Thursday, October 08, 2009 2:13 PM
Many people use Google Sites as a way to keep friends and family updated on what's going on in their lives. Great photos add color and personality, which is why we've made it easier to insert your Picasa Web Albums photos into a site. The 'Insert' menu now includes an option to insert a photo.You can also upload a photo directly to Picasa Web Albums from within Google Sites using the 'Upload Photo' tab in the insert dialog.
Note that Picasa Web Albums is not available in Google Apps, so this option will not appear for Google Apps users.
We've also made it easier for your friends and family to follow updates on your site. You can now access any announcement page as a feed by adding posts.xml to the end of that announcement page URL. For example, this is the feed URL for our sample ski club site:
- http://sites.google.com/a/googleuniversity.org/ski-club/Home/Ski-Club-Announcements/posts.xml
Feeds are also available for site comments (add "comments.xml") and site activity (add "activity.xml"). Announcement and comment feeds follow the permission of the site and require authentication for private sites. This means online feed readers which don't support authenticated feeds won't be able to subscribe to private site feeds or site activity.
Lastly, we also added the ability to create custom page templates for a site. Creating a page template lets you define default content as well as settings, like layout, that other collaborators can use when they create a new page. For example, if you are working on an intranet site, you can create a department page template and use that template for each department page. This saves time and adds consistency to your site.
41 comments:
That's great! I've been waiting for RSS feeds on sites for a long time.
My employees will be really happy about the templates.
Any change picasa web albums will be available for Apps users. Photos are important for businesses too, you know?
Is it possible for Google Sites to eventually replace Blogger? Google Sites offers almost everything Blogger does, plus pages. What Sites doesn't offer yet is labels, labels for Announcements and scheduling of posts. I'm sure there are other things missing, but they could be developed quickly enough.
RSS!!! Yes! I've been waiting too.
great work! great news. i have been waiting for rss a long time.
and, when will all this be available?
i just looked at my google-apps-driven site and there is nothing to be seen from rss or the templates
picasa would be great too! make it app! its app-worthy!
Fantástico. Lo de las plantillas era algo que echaba en falta para el sitio de la familia. Gracias.
Fantastic. The template was something I missed it for the family site. Thank you.(Google traductor)
Is adding Picasa to Google Apps considered? Is there any place users can vote for this (like in Google Code issues)? It seems very natural to have picture management at the organization level.
I'm lovin' the new Picasa feature.
This is a good function,but
my feeds are garbled, and the site use "https".
feed:
http://cadr.young.twgogo.org/hand-down/98nian/posts.xml
web page:
http://cadr.young.twgogo.org/hand-down/98nian
The character encoding of the feed output seems to be broken.
Instead UTF-8 charachter "é" (0x09c3) it outputs 0xefbf83efbea9.
+1 for picasa in google apps.
Please fix encoding for foreign characters...
See a bad encoding example:
http://sites.google.com/a/1-till-1.se/stockholm-1-till-1/blogg/posts.xml
RSS? Fantastic! I'll update the popular Yahoo Pipes that scraped sites for announcements and changes.
BUG: Currently, trying to access the activity feed (perhaps other feeds too) for a site on a Google Apps Domain that has been set to require https will fail if "http" is rather than "https". Instead, it should redirect to the "https" and provid the feed.
For example this site will provide a feed with https but not http.
Feeds are awesome!!! Now there's only two things missing:
1) update the docs, it's not that obvious to figure out the comment or activity feeds; and
2) make the feeds burnable! Including the Announcement fees which are automatically added to the Announcement page and are un-editable.
Like someone else said, Sites could almost replace Blogger (but I'm thinking more Wordpress.com) but you need to add labels to pages & announcements (and a way to manage & access them and feed off of them).
Also, like Blogger (and Wordpress) it would be nice to able to show just an excerpt of the Announcement on the main page and let users click through to the full article.
Google Reader doesn't support authenticated RSS. It seems this is a purposeful design decision (Google doesn't want to become responsible for storing external passwords).
Is there any way for google to use internal authentication (Google Reader has verified me as Mike and Google Sites opens up for Mike)?
I have GoogleApps Premiere. Can I use Google Sites to create password-protected webpages? I have customers with whom I communicate regularly with info that is constantly updated. So far, I have used email for this purpose but it's getting to be too labor intensive. With a webpage, I just post the info include links to download some CAD files up to 50MB.
Back again… for anyone who needs an RSS feed of a site's changes without authentication, try this Yahoo Pipe.
Hmmm ... I wonder if the templates feature is being rolled out slowly. I don't see any new templates, and neither do I see any ways to create my own.
Am I missing something here?
Good job guys, but how about no english encodings (cyrillic for example) in RSS?
@Thomas @Michael
You need to create the templates by yourself and then you could use them.
Look here for more details http://www.google.com/support/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156481
Another vote for Picasa in google apps - we use Apps for a kids sports league (ndfooty.org) and I've been manually using Picasa with Google Apps - integration would be much easier!
I can view the XML file that is generated by this feature on my public site, but Google Reader won't recognise it. When I run the address through Feed Validator, it tells me "Server returned timed out". What can I do to fix this?
google is the best and bigges the company.
One of programe google is RSS feed.
the is great, soo brilliant, so excellent, for ever
bravo and victory
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Well done on getting RSS into Sites but it needs more work to be manageable. I mean things like the feed titles (which are bizarre), easy ways to add subscribe links to sidebars and that sort of thing.
Still it's great to see Sites really coming along. I've been a big fan of it for a long time and want to see it continue to get better. Well done!
Awsome article....Thanks
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That is definitely a very good idea. Picture albums are sure on of the best ways that you can add to your site. And with this, it has actually become much easier in putting photo albums online.
It's really great, but unfortunately there is a problem with german Umlaute: ä, ö, ü, ß
another vote for picasa for google apps! have a personal site, got great integration with my mail, contacts, calendar, mobile sync.. would love to have pics sync up as well!
hi! i like the designs. check out the source of the template.
Thank you!
More templates easy to download
We want picasa in google app too!
I've been adding slideshows using Google web albums. It's easy and I love doing them. Great blog. All the best.
"Note that Picasa Web Albums is not available in Google Apps, so this option will not appear for Google Apps users."
So when will this be fixed? This is one of the most requested features for our Google Apps based sites!
Google Sites feed is still hard to implement :(
Feed encoding is finally fixed as I see.
@Hangya: Thanks for Information! And thanks to the Google Team for this great feature!
Good job,
But it doesn't work with google apps account and private sites.
We really need better Google Sites and Google Apps for Domain integration!
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