New Features: Private Pages and More
Tonight we deployed a variety of updates to the Webvanta system. The key features are:
- SSL for login pages
- Support for private pages with a shared password login
- Optional visitor (member) accounts providing access to selected pages
- New "paste" behavior in the WYSIWYG editor
- Support for very long content blocks
SSL for Login Pages
One change you may notice right away is that we have increased the security for all sites by using SSL (https) for login pages. This helps protect your password from being seen by anyone watching network traffic.
As a result, depending on the URL you use to log in, you may see a security warning. Our SSL certificate covers only the Webvanta domain name, and all of its subdomains.
So if you log in at your own full domain, you will see a warning that says the certificate is invalid. You can allow the exception, accepting the certificate, with no compromise in security, though the warning presented by the browser may seem scary.
If you log in via your subdomain (e.g., http://mydomain.webvanta.com/login), then you will not see any security warning.
Private Pages and Membership
The largest new set of features is support for private pages that require visitors to log in. There are currently two levels of this feature:
- Guest-level access. This is available for all paid accounts at no charge. You can set any page to Protected, via the new Access control at the bottom right of the page admin screen, and only users who know the password will be able to view these pages.
- Member-only access. This is a premium feature that has an additional monthly fee, depending on the number of member accounts. You can create any number of member roles, and set which roles are able to access each page.
Our documentation for these features is under development and will be completed in a few days. You'll find links to the documentation, as well as pricing details, here as it becomes available.
WYSIWYG Paste Changes
We've also made a change to the "paste" feature in the WYSIWYG editor. Until now, when you pasted content into the WYSIWYG editor, we forced the pasted content to go through the "plain text" filter. This kept possibly invalid HTML, or HTML that would override your site's styling, from being pasted in.
Now, we allow content to be pasted unmodified. This gives you more power, but also means that it is less predictable how content will be displayed. The markup pasted in may override your site's styling, and can cause layout issues.
The plain text paste function, which strips all HTML markup, is still available, but you must choose it explicitly. In the WYSIWYG editor toolbar, click the clipboard icon with the T to access this feature. Pasting in content via this path, and then using the WYSIWYG editor (or code editor) to style the content, remains the most reliable approach.
In addition, we've added a "paste from Word" feature, which provides selective stripping of the complex HTML markup that Word includes in content copied to the system clipboard.
The behavior of these paste functions depends on features in the web browser, so you will see somewhat different results in different browsers and operating systems.
Support for Very Long Content
Until now, content blocks, whether in articles, blog posts, custom item type text area fields, CSS files, JavaScript files, and templates was limited to 64K characters.
Now, this limit has been raised to 2M bytes. This should be enough for even the very longest articles, CSS files, and JavaScript files.
As always, we welcome your feedback. If you have any problems, please create a support ticket at helpdesk.webvanta.com. If you have an urgent problem, feel free to call us at 888.670.6793 ext. 1.
