It has been a long time coming, but the latest release of Doodlekit is almost ready for production.  For me, this is definitely the most exciting release of our free website builder yet.  The main focus has been on completely new template framework that allows our customers to finely tune every detail of their website design.  In addition, there are a ton of new features as well as an upgraded infrastructure.

One of the first priorites was to get onto the latest Rails release.  The latest version has been upgraded to use the following frameworks.

• Rails 3.2
• jQuery
• CoffeeScript
• LESS

The switch from Prototype to jQuery was a tough one for me.  I still think that Prototype had the upper-hand in a lot of areas, but it's clearly dieing a slow death.  Thankfully CoffeeScript picks up a lot of that slack.

In addition, we'll be upgrading our infrascructure to use RailsMachines' Moonshine stack.  

As far as new features, here's a quick list.

• 100's of new Templates
• Complete customization including new CSS like rounded corners and drop shadows
• 100's of @font-face fonts
• Header tool with image overlays and slideshow
• Background library with color replacement
• Icon library
• Template design wizard
• Automatic blog post preview creation
• Admin UI updates

I'll be posting more about the specifics of these new features.  We came up with some really creative solutions to some old problems.