"Everything seems to be working perfectly. I've never had a support team go code level and actually fix my problem for me like you did, not to mention having my ticket reviewed and fixed in less than 2 hrs, especially on something so obscure! You definitely just got some points in my book."

Nick Pelton
ThinkCreative Advertising

We’re gearing up for SXSW Interactive 2010. The trade show opens Saturday and we’ll be there at the LightCMS booth. We hope you’ll come by and see us. While you're there, you can also enter for a chance to win one of three iPods we’re giving away during the event. Here’s how:

1. Take a picture of Chad
   Chad (pictured above) is the director of the LightCMS Web Concierge Team. You’ll find him at the LightCMS booth at SXSW Interactive.
2. Tweet Chad’s picture
   Post your tweet on one of the Interactive trade show days (March 13th, 14th and 15th).
3. Include @LightCMS and #SXSW in your tweet
4. Follow @LightCMS so we can DM you if you win

That’s it! Your tweet will register you for that day’s giveaway. We’ll pick one winner each day. If you win, we’ll DM you so you can come by the booth to pick up your iPod Touch.

A few details:

• Creativity of your words and photography will be considered!
• Each tweet enters you in that day’s giveaway. To enter on a different day, post a new tweet on that day.
• On Monday, March 15th, all tweets must be posted by 3pm to be eligible. On March 13th and 14th, tweets will be eligible if posted by midnight.
• Any prizes unable to be delivered in person will be shipped to the winners.
• Good luck capturing those beautiful images of Chad!

As you know, we've got some great new features headed your way tomorrow morning. I've got some more details to share on what is coming. To catch up on everything we've posted before, check out this post and this post.

WYSIWYG Improvements

The most significant items in this release are the WYSIWYG editor improvements. These include a streamlined toolbar, a new "page link" functionality, and a bunch of other enhancements. To give you more details and a visual preview of these great new features, we put together the video below.

Custom domain through the Signup element

In addition to the editor improvements, we've got another bonus for you as the LightCMS account holder. We're adding a new feature to our Signup element to allow you to specify a custom domain to be used for client websites created through your Signup element. So, in addition to clientsite.publishpath.com, you can use clientsite.yourdomain.com as well.

Launching tomorrow morning

Our rollout of these new improvements is scheduled for Wednesday morning, March 3rd, 2010. We don't anticipate any downtime with this deployment.

Enjoy the new features!

Last week, we announced that WYSIWYG improvements are on the way and offered you some details about what is coming so that you could get prepared. Today, we’ve got a few more specifics to share with you.

Internal page linking now included

Since our last post, we’ve actually been able to squeeze one additional feature into the “simple” toolbar (row 1). This is a page linking tool. This has been a very often requested feature to allow a user to more easily link to one of the internal pages on their own website.

The web link tool will continue to work as normal for external links to other sites, but we are adding a separate page link tool to handle internal page links (see image below). It will be presented as a drop down displaying all of the pages on your site in a tree-like hierarchy. The user can simply highlight the text they want to make into a link, then select the appropriate page from the drop down to immediately create an internal page link.

Quick peek at the new editor’s simple toolbar

Here’s a quick look at the new editor’s simple toolbar. Please note that there could be minor changes to this before launch but this is close enough to give you the gist. Note the “page links” dropdown described above. Also note the “show more” button on the right that will expand out the second row of tools (for more details on what's included on the second row of tools, see our original post from last week). 

Ah, the refreshing simplicity ...

A host of improvements to the WYSIWYG

Not only are we making the toolbar improvements we discuss in our previous post, but we are also upgrading the WYSIWYG editor itself. The result is improved markup and handling in various scenarios, especially when using Safari and Chrome. Though these changes don’t represent all of the improvements we have planned, you should see noticeable improvements with this upgrade.

Launch scheduled for March 3, 2010

We now have a specific date for the scheduled upgrades. They are scheduled for next Wednesday morning, March 3rd. Though there could be unforeseen complications to delay this launch, things are looking good at this point for that timeframe. We don’t anticipate any downtime with this upgrade.

Even more possibilities

There are also some other exciting improvements in the works that could be included in Wednesday’s release, though I can’t give details just yet. Be sure to stay tuned in the early part of next week as we continue to solidify the details of this launch.

We’ve offered our HTML Xpress service at its current price of $495 since 2007. Today, we are initiating a price increase on HTML Xpress to $695.

We know that you may have proposals out to your clients that reflect the price of $495, and we want to give you as much lead time as possible. So, we’re keeping HTML Xpress “on sale” at $495 through April 15th, 2010 so that you’ll have time to make the transition with your own business. April 16th, 2010 will be the effective date for the change to $695.

Please note that this change only affects our HTML Xpress service. No other fees associated with LightCMS are changing. We believe our history of stable pricing demonstrates how seriously we take all pricing changes. And, we believe that even at its new price of $695, our HTML Xpress service represents a great value given the level of service we provide and when compared to other comparable HTML/CSS cutup and integration services on the market.

