Greetings, Showit community!

We return once again with an update sure to delight and amaze! We've made it faster for you to update your website by merging settings with common values across mobile and desktop. More settings throughout the app can now be merged or split between mobile and desktop!

Yes, now values that were the same between mobile and desktop are now automatically merged into one setting, with an option to split them between mobile and desktop if you so desire. This will speed up design workflows by allowing more common settings and updates to be shared across desktop and mobile. Gone is the tedious time updating both layouts for the same setting.

You’ll find the option to Split or Merge values from the ••• context menu to the right of a setting.

If you see mobile and desktop icon tabs above a setting then it's currently split between the layouts.

When you merge a value it will take the setting from the active layout: mobile or desktop. You’ll see that stated as “Merge Using Mobile” or “Merge Using Desktop” based upon which layout you have active.

The split option would have been a great utility in the 1986 science fiction horror movie, The Fly, in which Seth Brundle inadvertently combines his DNA with that of a housefly during a teleportation experiment. This ultimately leads to him becoming a human/fly monster and it being a David Cronenberg film they did not skimp on the body horror. I bet he wishes he had a split function following that wacky experiment. Also, the movie stars Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, so you know it gets weird. It gets really weird. Brundle’s solution of teleporting himself with other humans to dilute the fly DNA was one approach, but split merge would have been way better.

Now it is available to all of you! No genetic hijinks required. You’re welcome! 😉

Read more here...

Showit, the flexible drag-and-drop website builder, is announcing their acquisition of Sumo, the popular WordPress and Shopify lead generation tool.

Sumo, developed by the team behind AppSumo, has long been a tool that online businesses rely on to generate leads from their website. Sumo makes it easy for businesses to collect email addresses and phone numbers by providing easy-to-use tools to create stunning, high-converting forms and pop-ups. Sumo integrates with many popular CRMs and email marketing platforms such as ConvertKit and MailChimp.

Davey Jones will serve as the CEO of Formilytics, the newly formed business that will manage the development of Sumo. The team plans to continue serving Sumo’s existing community and developing Sumo as its own tool to make it the most robust lead generation platform available today. The Formilytics team will also be working closely with Showit to create a tight integration between the platforms.

Showit has developed a reputation for being a website platform that enables users to create their dream website. Thousands of small businesses use Showit to power their website citing its intuitive design, creative flexibility, and customer support as key reasons they love the platform.

“Showit’s mission has always been to cultivate the creativity that exists in each person and our core product is a website platform that provides true creative freedom,” said Todd Watson, CEO and founder of Showit. “We also see the need for our community to create thriving businesses, and Sumo feels like such a great fit to allow sites built on Showit to have best-in-class lead generation tools that connect seamlessly to all the ways our customers run their businesses.”

More information about Showit and Sumo’s partnership will be released over the coming months. Be sure to follow Showit and Sumo on Instagram to catch all the updates!

For more information about Showit and Sumo, visit:

• SumoMe.com
• Showit.com

➡️✨ If you want try Sumo Pro, you can use the code SHOWITEERS for 50% off your subscription.

Have more questions?

What kinds of things can Sumo do?

Sumo makes it easy to create forms and pop-ups to turn website visitors into leads.

The form builder includes elements like radio groups, dropdowns, and checkboxes so you can get the exact information you need from a lead.

You can create intelligent pop-ups that appear exactly when you want. That includes...

• exit-intent: appears as a visitor goes to close out the tab/window.
• welcome mat: shows a full page pop-up immediately upon opening a page.
• sticky bar: stays stuck to the top or bottom of the page as the visitor scrolls.

There are additional targeting features based on variables like referral source and device. Not to mention the e-commerce features…

How can I learn more about Sumo?

Check out https://page.sumome.com. Need a form and pop-up solution for your website or your clients' websites?

There is a free version of the tool that you can get started with.

➡️✨ If you want to try Sumo Pro, you can use the code SHOWITEERS for 50% off your first year subscription. ✨⬅️

When will the Showit and Sumo integration be available?

You can use Sumo right now on Showit websites but we want to make sure we build the best possible integration. In order to do that, we have some foundational work to focus on first such as getting feedback from the Showit community. Please know that it is a priority for Sumo and we'll keep you updated as we make progress.

Learn how to use Sumo on a Showit website by following these steps...

Does Sumo work on other website platforms?

Yes, Sumo should work on any website platform where you're able to embed a snippet of code. Most importantly, it works on Showit websites ;) There is also a WordPress plugin.

The Shopify App is currently being rebuilt, but we hope it's available in the beginning of the New Year.

Learn how to integrate it with Showit here...

Does Sumo integrate with my email marketing platform?

Yes, Sumo offers integrations with popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp, ConverKit and many more.

Will Sumo continue to be its own product?

Yes, Sumo will continue to be developed as its own product; however, we are planning a tight integration with Showit.

Will the tool continue to be called Sumo?

