Jumpchart's Big Update

04/22/09 Paste Interactive

The day has finally arrived. This morning we pushed a major update to Jumpchart, our collaborative content wireframing app. Jumpchart has a new face and a whole host of new tools in it’s utility belt! We’ve been working really hard over the last few months: Thinking, designing, building and living within the new Jumpchart and we’re really proud of the result.

If you’ve read through our Jumpchart preview posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) you’ll already know many of the changes that have come to the new Jumpchart, but not all of them. Let’s take a quick tour of some of the most exciting parts of the new Jumpchart.

Come in, take off your coat, stay a while
One of the first things you will notice is that Jumpchart’s user interface has been completely redesigned to be more subtle, we’ve moved menus and collected like tasks in common locations. We very much want the app to stay out of your way while you’re working and the new design is catered specifically to that end.

The new Jumpchart UI

We’ve also added a much requested feature to Jumpchart in this update, a two column layout that allows you to arrange your content into two different columns, to represent sidebar or menu content for example. We still firmly believe that wireframing (and Jumpchart) is really about content, not visual design, but the two column layout for organizing content has really won us over! It makes short work of complex sites with lots of information crammed into small spaces.

Editing with the new two column layout

Drumroll please…
The most exciting and useful feature that we’ve added to the new Jumpchart, and the one you haven’t heard about yet, is the new Export to WordPress feature. If you’re on the Super or the Deluxe plans you can now export your finished Jumpchart in WordPress export format (.wxr), ready to be imported straight into a fresh WordPress installation. And it’s not just WordPress, many of the most popular CMS’s on the market today (Drupal, Expression Engine, etc.) can import content in the WordPress format as well. By effectively moving all your pages and content straight to WordPress (all properly formatted and cleanly styled, of course), you’re generating tremendous momentum towards a completely built site when you plan with Jumpchart. Just apply your chosen design to the imported WordPress site and you’re project is ready for delivery.

Wordpress

wp-export-window

We’ll be publishing an in depth post covering all the details of the new WordPress export in the near future, so stay tuned! You can also read our detailed guide in the Jumpchart support section that covers the specifics of exporting your project to WordPress.

As we said before, we’re really proud of the new Jumpchart and, as always, we’d love to hear your comments about the redesign! We hope you enjoy the new Jumpchart as much as we do!