One of our favorite things about Squarespace 6 is the improved pace with which we can push updates to the system. Behind the scenes, we’ve adopted a modern deployment strategy, which means we can push updates to the system on a daily basis. Hundreds of bugs are fixed transparently every week, and features go live very frequently.
Here’s an overview of the features we’ve quietly launched in the 3 weeks since our public release:
- Automatic Google Sitemap.xml Generation – Squarespace will now automatically generate a complete sitemap for your site, improving your site’s search engine indexing for even the most JavaScript-heavy sites. This has been deployed across our system and you do not have to do anything to maintain your sitemap. It’s also linked in properly from your robots.txt so Google will start indexing off your sitemap immediately.
- Markdown Block/Markdown by Default Mode – For those of you who love Markdown (like us!) we’ve released not only a Markdown block that can be used in our page builder, but a Markdown by Default mode. To enable Markdown by Default, go into your Settings area in your website manager and check off Markdown by Default. Now, when creating pages or posts, a markdown block will be inserted in place of the WYSIWYG block.
One incredible characteristic of our Markdown implementation is that it is a LayoutEngine component, which means you can use Markdown in conjunction with any dynamic block in our system, right within the same post or page. - Amazon Block – We’ve added an Amazon.com product block to the system. Drop it in your page and type in any product from Amazon – we’ll retrieve the product image and data for you. Further, if you enter an Amazon Associate ID in your Settings panel, you’ll receive a payment from Amazon whenever anyone buys a product you linked to.
- Per-Collection Header/Post-Entry Code Injection – You can now inject code to page headers on a per-collection basis (helpful when integrating A/B testing tools). You can also add custom post-entry blocks to your blog, which is useful for integrating custom social buttons.
- Wordpress Importing Fixes – We’ve fixed a slew of problems related to Wordpress imports. If you’ve tried an import before and it failed, give it another shot and let us know. We aim to have 100% compatibility for Wordpress imports (everything from re-hosting your images to keeping your URLs perfect).
We’re making additions and improvements to Squarespace 6 every day, so stay tuned for more updates. As always, thank you for being a Squarespace customer.