No, we are working on rebranding the product. More details to come soon!

When can I start using Sumo?

Today! There’s a free version of the tool and a 30-day money back guarantee for those who subscribe to the ‘pro’ version.

Where can I follow along for Sumo updates and tutorials?

Check out Sumo’s ​Instagram​ and ​YouTube​ accounts to follow along.

➡️✨ If you want try Sumo Pro, you can use the code SHOWITEERS for 50% off your first year subscription. ✨⬅️

We're excited to share more details in the coming weeks! Have a question that wasn’t answered here?

Reach out to ​help@sumome.com with any questions.

Here at Showit, we are on the leading edge of Showit innovation! It helps that we are pretty much the only edge of Showit innovation, on account of being Showit, but that is a separate matter entirely. We have recently added Site Canvas Sets!

Site Canvas Sets

With this amazing new feature you can:

• Define a set of site canvases as a standard header and footer that can be applied across the entire site.
• Easily add/remove a site canvas across your site. (ie. a sale banner)
• Create multiple site canvas sets that contain different canvases to use on across groups of pages. (ie. specifically for your blog pages)
• New or imported pages automatically start with your default canvas set.

The possibilities are endless! We think this is pretty great. Our canvas sets are possibly the greatest set of canvases since the Sistine Chapel! And that was a fresco, not done on canvas. You know what else is not a canvas? The Last Supper. Also a fresco.

The Renaissance artists sure did like painting on walls and ceilings. You have to wonder how many great works of art were lost to earthquakes on account of the building they were painted on just fell over. Earthquakes are nature's greatest art critic. Except for fire. Fire has probably gotten more stuff than earthquakes. Or fires caused caused by earthquakes. There is a probably some intersection there. Imagine if there was an earthquake that broke a dam and started a fire. Everything is shaking and flooding and burning. That would be terrible. What do you even do in that situation? Pick your poison, I suppose.

None of that has anything to do with canvas sets, which are going to allow you to do great things with your site. It is a veritable earthquake to the old way of doing things, upending the previous way of styling. There we go. I brought it back. Happy designing!

Read more about Site Canvas Sets...

We are pleased to introduce a great new Showit feature to be able to turn off publishing on a page.

Whether it is a new page you are working on that is not quite ready to go live, or an existing page you want to remove from the site but keep for archival purposes, this new feature is for you.

You can turn off publishing, which allows you to continue to view and work on the page within Showit, but not have it present on your live site. It is a great way to keep things hidden until you are ready to show the world!

You know what is not a great way to accomplish a similar goal? Black holes. I mean, it will be hidden all right. However, given that not even light or other electromagnetic waves can escape from there, good luck getting it back out. Everything inside of the black hole is compressed into a mass of infinite density called a singularity. Or at least that is what we think. It is difficult to tell on account of the whole "nothing can escape from a black hole" nature of the phenomenon. Ok, sure, the event horizon emits Hawking radiation of a temperature inversely proportional to the mass, so theoretically it may eventually evaporate, for lack of a better term. We have not even touched on the time dilation properties, where to an outside observer a clock being sucked toward the event horizon would appear to tick more slowly, then eventually slow to stop as it reached that point, taking what would appear to be an infinite time to cross beyond. Of course, if one were holding the clock, it would appear to happen in a matter of seconds, but things get really weird around objects of incredible mass and that person would have way larger problems at hand. Like being sucked into a black hole.

So yeah, hidden pages! Those are really great and not at all like black holes, which is probably a really good thing!

NOTE: If you've already published a page and then turned off the publish setting. Publish your site again for the page to be taken offline.

Great news, everyone! Canvas Views now appear as tabs within a canvas!

Is it the 1980s again? Because we are all about to enjoy Tab once more! Anyone remember Tab? Just me? Cool. Cool cool cool.

In blog templates when looking at WordPress canvases, the canvas views now all display whenever you chose to Combine Views on Posts in:
1) a Post Loop canvas

or

2) a Posts View Lookup canvas (these are used to display featured posts)

This dramatically improves the visual editing process by now being able to align images/text on a multi-post layout. Additionally, customers looking to purchase a template will experience much better blog template previewing.

Alignment is great for making your site look consistent across experiences. Alignment can be really bad when it comes to waves in physics. If there are two waves where the crest of one touches the trough of another, a process called destructive interference occurs, and the waves become a single wave of amplitude zero.

For two waves that are in phase with each other, you end up with a process known as constructive interference, and the resulting amplitude is twice that of the original waves.

Destructive interference could make light appear to disappear, which is really strange to think about. If you had two separate waves where you could observe the light individually, but when they interfere there would be no light. Where did it go? The energy is either reflected back to the emitter of the wave, or transferred into kinetic energy, heating the medium of transference. Anyway, I'm going to go lie down now because I have to think about this some more.

Luckily Showit alignment is constructive, and your site will look even better than before. My pitch for destructive interference was soundly rejected by everyone, and with good reason. I still think it was a neat idea.

