On Monday, we rolled out a host of new updates to LightCMS. Most of these updates are behind-the-scenes improvements, but there are a few visible changes we think you’ll enjoy as well.

Improved blog comment email notifications

You’ve always been able to set your blog elements to notify you whenever a comment is left on any post on your blog. You do this by providing an email address in the “Email notifications” field (see below). However, we’ve now made some frequently requested improvements to the email that is sent to you when someone leaves a comment.

The email now contains the name and email address provided by the person leaving the comment, the text of the comment itself, and a link to the blog post on which with the comment was left. Additionally, the email address provided by the person leaving the comment is now used as the “from” address on the email, making it easier for you to reply to the person who left the comment by email.

These improvements are designed to help you better manage comments and interact with those who are leaving comments on your blog.

Speed enhancements and more

This release also included many new optimizations aimed at further improving system performance across the board. In addition, we made some changes to the design services interface, making it easier for you to access and order HTML Xpress services.

Enjoy

Enjoy the new features and stay tuned for more.

A web-based application is only as good as the company behind it, and the company behind LightCMS has always been one of our strongest selling points. This year, that selling point gets even stronger as Element Fusion, our parent company, celebrates its ten year anniversary.

As you know, ten years in the web business is a long time. Over its ten years, Element Fusion has taken a different approach than most web companies. For one thing, we’re completely debt-free and we have no outside funding. At the same time, we have received consistent honors and recognitions for growth throughout our history. A strong, fast-growing, debt-free company can only mean one thing — this is a company focused on the long term — a company that’s built to last.

So, please join us in celebrating this milestone. We’ve set up an Anniversary Website where you can review a little about our history and see some of the special things we’ve got going on this year. We’re hosting an Anniversary Open House at our offices if you happen to be in town and would like to stop by. We’re also ramping up our Website Giveaway Program and giving away four website packages valued at over $5,000 each to four non-profits over the course of 2010.

We’ll be talking more about all of these activities here and on our company blog in the months to come, but for now, we just want to say thank you. Thanks to all of you for supporting us over the years. We are very thankful for all that has happened throughout our history and we look forward to the next ten years and beyond.

To start off the new year, we've added quite a few new websites to the LightCMS gallery. See what other designers are doing on LightCMS and submit your work to be showcased.

We announced our Shine the Light! program last year when we launched the LightCMS Rewards program and the LightCMS network, but this video gives a little more information on the program. If you qualify for LightCMS Rewards, I hope you'll consider joining us in donating websites to deserving non-profit organizations through Shine the Light!

Get to know and connect with one of LightCMS's preferred partners. Collision Media is a Oklahoma City based creative design studio that uses LightCMS to provide simple and powerful web content management for its clients.

About Collision Media

Location: Oklahoma City, OK
Website: http://www.collisionmedia.tv
Primary contact: Kenny Foster email

Collision Media is a creative design studio that provides web design, graphic design, printing, photography, video editing, and other media-related services for your church or small business. Adding a jolt of creativity to you or your organization is our passion at Collision Media. For over 8 years, we have been serving churches and small businesses with beautiful websites that are user friendly, easy to manage, and built to grow with each organization.

LightCMS Examples

Q & A with Collision Media

What did you use before LightCMS and why did you switch?

Before LightCMS we primarily used a mix of WordPress and Joomla to serve as content management systems for our clients. We switched to LightCMS because of the ease of use for our clients, and the simplicity of integration for our designers. The platform exceeded our criteria for functionality and usability.

How does LightCMS help you better meet your clients' needs?

The simplicity of LightCMS allows our clients to update their own website with a very small learning curve. Our clients no longer feel overwhelmed at the thought of being their own webmaster and keeping their website updated. In fact, when showing LightCMS to our customers it often changes their perception of how a website works and operates in the world of Web 2.0.

LightCMS also allows for a very quick turn-around. With simple solutions, the coding/integration time is next-to-nothing and allows us to produce quality work in a fraction of the time. This is very helpful for the client who wants everything done in a timely fashion.

What would you say to another designer or agency that was considering using LightCMS?

Give it a try. Once you fully understand the simplicity and flexibility you are going to love it as a designer, and your users are going to fall in love with the ease of use.

Any tips or tricks to give other LightCMS users?

The feature set of LightCMS is the same for every client, however, if you think outside the box you can use each element to specifically benefit your individual clients. For instance, some of our clients use the form builder as a sign-up form for various events while others use it as a shopping cart. Some of our clients use the blog element as a blog while some use it as a podcast manager. Dive deep into the possibilities each element brings to the table and you will continually surprise your clients.

