Since we launched Webpop back in May we've been busy bees. Not only fanatically supporting our new clients, maintaining and scaling our infrastructure and coming down hard on bugs that popped up, but also adding plenty of hot new features to our CMS.

We've sent out announcements on many of them, others we've just quietly introduced. Maybe when seeing all of them in one place you'll spot just the one you've been waiting for.

Here's the full list of all the new features we've been adding during the last 6 months.

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Sometimes when pulling in a blog post on the front page or placing a title in a constrained space, automatic truncating can come in really handy.

Now Webpop makes it really easy to truncate anything in a safe way, just use the new "truncate" attribute in your pop tags:

<pop:body truncate="100"/>

This will display a body field truncated to at most 100 characters.

You can also specify an ellipsis to use in case truncating is necessary:

<pop:title truncate="17" ellipsis="..."/>

This would turn the title "Truncate All The Things" into "Truncate All The ...".

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Webpop now features fine grained control over which sections your clients can edit.

Nothing has changed for the typical case of inviting a client to edit all the contents on his website, but now Webpop lets you limit just what sections a client can touch.

Just click on the settings icon next to the clients name after sending the invitation. You'll get a new dialog that lets you choose what sections this client can edit. Simple, fast and easy.

Last week we finally launched our integrated search engine, letting you easily add a fully customizable search to any of your websites.

One of the advantages of a fully hosted CMS is that we can take advantage of exciting new technologies. A CMS made to be installed on a shared host needs to stick to the lowest common denominator. We don't.

For our built-in search we've taken advantage of this and set up an ElasticSearch cluster. All content on your site gets indexed by elasticsearch and we've added a new <pop:search> tag to let you add a search to your site.

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Over the last couple of months we've worked a lot on support for ordering and sorting content and Webpop now allows just about everything to be ordered or sorted just as you want it.

In Webpop we operate with 3 types of dynamic content: Sections, Entries and Categories.

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Sometimes when using the <pop:entries> tag you might want to skip the current entry.

A few cases where this would be usefule is when showing the latest posts in the permanent sidebar of a blog or showing other entries from the same category as related posts.

Now you can easily skip the current content from any content listing by using skip="current". Here's an example of showing the 5 latest blogposts, not including the post currently displayed:

<pop:entries from="blog" limit="5" skip="current">
  <a href="<pop:permalink/>"><pop:title/></a>
</pop:entries> 

Thursday | July 28, 2011 | 10 AM PST / 19:00 CET

The next webinar in our series of biweekly broadcasts will be all about the Webpop client side experience.

We'll show how the on-site editor works with plenty of real examples, give a bit of insight into what makes this possible and show how to make sure your client gets the best possible experience.

Tune in at our Livestream Channel on Thursday.

Meet our newest UI component, the Content Explorer:

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Webpop Webinar: All About HTML5 Forms

Learn all about HTML5 forms in our 2nd Webpop Webinar

HTML5 comes with a lot of new form related features. In our next webinar, we'll be covering all the new form fields, the built in client side validations, browser support and how to take advantage of the new CSS pseudo-classes to style your forms.

At the end of the presentation we'll also show you how to use HTML5 forms with Webpop.

Tune in at our Livestream channel on Thursday.

We just added two new tags to our templates that come in handy when you have scripts or stylesheets you want to include only for the live version of your page or only for our private development version.

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Thursday | June 30, 2011 | 10 AM PST / 19:00 CET

Learn how to get the most out of Webpop and meet the guys behind it. This Thursday we'll be doing the first Webpop webinar on livestream.

Tune into our channel on Thursday at 10 AM PST / 7 PM CET where we'll demonstrate how to turn a static mockup into a dynamic website that a client can keep up to date.

This is a great chance to learn more about Webpop, meet the team behind it and ask all your questions, so make a mark in your calendar, come by and say hi!

Today we're happy to announce that we're joining Rackspace's Cloud Tools program.

Building Webpop on top of the Rackspace Cloud has been a fantastic experience for us, and we're happy to be their newest Cloud Tools partner. In this blog post, I'll dive into the details of how we've built a truly scalable CMS on top of their Cloud Servers infrastructure.

One of the things that always makes me sad, is when I follow a link from Reddit or any of the myriad of other social news sites, and get a page that simply times out or throws a server-side error. For someone with a blog or a company site, getting hit with lots of traffic should be a marvelous thing, an opportunity, an event to be celebrated. Not a moment of frantically struggling to get a server to survive while presenting people with your domain plus a broken site. Having your website die, just when you're finally getting a bunch of visitors sucks. For any small business, it's a wasted opportunity.

One of our goals, when we set out to build Webpop, was to make sure this would never happen to anyone hosted with us.

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At Webpop we're big fans of Carsonified and for the second time we're happy to be sponsoring their Future of Web Design conference in London.

As a startup sponsor we got the chance to give a short presentation of Webpop in of the University Room.

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Last tuesday Webpop hit the frontpage of TechCrunch as Rip Empson did a great writeup of our product.

