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Hello,

Last year we made the difficult decision to move Vae into a permanent maintenance-only mode.  We continued to seek out third parties who would be willing to maintain Vae, but were unable to find such a partner.  As such, we will be officially shutting Vae down on 12/31/2020 at 11:59PM PST.

Please take the appropriate steps to move your sites to a new platform within the next 6 months.

To reduce the financial impact as much as we can, we will be ending all monthly charges for Vae effective immediately.  This means the final 6 months of service (if you choose to use them) will be free of charge.

We appreciate your loyalty and support over the 13 years, and if you have any questions, you can contact us at 1-800-286-8372 or [email protected].

Sincerely,

Justin & Kevin
The only members remaining, The Vae Platform Team

Hello,

It’s with a heavy heart that I am writing to tell you that we are officially moving the Vae product into a permanent maintenance-only mode. 

When we first released Vae in 2007, the e-commerce and CMS landscape was drastically different.  Vae’s one-stop-shop approach seemed promising, Wordpress was still a small startup, and Shopfiy’s shadow was not nearly as long.  However, we failed to appreciate the importance of the open-source nature of Wordpress and the community-driven app marketplace of Shopify.  As a result, those platforms have a much richer community of plugins and extensions with which we’ll never be able to compete.  Also, static site generators such as Jekyll and Github Pages have replaced many of the use cases we developed Vae for, and they do so with much greater community support.

As such, Vae has not grown at the pace necessary for us to sustain releasing new features and updates.  We do not make a profit on Vae today, even without factoring in the costs of ongoing development and customer support.

We know that you have invested considerably in the development of your Vae sites, which is why we resisted calls from investors and advisors to shutter Vae completely.  We feel that a better option for the company and our customers is to shift into a maintenance-only mode, the details of which are as follows:

• We will no longer be adding new features or keeping integrations with third parties up to date.
• We will make updates as-needed to keep the core of Vae’s services running, but are not guaranteeing that every aspect and feature will continue to work.
• We will no longer be providing any refunds because of Vae service availability.
• We currently have no timeline on shutting down Vae entirely, but we will not be doing so until at least 2021.  If we do decide to fully shut down Vae, we will notify you at least 180 days prior.

To minimize the burden this may cause you and other customers, we reached out to a number of third parties to see if they were interested in taking over Vae’s development.  While nobody showed interest, substantial portions of Vae are already open source, and we are happy to continue to review any pull requests you want to make.  

We appreciate your loyalty and support over the 12 years, and if you have any questions, you can contact us at 1-800-286-8372 or [email protected].

Sincerely,
Justin & Kevin
The only members remaining, The Vae Platform Team

Hey everyone -- I'm writing to let you know about some big changes.  As you can see, we changed our name to Vae Platform. 

On this blog, we've taken the liberty of "rewriting history" -- we've edited old posts to reflect the new name and URL.  This isn't for any reason other than making it easier for newbies to follow what's going on without having to learn new name and URLs.  I hope you can forgive me for doing it, we're very proud of our past and we weren't trying to erase it.

Furthermore, over the next several weeks, we are going to be rolling out some major changes to our platform that will hopefully be exciting to many of you.

Upcoming feature relaeases include:

    * Support for 'git' and deployment using 'git push'.
    * A totally revamped rich-text editor.
    * Integrated SEO tools.

But the biggest changes to come are internal.  While we are very proud of the 99.85% uptime record we posted during the last 12 months (despite multiple incidences of server hardware failure), we knew that we could do better.

To that end, we have been totally revamping our server architecture to eliminate as many single-points-of-failure as possible.  We're taking quite a radical approach.  Rather than maintaining multiple servers in just one location, we are going to be setting up dual copies of our entire infrastructure stack in multiple physical locations.  Each location will have independent power, cooling, Internet connections, and copies of your entire website.  Even if an entire building drops off the grid, your site will continue entirely uninterrupted.

We are currently rolling out this system gradually to customers.  We already have a few sites live on the dual-copy system and so far, so good.

We think that this new infrastructure is so awesome that once we get all our existing customers migrated to it, we are going to market it like crazy.  Almost no shared hosting companies do this, and we think that it has the potential to radically shift the baseline for reliability in the shared hosting market.

It's so cool that we think that people will start using our service even if they don't want the CMS or eCommerce but do want reliability on their website.  So, we are going to update our plans to include the option to purchase a hosting-only package that doesn't include the CMS.  And we're going to push it, hard.

There is nothing you need to do about the name change.  At some point, you may see yourself get redirected to vaeplatform.com when trying to log in, but that's it.  All URLs will continue to work.

Thanks for supporting us through the first 3 and a half years of our service.  We're looking forward to growing even bigger and finding new ways to serve you guys better and better.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

To you!

Kevin Bombino // Manager
Action Verb, LLC

As many of you have noticed, we launched a redesign of the Vae backstage on Sunday.  Thanks for all the compliments.  We're really excited to get this out the door.  We are continuing to fix a few bugs that remain, and hope to have it all cleared up by the end of the week.  Thanks to everyone who reported bugs.

We also want to mention another cool feature that recently rolled out -- three-level publishing status.  It used to be that you could toggle content between 2 states:  Published (green) and Not Published (red).  Well, we've added an in-between state:  Published (Staging only), represented by a yellow icon.