Anything else?

We made the strategic decision to use LightCMS for all of our web products because it continually exceeded our expectations in performance and functionality. The added benefit of great email support from Element Fusion makes this is a no-brainer decision for us.

Collision Media is a preferred partner through LightCMS rewards. To learn more about becoming a partner see the rewards page.

As 2009 draws to a close, I thought it would be fitting to reflect a little bit on what has been an amazing year for our beloved LightCMS. You may not fully realize it, but as a customer of LightCMS, you are building your web design business on solid ground. Our company has always operated and continues to operate debt-free with no outside funding. At the same time, we've seen phenomenal growth in 2009, bringing tens of thousands of users onto our CMS system.

Phenomenal growth

For example, the total number of paid websites running on LightCMS (not including free sites) grew by 236% in 2009. At the same time, the number of LightCMS resellers who have at least one paid website on our system grew by 180%. This shows us that not only have we seen a fantastic increase in the number of new resellers taking advantage of all that LightCMS has to offer, but those resellers are being fruitful, adding multiple paid websites to the system so that total websites is growing faster than total resellers. This is exactly the balance we want to see as it demonstrates that our resellers are putting their confidence in our system and adding more and more client websites to LightCMS.

Our rapid growth has also expanded the influence of LightCMS across all of the US and around the world. Recognition of our product has increased dramatically as we've had the opportunity to participate with several world-renowned conferences including SXSW in Austin, The Future of Web Design in London, and AdobeMAX in Los Angeles. At these events, we've enjoyed meeting with so many web designers and creative agencies from around the world and talking with them about LightCMS.

Expanding development

Supporting this growth has been an intensive commitment to development over the course of this year. Our development team ends the year with more coders on board than ever before. We've seen the results of this commitment throughout the year. We've added huge support for your web design businesses through reseller tools like the automated client billing system, the completely reworked account administration interface, and even more recently our deployable website sign-up element. All of these additions are steps along a path of solidifying LightCMS's position as an unmatched tool for supporting your web design business.

We've even added perks and incentives for you through our LightCMS rewards program and the LightCMS network. We've expanded our own philanthropic efforts and encouraged the efforts of others by partnering with our designer network through the Shine the Light program. To improve our communications, we've deployed a new LightCMS website, launched the all-new LightCMS blog and Twitter feed, and even created a status page to keep you informed of any system issues.

Whenever there is rapid growth, there are also obstacles to be overcome. We crossed over a huge obstacle this year as we deployed massive improvements to our hosting infrastructure. The significance of the improvements we have made in this area cannot be overstated. Our systems not only offer speed and stability at our current traffic levels, but are positioned to accommodate exponential multiples of our current system demands. Plus, we are equipped to easily and rapidly deploy any new hardware required as our system continues to grow.

Of course, we've added lots more stuff this year as well. Through the Fall Kickoff, we blazed through a list of often requested new features.

Our parent company, Element Fusion, has also been recognized for many awards and achievements. We've also reached a big milestone as we'll be celebrating our ten year anniversary in 2010. For more about Element Fusion, you can see our 2009 wrap up post on the Element Fusion blog.

Looking ahead

Looking back at all that has happened is fun and insightful, but we prefer to spend most of our time looking forward. 2010 is a new year and a new decade. We have big plans for the coming years and we have no doubt that LightCMS will continue to expand and grow its influence for years and years to come. We're thankful for all of you who make it possible for LightCMS to succeed. Here's to our continued partnership, new partnerships to come, and to a new year. May it be successful for you and for your business.

Did you know that the winter solstice, the official start of winter in the northern hemisphere, is actually today, December 21st? When we figured that out, it just made sense to launch our Fall Kickoff finale today. I mean, I know it’s felt like winter for most of us for a while, but according to the scientists, today is the beginning of winter and therefore end of our Fall Kickoff promotion. And, as usual, we’re going out in style with some fantastic new reseller tools.

Introducing the new Signup element

Our overriding goal of helping your web design business succeed has driven us to release some amazing reseller features today. First is the all-new Signup element. This element is only usable by you as a LightCMS account holder. Your clients won’t see it as an option, but you can find it now in the list of available elements and you can add it to any region of any LightCMS website. When you do, we’ll insert full website signup functionality into your site, allowing your customers to sign up for their own websites under your LightCMS account, right from your own website. Here’s a look at the content generated by the Signup element, on our feature demonstrations site, which is using the Northern Light template.

