I'm excited to announce a new set of features we rolled out recently: much more powerful blogging features, a fresher, cleaner Weebly interface, and a whole bunch of smaller improvements.

New Blogging Features

First up, we've released an entirely new set of blogging features. Once you're editing your blog, you'll notice a "Manage Blog" button. From here, you can moderate all of the comments for your blog in one fell swoop, and move into the blog settings area, where you can choose to close comments on a blog-wide basis, leave them open, or have them be moderated.

There is also a new post settings area, where you can initiate trackbacks and set the comment moderation settings for each individual post.

Finally, you can also change the post date by clicking on the date when editing a post, and set it to anytime in the past or future.

Cleaner interface

We've also made a significant amount of improvements around the elements interface. The ugly blue boxes that surrounded all elements are now gone, and your site should appear in the editor exactly how it will when published. The blue box surrounding each element that allows you to move the element and delete it now only shows up when hovering over the element.

Also, we've added the ability to move elements from one page to another by clicking on the arrow in the top left hand side of the blue surrounding box.

And more!

We've added quite a few other requested features, including the ability to open links in a new window, constant improvements to our infrastructure to make Weebly faster, an autoplay option on the Weebly audio element, and many other bug fixes and improvements.

As always, we'd like to thank all of your for using Weebly and providing incredibly helpful feedback! You can always suggest and vote for new features by visiting the Weebly slinkset page.

We'd also like to especially thank those users who buy a domain or purchase Weebly pro -- we're working very hard to provide the easiest, fastest, most powerful way for you to create a website and blog out there, and we appreciate your support in helping us achieve that objective.

UPDATE: Nikasia was found!

Nikasia Nowell is a 13-year old girl from West Oaklane, Philadelphia that went missing on March 12th, 2009. Her family has created a Weebly site to help spread the word.

If you have seen Nikasia or have any information about her whereabouts, please contact the local police or the family here.

You can also help spread the word by Twittering about the site, or by re-tweeting the family's original message.

We're currently looking for people who are able to help us translate Weebly into other languages. Specifically, we're looking for help translating Weebly into:

- Spanish
- French
- Chinese
- German
- Japanese
- Italian
- Arabic
- Portuguese
- Korean

If you know any of those languages and are willing to help out, please send an email to translate@weebly.com. Thanks!

I'm happy to announce the launch of the Weebly Affiliate program. We've had people write in for quite a while asking if there was any way they could make money helping us promote Weebly, and we're glad that we now have a program to do so.

The terms are very straightforward: sign up at http://affiliate.weebly.com/, and place your affiliate link or banners on your website. You will earn a 25% commission on any sales you refer, which can add up fast.

There are a few ground rules: We will absolutely not tolerate affiliates who spam, and you are not able to advertise against the keyword "weebly". Other than that, we'd love to work with you and help in any way we can -- feel free to email us at affiliates@weebly.com.

After quite a bit of work building and testing the new custom theme features, we're happy to announce that we've finally launched the ability for any user to incorporate their own theme into Weebly.

When logged in and editing your website, you'll now see an "Advanced Editing" tab that appears when you are choosing a design. Click on this tab, and you will be able to edit the full HTML code and CSS styles of your website and upload files your theme depends on.

Once you do so, you'll be presented with a full suite of tools designed to help make advanced customization as simple as possible. From a syntax-highlighted code editor, to an instant preview tab, we've put some work into making the editing interface simple and comfortable.

When you've created a theme you like, you can export it by clicking on the "Export" button, which will prompt you to download the theme package .zip file. You can then give this theme file to any other Weebly user, who will be able to import the theme by clicking "Custom" and then "Import" under the Designs tab.

We're always working long days (and nights!) making Weebly the easiest and most powerful way for you to create a website, and we have a lot of exciting features coming up soon, including a simple way for you to customize your page without having to edit any HTML or CSS.

Thanks again for using Weebly, and thanks especially to the users who support us by purchasing pro or buying a domain -- we couldn't do it without you!

We will be beta testing a set of features that allows any Weebly user to customize their theme, and are looking for users who know a bit of HTML/CSS and would be willing to spend a little time to test out the new features, won't mind if things aren't 100% solid yet, and will be able to give us some thoughtful feedback.

In return, you'll be able to get access to these features before anyone else, and have complete control over the design of your site.

UPDATE: These features have been released.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays from the entire team here at Weebly! Wishing you and yours a very merry holiday season.

- David, Dan, Chris, Justin and Drew

We've just released a whole new set of themes! Justin has been working on these for a couple weeks now, making sure that everything is working smoothly, and we're happy to finally be able to bring them to you.

These new themes include some general purpose designs, as well as themes geared towards wedding and education websites.

While we never made an official announcement on our blog, we just recently passed 1 million registered users! (The picture to the left was taken from the dashboard at our office as it happened)

Thanks again to everyone who uses Weebly, and especially those users who have signed up for Weebly Pro or purchased a domain. We really appreciate your support and are working every day to make Weebly better for you.

We have some exciting plans for Weebly in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks again for all of the great feedback you've been sending our way -- as always, keep it coming!

Notice the fresh design on Weebly’s homepage and “user home” area?  We just rolled out the changes to all members.  We think the new design has a cleaner and more professional feel than the previous one, and also adds in some additional capabilities which we hope you'll enjoy.  

You'll see that there is a new "To Do List" area upon logging in.  Here we have listed some items that make sense for new users to accomplish, such as starting a blog, checking out Google AdSense to make money, and publishing a website.  Each item links to the relevant help tutorial describing how to accomplish the task.

Also new is an area to submit your site to be featured.  If you think your site is heads above the rest on Weebly, submit it and you could be featured on our homepage.  We're going to be putting up a new featured site everyday, starting December 1st.

We hope you like the new changes.  Let us know what you think in the comments.  Justin, the man behind this design, has also created a bunch of new themes we're getting ready to release in the coming days.  Stay tuned!

I'm happy to finally announce full compatibility with Safari 3+ on Windows and Mac and Google Chrome. Although Weebly has been cross-platform since the beginning with Firefox, you can now use Weebly if your browser of choice is Safari or Google Chrome.

We've also released a new feature: Nabble forums. Under the "More" tab, you can now add forums to your site by dragging on the "Nabble forums" icon!

This release also incorporates quite a few bug fixes and small updates, while we work hard to continue making Weebly the easiest and friendliest possible way to make a website.

We also want to officially welcome Justin and Drew to the team. Justin is our in-house designer and master of slick UIs. He's working hard on making everything look good, and has designed a ton of brand new themes that we're releasing soon.

Drew is arguably the first Weebly to relocate to join us, and for that we're very grateful. He's made the move from Arizona to Sausalito, and is working on adding new features and fixing bugs. For the next couple weeks, he'll be working on a new re-design of the site, which we hope to launch soon.

All of us are working non-stop to make Weebly the best web site creation experience out there. We're listening closely to your feedback and suggestions, and are working on the top features you've requested. Thanks again for using Weebly, and be sure to let us know if there's anything we can do to make it better for you!