Working around 15 page limit

I stayed busy working on moonfruit in the last week or so.

I am currently building a page which would have a list of my members. Logical approach was to create a table where I would have names listed and member's contact info. It turned out nice , but I realized that the e mail addresses are not click able, meaning you can't click on the address to automatically open your defaulted email (for example outlook) with desired address already in the "To" field. Apparently moonfruit doesn't let you link a text inside of a table cell.


Just like most problems on moonfruit this one has a way around it but it is a long one if you need to create a larger list. I ended up creating a separate text box for each of my member's emails (anything you type in it can be linked to e mail, web site etc) After linking them I ended up dragging each little text box to a corresponding empty cell in my table. It took a while to align it all but now I have a table with clickable e mail addresses.
Now, moving this table would require some work as well. First I would move the regular table , the e mail addresses will stay behind since they are not a part of the table. Next step would be Ctrl click each one and then when they are all selected you can move them in one piece to align with empty table cells where they should be. The other downside is that visitors can't copy these e mail addresses.

Also I played a little with creating a directory for my players. When you are creating a new page in moonfruit one of the options is to create a directory page (aside from blank, blog, photo, forum etc) This directory page lets you create a list of items/memebers/products etc , you can enter about 5 fields of info for each entry. So if you are making a list of memebers like myself for each name you can add their contact info e mail, phone etc. The visitors can see a list of names , clicking on a name opens up the rest of the info about that person. This directory also has a search field and I think you have ability to let your members enter and update their own info.
memebers can download picture and create a link to their e mail or website.



Chrome issue update
In my last posting I mentioned how one of my pages has content disappearing in Chrome browser. I posted a message in the forum, and one of the site leaders thinks that it may be due to very long pages that I create. He thinks that site maker works correctly on pages up to 4000 pixels long.

I am not convinced that this is the main problem. For example the page in question is not over 4000 pixels and content starts disappearing at about 3000 pixels well under the maximum. Aside form this I have some pages that are 5000 pixels long and they look fine in all browsers. If there is issue with flash not working at 4000 pixels how come that this problem doesn't exist in Internet Explorer?

To make it even more complicated I found out that some of my sites visitors can view the page in question in all 3 browsers without any trouble. All the content is visible to them.



I will work on this issue and try to make some sense out of it. The site leader suggested splitting my content to more shorter pages, but this won't work for me because I have 15 page limit on my free moonfruit site. To fit all the past data and leave enough space for future stats i have to maximize the page lengths in order to stay under 15 page maximum.

Page limit
The page limit for a free moonfruit site is 15 pages. Since as i mentioned before I am only interested in building a free web site, this page limit sometimes can create problems especially if you plan to add a lot of content and features on your site. So this is how I get around it.
For starters I try not to use some of the weak moonfruit features , for example their blog or forum. Instead, I find a good external program . For example I like to use http://www.blogger.com/ for creating my blogs, and http://www.forumotion.net/ for my forums.

Using these external programs gives my site better features and also saves me two pages in moonfruit for something else. I usually create a menu link on my moonfruit site to these external programs. So when someone clicks on the blog tab in my menu a new window opens up with my blogger blog. I customize my blog so it has same header image and similar colors as my main site, so it looks like it belongs to it.
Downside is that you have to log in on different sites to update the content as opposed to have everything on moonfruit. Also some people wouldn't like new window opening up, or not having embedded blog in same template as the main site.

Another way to avoid hitting the dreaded max page limit would be to create an additional free site. For example, I needed pages to store past results for my tennis league . It takes a lot of pages to record the stats from previous 4 years, so i created a separate free web site on moonfruit which will only be for storing past scores. I named this site rtlhistory.moonfruit.com
so it would look like an extension of my main one. I created a menu link on my main site to this new page and I named that tab History. I totally duplicated my main site's header all colors and background so once you open the history site it looks 100% same as my main site. So visitors don't feel like they are entering a different web site.
The downside is that the history opens up in a new window but clicking home tab on the history site brings the visitors back to the main one.

So long for this posting. Please feel free to post comments or questions about this blog below.
I will try to keep updating the blog regularly.

Moonfruit 4 months later

Well since my last post I have been working a lot on moonfruit. I built a few web sites with moonfruit, if you have a free version for each site you have to create a new login ID and password.

Over time I was able to resolve some of the issues that kept me from committing 100% to this web builder. For example big thing for me was lack of ability to make a functional pay pal button integrated in a free moonfruit site. I found a way around that issue. I ended up using wix.com which is another flash based free web builder . I used their pay pal widget to create a pay pal button on one of their pages. When you want to publish a page from their site they give you three options: Embed in a different site, publish as a web page or email the page. I picked the first option which creates a code for you . I copied the code and pasted it on my moonfruit site using their HTML widget. Once the button was embedded in my site I resized the HTML box so only the button would be visualized and not the surrounding background. It worked just fine.
I turned out to be a lot of work for a seemingly a simple thing to do but unfortunately I wasn't able to do this on moonfruit alone, even though they offer pay pal integration I was never able to make it work and I never got a straight answer on moonfruit community forum why.

Moonfruit's HTML widget is not a beta version any more and I think it is working a lot better than before . They came up with new toolbar which is easy to use.

I just purchased my domain which was 6.99 on http://www.1&1.com/ and I really think I will switch my tennis league site to moonfruit next spring. The domain pointing set up was very easy and quick.

Google Chrome issue
This is currently my main issue with moonfruit. Some content doesn't show up on google chrome web browser. For example one of my customers wasn't able to see a registration form on one of my pages when he used the Chrome. The form was just fine when he switched to Internet explorer. I checked it on my computer and the form is visible in the latest Chrome download.

Also after my moonfruit page gets to certain length the content in tables disappears. Again this only happens when using Chrome browser . Everything looks fine in IE.

If I don't resolve this I will have to post a message on my site that it is only optimized for IE . Since more and more people are using Firefox and Chrome now, I think this is a serious problem.
I posted a question on the moonfruit community forum, and I haven't gotten any response regarding Chrome-Moonfruit compatibility issues.
I plan to keep working on this, partially because I really like google browser and I think it will be used more and more, so we can't limit my web site to IE only. I really hope this compatibility issue improves. I can live with some pages looking little bit different from browser to browser but content disappearing is a more serious issue.

I also checked the same issue in the firefox and same content was gone as well.

While checking my site in Chrome I noted that mouse wheel works when your cursor is over the content. So you can use it to scroll down the page. This is not possible in IE. When you are using IE you actually have to move the cursor outside of the content area of the site to be able to use the wheel to scroll up or down . At some point i was told that flash sites work this way and that the wheel can't be used with cursor over the content. Apparently this only applies to IE and not to Chrome browser. Personally I think this is a nice advantage of the Chrome even though it could be a minor thing for some people.