The Signup process is completely private-label. You even have the ability to add your own custom content to our terms of service and customize the welcome emails and confirmation messages that are sent out to those who sign up (find these features on the “advanced” tab of the element’s settings). You can also upload your own design to be used on the website that is created, allowing you to create a truly branded experience for your potential customers as they sign up for websites on your CMS system.

You can choose to be notified by email when new websites are created (and receive the customer’s name, email and phone number in the email) and you can view all of the created websites under the website listing on your “My Account” tab. View the detail page for any website and you’ll even find the customer’s contact information conveniently listed for you. Put it all together and you can see that the new Signup element is designed to help you grow your business by offering potential customers a free demo website while helping you collect and follow up on new leads.

We’re very pleased to bring this functionality to you. It has been requested often by so many of our LightCMS resellers that we know it will be well-used and will open up new opportunities for web designers everywhere.

New, private-label design viewer

The second reseller resource we’re announcing today is a private-label design viewer. This web-based viewer allows you to easily view all of the free designs available through LightCMS and, if you so choose, to share them with your clients as well in a white-label interface. Just point your browser to:

http://designs.publishpath.com

We will continue to keep this resource current as new designs are added or changed.

New default template and LightCMS welcome content

We’ve also changed out the system default template. The default template doesn’t affect you too much, but it is used by default whenever you add a new website to your account (of course, you can change the design used at any time once the website is created). You may also see it if you try to apply a custom design that contains some type of irreconcilable error. The system will load the site in the default template to allow you to continue to edit the site while you correct the design issue. The new system default template is Northern Light.

Additionally, we’ve updated the LightCMS welcome content. If you’ve already set up your LightCMS account, this won’t really affect you, but for those of you who set up new LightCMS accounts from this point forward, we’ve created a much improved welcome site to help get you the information you need quickly and easily. All new LightCMS accounts will have this content loaded onto their first LightCMS website automatically. If you already have your account set up and would like to see what the new welcome content looks like, you can check it out here. Remember, this feature is only for the benefit of the LightCMS account holder and in no way affects your client websites.

Farewell, Fall Kickoff. Hello, new year.

This wraps up our fall features promotion. It’s been a great ride, bringing us the LightCMS network, LightCMS rewards, the LightCMS blog, and the Shine the Light program. We also added FTP secure, email file link notifications in form emails, linked images and navigation for photo gallery slideshows, time zone offsets, version tracking and archiving of design files, non-latin character support, captions in photo galleries, multi-currency donations, and the blogging API (which I am using right now to create this post). Oh, not to mention a ton of behind-the-scenes enhancements and improvements for speed, reliability and to set us up for future development. Plus, the Signup element, design viewer, and default template in today’s release. Put it all together and I’d call it a big score, or a huge win, or some other type of football allusion but I’m ready to put all of that to rest.

Remember, the end of Fall Kickoff doesn’t mean the end of new features. Not in the least. We’re already gearing up for the new year and we’ve got some great plans in store so stay tuned. And, as always, thank you for using LightCMS. We look forward to working with you for years and years to come.

LightCMS automatically provides default styles for content elements through its built-in CSS file.  However, there are times you might want to take the styling of the elements a step further and put some extra, custom polish on your sites.  Although you have always been able to view the CSS with developer plugins such as Firebug, we thought it would be helpful to create a reference guide that shows our default element styling. So, we did, and you can view it on our account support site at http://accountsupport.publishpath.com/styling-elements. 

The reference guide breaks things down by element and shows you all of the default CSS statements included for that element. This allows you to spot the statements you might want to override with your own CSS. The following is an example entry from the reference guide on the Blog element’s “list view.” The top image shows a blog list view entry and the statements below show the CSS that is applied to it. This is just a sample. You can see all of the entries in the reference guide.

In the spirit of the holidays, we’ve got a little gift for you. That’s right, it’s a new, free design, in two variations available for you to use on LightCMS. You can use it as is or download the source and modify it to your heart's content. Plus, it’s got a cute little box-like character on it. Check it out below.

Box’d

Box’d – Cardboard

Since LightCMS is a hosted solution for web designers and their clients, one of the first questions many people ask is if they can use their own domain name instead of the system's default domain. Of course! We allow you to use custom domains on free sites as well as paid levels of LightCMS.

Check out this video that explains how to set up your own custom domains to work with websites running on LightCMS, the friendly CMS for designers and their clients.

A written tutorial to accompany this video can be found on our designer support site.