Today we are releasing Sparkle 4.1, a fundamental update that consolidates many smaller fixes and improvements. When considered as a whole, the improvements make Sparkle 4.1 a significant upgrade over Sparkle 4. We invite all Sparkle users to update, the update is free.

We’re very proud of the introduction of Layout Blocks in Sparkle 4, and excited for their huge potential. It was a non-trivial and non-obvious addition to our free form layout engine, adding just enough structure to improve editing dramatically. We found a bunch of minor issues and added many refinements. This isn’t quite apparent from the release notes, but the improvements make Layout Blocks a lot better in Sparkle 4.1.

We also make a nice improvement to forms, by adding validation of a few different input types, added support for the new Calendly API, and some improvements to the Ecwid category browser.

A common source of frustration, particularly for new Sparkle users, is how the multi-page visibility interacts with elements following the page footer. In addition to fixing a couple bugs in this area, we have added an alert that makes it clear when changing one of those settings could affect multiple pages. This is still an area where we think we can improve further, we strive to make this a non issue in the future.

As our documentation translation to German, French and Italian is now complete, the links to documentation are now updated and functional across the languages where we have the translation.

There’s a long list of fixes and performance improvements in our release notes page, but the reality is we omitted many many minor fixes for edge cases most users would never encounter. You just need to know Sparkle is as smooth as it is because we are committed to solving any problem that might come up, and where possible anticipating issues by designing Sparkle in a way that prevents you ever encountering them. You’ll never know everything that could have gone wrong!

And about commitment, we have two years of planned updates for the future of Sparkle, and that’s just scratching the surface of a huge list of assorted additions we collected over the past 8 years. Seriously we are just incredulous about the lack of ambition of our competitors, both the small ones and the very deep pocketed. How could that be?

At the risk of sounding presumptuous for a second, Sparkle is the only web design platform fueled by dreams!