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We are very excited to tell you about ‘Viewbook V3′ which is currently being developed. The last two months we have been creating a whole new vision on what Viewbook should be in the near future. Here is a rundown of what we came up with.

Ronny and Paul presenting design ideas.– Music by: Tyler wat doe je?

With Viewbook V3 we bring you a completely new ‘next generation’ website builder. A flexible design tool that gives you more control on the creation and customization of your portfolio website. With the idea of you being able to create your portfolio perfectly, we’re working on the following ideas and features:

Modules & Galleries
We introduce a new concept called ‘modules’. A module allows you to easily drag & drop bits of functionality onto the stage. Portfolio websites need outstanding galleries and representations of your work. What we are creating are fully configurable collections, albums and contact sheets. Including horizontal and vertical scrolling galleries. Our focus is to offer you the choice how you want your images to display, including flexible cropping, sizing, alignment, spacing, and many more options. We’re putting a lot of effort in this to make Viewbook outstanding when it comes down to image display.

Many other features as modules
Simply drag & drop twitter feeds, social buttons, text-fields, images & video anywhere on your page. No need to add custom code or markup to text-fields anymore.

Adjustable page formats & layouts
You can start with predefined page formats. That works for most people. But if you think your site requires more options or a different composition, you can change many properties of the page; it’s layout, modules, order and alignment of elements. You can add new modules to your page, and create pages that combine galleries, video and text for example. This allows creating many design options and variations, while keeping the user interface simple to understand.

Redefined page editor
Center-stage in the the website builder is the page editor. This is what you will be looking at the most of the time, while creating your site. It consist out of editor panels (for page properties, modules and selection settings) and the stage ( your webpage canvas ).

Custom CSS
If you want all influence on how things look, we’ll add and option for custom CSS so webdesigners can change the appearance of any element on the page.

New user interface
With a lot more features and customization options, the interface still needs to maintain its clarity. Therefore we are redesigning the user interface, to let you work more intuitively and make better use of space. Bottom line is, we want it to be easy enough for people without webdesign knowledge and powerful enough for webdesigners. That’s a real challenge.

Other improvements
There’s too much to mention here but we’re also implementing a lot of other smaller features like; favicons, better video display, more menu styling options and scalable backgrounds.

That’s a quick overview of things to come. I understand it’s still very abstract. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get the terminology just jet. Honestly, we have daily discussions on what things are called, and just started writing the Viewbook Terminology Manual.

So when will it be ready?
We have an idea but as with all larger software projects, it is very, very hard to estimate time needed for completion. So I’m not going to give a date, let’s say we’re working hard to get it released later this year. We keep you posted during the process as much as possible, and let you know when things become more clear.

Your existing sites will keep working in V3!
You don’t need to worry about redesigning your complete site from scratch in V3. So there’s no need to wait for V3 to come out. We’re also not planning to change prices or other terms.

If you have any feature requests please add them to our feature requests page. This way other people can comment and vote.

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