Jérôme, author of Jinfoo (http://jinfoo.canalblog.com/), a French blog on all things Web 2.0, has created a short introduction to Weebly in French. His site, which he created with Weebly, is available at infrench.weebly.com. Merci bien, Jérôme, on l’apprécie!

I’m happy to announce that Weebly now supports the full range of UTF-8 international characters, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and most other world languages. The areas compatible with UTF-8 characters include the title of a page and the content inside a page. Stay tuned — we’ll be releasing a couple more features over the next few days. We’d like to thank Riku of WappBlog (http://www.wappblog.com) for helping us test this new feature.

I’m proud to announce that Weebly is officially launching its private-beta today, September 12th. What does private beta mean to us? It means we’re going to fill as many invitations as we can given our current capacity, so that every user can have a great experience. Along with the launch, we’ve released the new user introduction videos, which should help you get a feel for the user interface. Keep the feedback coming — we appreciate all of it.

We’ve made quite a bit of progress over the past few weeks, and have finally pushed all of our changes to the main site. Although too many to inumerate individually, we’ve fixed many, many bugs and added quite a few new features. Thank you all for your feedback — we’ve listened, and implemented the most requested additions, including:

 - Many enhancements to the text-editor to make it more user friendly (thanks Eric and Rahul).
 - Additional elements and themes, including the YouTube and YouAre.tv video elements.
 - An enhanced theme selection page.
 - Many slight tweeks to the user-interface, making it even easier to use, such as a confirmation box before deleting an element, and an improved linking tool.

Total, we’ve fixed over 40 bugs since our last release. What’s coming up next? Expect a new user introduction, the ability to change theme options (such as uploading a header picture), undo and redo buttons for the text editor, and more elements. I’ll be updating our To-Do checklist to the right over the next day, so you can continue to follow our development progress.