One of the great things about Webpop is not having to worry about large spikes in traffic. Getting featured on a large tech site can easily kill the performance of a self-hosted CMS if everything hasn't been carefully tuned and optimized. So how did Webpop fare?

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At Webpop we're working hard at building the best hosted CMS for professional designers, agencies and their clients.

During the last year we've built a powerful tool that we believe can make a real difference for web designers, and the feedback we've been getting during the last 6 months of beta has been enormously encouraging.

There's one question we've been getting more than any other, and one we so far haven't been able to give a clear answer to: "What's this going to cost?"

Today we're happy to finally announce the initial pricing for Webpop.

For the hard facts, check our new Plans and Pricing section. For the longer story, read on.

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The other day I was tweaking the Webpop blog by adding a new "Link" post type, for posting quick links to external sites with just a small comment.

Allan, our designer, had included the type in his comp for the blog, but it was a detail that we left behind for the launch of our blog.

While the change was pretty straight forward, just adding a new kind of entry for the blog, hooking it up with our templates and tweaking the css a bit, it sure wasn't something I would like to be doing directly on a live site with people watching.

Versions in Webpop make it possible to create an exact copy of the whole directory structure that makes up the design of a website. Each version has it's own url where you can always preview the page or compare with other versions. Creating a new version is instantaneous and takes up no extra storage space.

So I created a "Links" version, editing my templates while previewing and verifying the result on the version-url. Once satisfied with the result, I activated the version and put my changes live.

Design versions is a small feature, but it makes it really easy to go in and tweak a live site safely. It's the kind of feature you just can't do without once you've gotten used to it.

Adding a customized Twitter button to your website is a lot easier than you might think.

<a href="http://twitter.com/share">Tweet</a>

Yes, really, that's all it takes. Give your link some design love and tada! Your very own custom Twitter button.

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One thing we've noticed during the first 4 months of beta testing is how surprised our testers get once they realize that when we say, “Full control over HTML and CSS” we really mean full control.

Lots of CMSs, site builders and e-commerce platforms like to claim that you get full access to the CSS and HTML, when what they really mean is that you can touch a snippet here or there, decide on a header or tweak a general layout. That's not what we mean. When we say full control we really mean that there is no part of the HTML, CSS or even javascript that you cannot write exactly as you want.

There's no specific layout structure that you have to comply to. No blocks of markup generated by a blog or calendar module that you can only decide where to put. No pre-made navigation blocks that you can only position, but not tweak. No auto-generated javascript that gets injected into your page outside your control.

With Webpop the output is exactly what you put in. No exceptions.

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Since we started the code editor in Webpop, we felt the need for a code completion feature. I've personally used it on several programming IDE's and think this feature will help you learn and somewhat understand our pop tags. Our first step was the Tag Explorer, located at the top right icon in the code editor. The Tag Explorer is a great feature to speed up development and get a glimpse of the tags you can use. Anyway, when we first saw the great work done by Quplo on their Common Sense Code Completion we said: "Hey! That's exactly what we need for our code completion".

So, that's it. :-) We got our hands dirty and some days ago we deployed the first version of our take on the Common Sense Code Completion. We also fixed some issues from the original code and then added a few features, like support for context aware tags. Context aware tags only appear inside a certain context, for example in HTML you can only get "optgroup" and "option" tags inside a "select" element. For Webpop tags, we extended the context awareness to actually even read the content of the site and suggest the correct tags and values!

We are releasing these changes in Github. Please feel free to fork it and contribute! Main contributions to the original Quplo CSCC are in the master branch. The webpop branch includes tags and features specific to Webpop. You can checkout the webpop branch to take a look at how we have implemented our tags.

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As a visual web designer I enjoy every aspect of designing and creating web pages. Realizing my original comps to actual HTML pages is surely a pleasure. It's a delight to polish, fine-tune and re-align (until exhaustion) my already great-looking web pages (you know it – CSS tweaks, typography, background textures, etc.). As a matter of fact, at this stage the web pages are even better now than the graphic comps where I started before! A tragic story unfolds –  a merry beginning only to finish with an awful ending .

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Back a year ago when we set out to create Webpop we took an important decision:

No matter how tempting it would be to just grab some existing blogging engine and whip up a quick blog and a landing page, we just wouldn't go that way. The Webpop blog would run on Webpop from day one.

Now, writing a simple blog engine is not a big deal. When I first picked up Ruby on Rails I wrote my first homemade blogging engine in a day or two.

But a single user blog, with rigid structure and a few basic forms for posts and categories is one thing. A scalable multitenant system with unrestricted access to every single line of html and css, hosted serverside javascript extensions, custom content types, built-in version control, dynamic resizing of images, domain registrations straight from the project screen, integrated SEO tools and a sleek on-site editing interface - now that's a different beast altogether!

During the last year our whole team has made an incredible effort to take all of this from idea to reality. And here we are, finally ready to launch the Webpop blog and start showing the world what we've been building.

We've been running a small controlled beta test for the last 4 months and we're now ready to start sending out invites in greater numbers, so make sure you sign up for the beta and reserve your spot.