We recently rolled out some great improvements to the Design Settings panel that will make setting these presets even easier. These adjustments are setting the stage for a larger overhaul of settings panels to support merged and separated mobile/desktop settings on a per setting basis. Our initial release of this change was with Canvas Backgrounds.

When visiting the Design Settings panel, you'll find that settings that were the same between Mobile and Desktop will now appear merged into one setting for quick easy adjustment across both layouts. You can easily separate the merged setting by clicking on the underlined title to split it back into separate mobile/desktop.

We find that this approach of merged values helps speed up design workflows and cause less customer confusion when adjusting settings. While also allowing the full flexibility to customize between mobile and desktop if you prefer.

We also improved the text style previews to better understand how your settings like Line Height and Bottom Margin will apply with multiple rows of text. And we also added an Inline Link preview option that you can turn on to see how inline links will render.

In the coming months you'll see similar support for mobile/desktop merged settings push out to many of the settings panels across the app.

We've recently added the ability for contributors to now view their client's DNS settings. This will allow you to more quickly launch your client sites.

When you go to your contributors list in your Account > Profile you will now see a DNS option below each client which will take you to view their DNS details.

Let us know what you think of this update.

We recently launched global blog templates in the design application! What are global blog templates, you may ask? They are a way to customize WordPress posts or pages with a unique layout that's different from the default post/page layout. For example, you could have:

• Full width content
• A single sidebar on the right/left
• A three column page

The possibilities are endless and your imagination is the limit!

Ok, there are other limits. Like the speed of light in a vacuum, or the universal gravitational constant, or Planck's constant. That last one governs the quantum nature of energy and relates the energy of a photon to it's frequency. You can kind of mash all three of these together to get something approximating time, or at least the observable age of the universe before which physics did not really exist, so none of these laws applied.

See, you came to learn about blog templates and now we are discussing physics. You never know what might happen as a Showit user! Go out and create some beautiful blog templates and then ponder the dimensions of time, which we still do not truly understand. Maybe you can solve it and win an award! Or just have a really difficult time sleeping at night like I do when I think about it too much.

Featuring a modern urban metro style, Cartera is a bold, minimalist design to prominently feature your site's most important assets. With a clean color palette, midnight shadows, and eye catching line work this design hearkens back to an updated art deco aesthetic. Bright, colorful images will leap from the page, showcasing your creations. This design is perfect for artists of all mediums with features including: homepage animated text, portfolio page with five project pages, and more...

Cartera means 'portfolio' in Catalan, the language of Northern Spain. It is sure to surprise and delight your visitors.

Something else from Spain that is bold and audacious is Tapas. I went out with a friend to try that one night. My bill was $87 and I was still hungry at the end. They kept bringing us out tiny plates of all manner of things. One of them was foam on a little cracker. They tried to tell me it was an olive/shrimp foam meant to conjure images of the Spanish Mediterranean, but I don’t know of one single organism on this planet that survives on foam or the esoteric concept of a location to which I have never travelled. I had to go across the street and get something else afterward so I didn’t go to bed conjuring images of being hungry inside my own house. Maybe I am an uncultured philistine, but I am going to be a FULL uncultured philistine. I guarantee this is far and away better than tapas.

You'll find Cartera available free in the Showit app. Try it out by adding a new design.

Showit is happy to announce we have added support for displaying WordPress custom post types within Posts View Lookup canvases for our Advanced Blog users.

If you know what custom post types are, you are likely excited for this news. If you do not know, they are a way to extend WordPress with custom content, turning your blog into a bespoke content management system (CMS).

Showit has always supported custom post types display through standard or custom archive and single post blog templates. But you'll find this new option available in a Posts View Lookup canvas which is typically used to feature a set of posts on another page such as a Wordpress homepage.

You will find custom post types underneath the existing post lookup structure in the design app. From here you can specify the custom post type slug to load, as well as refining the posts by category, tag, and taxonomy.

As an example, let's say you run the premier fan site for the movie Xanadu, a film about magic and roller skating and the magic of roller skating. There is lots of singing and dancing for some reason. I think Olympus has something to do with it. If you wanted to have information for each actor that appears in this cinematic masterpiece you could define a custom post type for that data. Then you could add posts for Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelley, and Michael Beck (who I only know from The Warriors, which would make for another great fan site). With those filled in, you can display the custom post type in their own canvas and dazzle your visitors with all kinds of information they never knew. Incredibly niche information about Xanadu and the people who starred in it.

If my first example doesn't quite connect, how about the idea of creating a separate set of Podcast episodes under their own post type of "Podcast"? Yes, you can do that and then you can use this new feature to display a few podcast posts on your homepage.

We here at Showit are excited to see what you create with custom post types, though I am concerned I am going to get flooded with pages about Xanadu, which is simply a peril of the job and one I willingly accept. I have to believe we are magic. Nothing can stand in our way.