Google Sites Adds East Importing From Picasa, Docs and other Google Apps

Google Sites, the visual web site builder that's been fairly quiet since it launched publicly, just picked up a laundry list of features. Easy importing from Picasa, Docs and other Google apps, site RSS feeds, and templates have all landed.

For a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) web editor, having to manually insert HTML embed codes for a Picasa album slideshow, YouTube video, Google Doc, or other related apps seemed kind of perfunctory, and Google's obviously gotten hip to that. From the Insert menu on Sites' page editor, it's now pretty simple to drop any of those objects into a page or site element.

Google also allows Sites creators to offer up feeds for any page that regularly changes by adding posts.xml to the end of that URL. And if you're happy with what you've created on a Sites page, you can save a template to work off for other sites, or create sub-templates to maintain a consistent look across a site.

[via Google Operating System]