When content is in this state, it will be visible on http://<;you>.vaesite.com/, but not on your live domains.  It's a great way to test new content on your site without taking it fully live.

Hey everyone --

It is with great excitement that I can share some recent news.  We have just reworked the Vae hosting plans to be much more affordable and competitive against other hosting providers.

Check them out now at http://vaeplatform.com/pricing

Here's a summary of the changes we made:

• There is now an unlimited transaction option for eCommerce within each plan level.  So now, you don't have to worry if your customers will be successful -- we will not charge them extra for their success.  Our cheapest unlimited transaction plan starts at $59.95!
• The flexibility granted by this option also allowed us to reduce the number of plans we offer.  Rather than offering 6 plans, we now only offer 3 full-featured plans, plus the Solo plan.  Furthermore, now more than ever, we expect 95% of our customers to use the Medium plan (with or without the unlimited transaction option).
• We have raised the amount of included data transfer (bandwidth) from 10GB on the Medium plan to 100GB.  This is a full 10x increase!  This change alone will prevent most customers who currently pay overage charges from paying them in the future.  The Large and X-Large plans include 250GB and 1TB, respectively.

The new plans are available now.

We converted all existing customers plans to the equivalent new plan at the same price point.  For the overwhelming majority of our customers (98%), this will either result in an overall decrease in their spending or their spending will stay the same.  In the few cases of customers whose costs are higher under the new packages (mainly customers from early 2008), we will grandfather them in under their existing plans.

Thanks again for trusting Vae and I hope that these changes help you launch even more websites in the coming months.  Feel free to contact me with any questions.

A few days ago, we posted about VaeML's better if/elseif/else support.  I mentioned that this was available to all existing sites.  What I forgot to say is that mixing and matching the old-style (<v:else> tag inside the tag that it applies to) and new-style (<v:else> tag after the tag it applies to) on the same site can cause ambiguity when there are nested tags.  We've had some designers get confused because I mistakenly gave the impression that mixing the styles on the same site would work.  This is not the case.

Here's how we're going to handle this:  for new sites, the new style will be expected by default.  For existing sites, the old style will be expected by default.

For existing sites wishing to use the new style, you will need to explicitly disable the old style by going to the Site tab > Optimization tab and unchecking the checkbox for "Allow <v:else> inside the tag they apply to".  For new sites wishing to use the old style, go in and check that checkbox.

We have become aware that PayPal has made changes that *may* impact the integration between Vae CMS and PayPal.  This applies to people using PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal's no-monthly-fee product.

Specifically, our PayPal standard integration relies on a PayPal feature called Instant Payment Notification ("IPN").  IPN used to be enabled by default on all PayPal accounts, so our integration worked out-of-the-box. 

It seems that PayPal no longer enables IPN by default, and in some cases has retroactively disabled it on some accounts.  We're not sure why.  It is supremely annoying that PayPal made these changes without making any official announcement (at least that we can find), and it is easy to find reports on the Internet of other people who have been bitten by this.

If you are using PayPal Website Payments Standard, you should log into your PayPal account and verify that IPN is enabled.

Here are instructions on how to do so:

1. Log in at http://www.paypal.com/
2. From the navigation bar at the top, choose "Profile", under the "My Account" tab.
3. Click the link that says "Instant Payment Notification Preferences".
4. If you are in the USA, you should be on this URL:
   https://www.paypal.com/US/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_profile-ipn-notify
5. If you see a button that says "Choose IPN Settings", you need to enable IPN.  Click that button.  Select the option for "Receive IPN messages (Enabled)".  For the URL, enter the following:
   
   http://<yoursite>.vaesite.com/?__v:store_payment_method_ipn=paypal
   
   Replace <yoursite> with the same subdomain that you use to login to the Vae backstage.  So if your site's backstage is "http://btg.vaeplatform.com", use "btg".  Note that this URL uses "vaesite.com", not "vaeplatform.com".  Then click the "Save" button.
   
   You should then see that IPN message delivery is Enabled.
6. If you see that IPN is already enabled, you do not need to take any action.

Additionally, you should check your PayPal account to make sure that there are no transactions in there that did not get synced to your Vae CMS backstage.

We are very sorry that this action is required, however, when supporting 3rd party payment gateways, we will always be at the mercy of any decisions or changes they make.

Please feel free to contact your account manager or support if you have any questions.

VaeML, our awesome content presentation language, now has better support for if-statements.  Before, we did not support the idea of an elseif statement, and we had a weird notion that a <v:else> tag should be nested inside a <v:if> tag rather than coming after it.

We have fixed both of these issues.  Observe:

<v:if path="price>500">
Comes with free overnight shipping!
</v:if>
<v:elseif path="price>250">
Comes with free 2-day shipping!
</v:elseif>
<v:else>
Comes with free ground shipping!
</v:else>

It's the new hotness.  Note that you can still nest <v:else> inside <v:if> if you'd prefer it that way.

By the way, if you use Haml, it makes the above look a lot more elegant:

%v:if(path="price>500")
  Comes with free overnight shipping!
%v:elseif(path="price>250")
  Comes with free 2-day shipping!
%v:else
  Comes with free ground shipping!

Enjoy!