The past couple weeks I have been getting ready to make the transition from Squarespace version 5 to version 6. The setup is pretty simple and routine; Squarespace even offers videos to walk you through the upgrade process step by step.

Considering there will be a lot of excited legacy users like myself, I expected Squarespace to offer a near flawless experience for formatting previous content for version 6. Of course, with such a major overhaul there are bound to be issues when moving data. However, the amount of issues I have had making this transition compelled me to make a list of grievances:

  • Templates. There are major difficulties reformatting pages from version 5 to fit the version 6 templates. In version 5, images are linked within the blog posts text, and not in the “block” format in version 6 uses. This means I can’t target the images properly to align them. Thus, all blog post images uploaded in version 5 are left-aligned in the current template, while images uploaded in version 6 are center-aligned. Not good. Especially when you’re trying to present a uniform experience for your visitors. I will be manually updating the last couple months of blog images to fix this.

  • Float styling. If I remove float styling from an image, the blog post title resides under the image. If the image has a left or right float, the blog post title sits above the image. What gives? Arbitrary, glaring quirks like this should not show up in public release.

  • Post excerpts. I added a post excerpt to an existing blog entry, the excerpt overwrote the entry itself. Very frustrating. Not to mention, version 6 does not support images in excerpts. (Apparently this will be corrected at a later date)

  • Markdown editing. Editing mode for markdown seems to be buggy as well. I wrote this initial post in a desktop editor, and pasted into the blog post text box. Easy enough. Making changes on the fly within the Squarespace editor have been frustrating though. I am unable to select certain text. Arbitrary edits occur on other lines within the body of text when the cursor is clearly placed somewhere else.

Here’s to hoping Squarespace gets these issues resolved, and the Developer account will give me the control I need. While there are a few really great features in version 6, like responsive design out of the box, I’m somewhat underwhelmed with the lack of control this version currently offers and annoyed with how buggy the transition is from version 5.