Updates and Bug Fixes for June 26th

Today’s Blogger release is a big one for Blogger in Draft. Let’s lead off with the quick stuff:

• Google Gadget integration continues to improve, with better editing of gadget preferences.


• The new look for the Dashboard has seen a handful of tweaks, including a new button style that we’re trying out and, by popular demand, the “show all blogs” toggle is now sticky.


• The subscribe page element has been published to WWW.


• We’ve added a “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” to the Blogger in Draft dashboard, so now you don’t have to remember to type “draft.blogger.com” instead of “www.blogger.com.”


• So you can easily keep up with the news, we’ve added this blog as a tab on the Blogger in Draft Dashboard.

But that’s not what you came here for. You wanted this:

• Webmaster Tools Verification. Turn this on to automatically add and verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.


• Star ratings. Add a 0–5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts so that your readers can rate them.


• Import / export of blogs. Back up all of your posts and comments to one Atom XML file on your computer, and import your posts from one blog to another.


• Embedded comment form. By incredibly popular demand, we’ve brought the comment form to your blog’s post pages, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.


• New post editor. We’ve completely revised the post editor, bringing in drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.

As always, these features are on Blogger in Draft because we’re not done with them and we’re looking for your feedback. Please read the posts for each of the features before trying them so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Make sure you leave comments! These are big features for us, so we want to get them right before we turn them on for everyone.

New Feature: Star Ratings

With our new Star Ratings feature, your readers can easily rate your posts — or the things you post about — from one star to five stars with a single click, right from the post footer.

Think of Star Ratings as a mini-poll for each of your posts. If you blog about fashion, food, crafts, quotes, or art we think this will be particularly useful to you.

To enable Star Ratings, log it to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts page element and then check the “Show Star Ratings” checkbox.

You can customize the location of the stars within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box.

Additional Notes

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Star Ratings.
• The star ratings widget should blend seamlessly with most solid-colored blog backgrounds (one exception is Rounders, where the edges of the widget will be visible via a color change). The text and background colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor
  • Backrgound: mainBgColor, bgcolor
• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the Star Ratings. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Star Ratings code from a fresh template.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!