• Completely hosted solution, no software to install
• Member oriented website with profiles, security, etc.
• No more advertisements, Ad placement module so you can make monetize your site traffic.
• No limits, unlimited pages, elements, modifiers, and bandwidth
• Highly flexible Platform
• Platform updates, new features, and overall improvements added on a regular basis.
• No additional fees for software updates or support.

We hope you chose to continue to “grow yourself” with Spruz.

To thank you for supporting us, we are offering members that have been part of our network for over 30 days a 50% discount on all upgrade options (This comes out to only $4.99 a month). This offer will expire October 15^th. To upgrade you can go to http://www.spruz.com?page=upgrade

Or if you feel the need to delete your website you can go to http://www.spruz.com?page=site_manage

Jay and David

For the last week or so we have been silently releasing mostly minor updates such as bug fixes and usability enhancements of the content manager. A few users have noticed the version numbers changing and were wondering what changes were being made.

The main feature that was being worked on, and was just released, is a re-launch of the Contact Form page element to work with the new content manager. The new Contact Form element has a robust form editor that allows you to add fieldsets as well as add all the standard input and select elements. The system has a full drag and drop interface for sorting and customizing your contact form.

We have also added 4 new themes in a series called Accent; check them out in the Modern category.

We have many more feature additions and improvments on the way, so stay tuned.

We want to thank those of you that have provided helpful feedback and inspiration after the 2.0 update. We have finished adding a number of features additions to the page builder that were left out of the 2.0 update and we corrected a number of bugs and problems that were reported.

Some of the new improvements to the page builder include;

·         You can now easily change the layout of the page. This also adds a layout with a non global right hand side. The new page layouts allow you to select different position arrangements to place your element.

·         We changed the tabbing, to break different content areas into easy to understand sections

·         We have moved the managing your site intro, start page and word filter from the site properties to the page builder to allow for easy access.

·         Now you can create and upload your own Favicon to your Spruz powered website!! Member requested feature!

·         Turning off styling, and collapsing elements will stay persistent now. Thus keeping its setting as you move through your site.

·         We added more text to let people know that only element pages can be managed and adjusted on the page builder. Other systems must be managed from the main site, not administration. Clicking on a link will take you were you are suppose to manage that system.

We have completed the release of Spruz version 2.0. This was a big step in the development of the Spruz platform for 2 reasons. Number one, this update allowed us to make many structural changes to the platform and page builder that so that we may deliver more data rich elements, page types, etc. while keeping a high level of flexibility. Number two, we have rolled out platform improvements that bring more stability, faster page load times, and scalability to the Spruz network.

The most noticeable change in this update is the new and improved Page Builder. The new page builder has been designed to make it easier to find and edit pages, the builder has been cleaned up and improved over all. One of my personal favorites is fewer page refreshes when making changes and updates to the site. This makes for a more seamless experience when modifying your website features.

Please remember changes you make to your website are cached for visitors not logged into your site. It may take up 1-5 hours for those changes to be applied for site visitors.

Here is a brief list of page builder features;

• New on page element adding
• Integrated site style sheet to see a better representation of how elements will appear on the main site. This will make it easier for you to correct color issues that may make things easier to read for your site visitors. We also added an option that allows you to turn off your styles.
• New and improved drag and drop
• Ability to collapse elements to make it easier for them to be moved.
• New page layout support. This will allow us to add new layouts for placement of elements, rather then the 4 box layout. Blank pages have been put into the element based system to make it easier to manage. Blank pages create an element based page with 1 column for all your content.
• New and improved quick button for setting what page content you want on your home page.
• New global area selection. This allows you to decide if your site has left, right or both side global areas for navigation and other content you may place there that needs to be on every page.
• We have made the page builder unbreakable, this means it can not be broken accidentally through bad HTML or Java scripting.
• New editor for custom content, making it much easier to use. Built in image uploading will be added in the next few weeks.
• The forums and profiles will now inherite the top navigation box/global area.

Some overall platform improvements

• New changes in the way information is cached from the databases for visitors not logged in. It is important to note that visitors not logged in will not see new site changes for up to 4 or 5 hours. We will be adding an option for you to control cache times in a future update.
• Numerous platform stability fixes where applied.
• We have added additional data caching on data collections that are not changed very often. You should see a difference in page loading times.
• Our overall scalability has been tested and improved to allow the platform to host an infinite number of Spruz powered sites. We have new hardware on the way that will be able to take advantage of this change.

The main purpose of this update was a lot of backend improvements that will further allow us to provide the most flexible site and community creation portal on the net. You will be amazed on the new page elements and systems you will see added over the next few months.

Please keep in mind like anything new, there may be unforeseen issues. Please report problems by using our support tickets or posting in our forums.

I want to thank you all for the support!

To post questions about how to use Spruz and the platform please use our forums http://www.spru

Did you know you can use your own domain name or register a new one to use with your Free Spruz website? Replace the yourname.spruz.com with yourname.com or .net, .org, etc. You can add your own domain to your site for only $24.00 per year with additional discounts for 2 years. There is no requirement to upgrade the site for adding your own domain.

To get started go to http://www.spruz.com/?page=upgrade, once there select if you want to register a domain or use one your own. Then select the upgrade option to keep your site free! That is all there is to it!