Thursday, December 10, 2009

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.

4 comments:

  1. i cant make a downloadable files with MF , pl help me

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    Replies
    1. Sorry , the comments never rolled to my e mail so I didn't know I had any posted . Have you tried moon fruit forum, they might have some answers for you.

      I embedded documents in my moon fruit sites but haven't tried downloadable files.

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  2. i've had the same issue with Chrome. It cuts off half the moonfruit webpage!!! It's a pain and I wonder why no one has responded to your query on the forum. Let's keep at them! Thanks for your post and update. www.teachingcomputing.com :=)

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  3. Does it cut off on the bottom or side? I have been using Chrome 100% for past few years and I don't remember that problem. I have some very long pages and Chrome doesn't cut the bottom .

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