Thank you for your business and for your continued support of LightCMS. We look forward to serving as your partner for many years to come.

Today we want to give you a little peek at some improvements that are coming soon to the LightCMS system. Since these changes involve the WYSIWYG editor, which affects nearly every user on the system, we wanted to give you lots of advanced notice so you have time to prepare your own clients for what is in store.

The WYSIWYG editor is the interface you see when you edit a text element, blog post, calendar event, or any other rich text area on a LightCMS website. We are constantly working on ways to improve this interface. We have received tons of feedback from many of you and that feedback has informed our own discussions as well.

We currently have a plan in place to make significant improvements to how the WYSIWYG interface works. We are really excited about these changes as we know they are going to greatly improve the functionality of the system while exponentially increasing its ease-of-use for you and your clients. These changes are going to be rolled out in phases to help smooth the transition. Today, I’d like to share with you what we have in store for phase one.

Simplifying the toolbars

In this first phase, we intend to simplify and improve the editor’s toolbar, making it less cluttered and easier to understand. We will accomplish this in two ways.

First, we will be collapsing the toolbar into a single row and adding a “show more” button to allow the user to expand out additional tools as needed. Along with this, we will rearrange some of the toolbar buttons so that the top row of the toolbar houses the simpler tools, while additional rows house the more advanced functions. Therefore, when the user loads up the editor, they will be presented with a much more streamlined and simplified view with a single row of toolbar buttons. By clicking the “show more” button, they can access the more advanced tools as needed.

In a future phase, we plan to add the ability for you as the LightCMS account holder to control whether or not your clients and users can access the “show more” button. If you turn off the advanced tools for a particular website, users of that website will only have access to the simple tools when editing content. This will enable you to more tightly control what clients can do to the content on a website. However, in our first phase, everyone will have access to both the simple and advanced tools.

The second initiative we’ll be taking in phase one is removing or changing a few of the toolbar buttons. These changes are outlined in detail below and are intended to reduce clutter, prepare for future phases and, in some cases, to bring the functionality more up to date with common practices. We know that removing options may impact you and your clients and so we don’t take these changes lightly. But, after much discussion and consideration, we are confident that the changes outlined below are an important step in our plan for improvement.

The new toolbars

We don’t have actual screenshots of the new toolbar layout just yet, so here’s a look at the current toolbar. Please use the numbers next to each button for reference as I describe the changes we’ll be making below.

Simple tools (row 1) on the new toolbar will include:

• Bold (1)
• Italic (2)
• Align left (4)
• Align center (5)
• Align right (6)
• Numbered list (11)
• Bulleted list (12)
• Image manager (13)
• Docs manager (14)
• Insert video (new, see below)
• Add link (17)
• Remove link (18)

Advanced tools on the new toolbar will include:

• Heading chooser (22)
• Apply CSS (23)
• Font size (24)
• Font color (25)
• Indent (9)
• Outdent (10)
• Undo (31)
• Redo (32)
• Horizontal Rule (35)
• Find and Replace (33)
• Spell Checker (26)
• Table manager (19)
• Symbols (20)
• Flash manager (16)
• Module manager (36)
• Full screen (21)

New tools

As you can see above, there is one new toolbar button we’ll be adding. We call it the “insert video” tool. This tool will simply pop up a text area into which the user can paste the embed code for a hosted video player from sites such as YouTube and Blip.tv.

Another new feature of the editor isn’t actually a toolbar button, but a built-in behavior. The new editor will automatically treat all content that is pasted into the editing window as plain text. This not only solves the issue of users bringing in unwanted formatting from outside sources, but also eliminates the need for the multiple format stripping tools that currently exist on the editor.

Tools to be removed

You may notice that some of our existing tools will no longer appear on the editor. The following is a list of the tools that currently exist but won’t be a part of the new editor:

• Insert paragraph (34) – this tool is fairly redundant since you can create a new paragraph in the editor by pressing the enter key. We also have more improvements in the way the editor handles markup including paragraphs in store for future phases.
• Format strippers and “paste as” tools (27-30) – as mentioned above, these tools will be replaced by default behavior that forces all pasted-in content to be pasted as plain text.
• Strike through, Justify and Remove Alignment (3, 7, 8) – these lesser-used tools will be removed to reduce clutter on the simple editing toolbar.
• Media manager (15) – this tool does not function effectively and so it is being replaced by two things. First, the new “insert video” tool mentioned above will provide a more effective and current way for users to include video content on their site. Second, if the user wishes to upload media files to their site, they can do so using the document manager tool.

Launch schedule

The changes described in this post are what we are calling our “phase one” changes. The launch of phase one is tentatively scheduled for the week of March 1st, likely on Wednesday or Thursday of that week. We will be following up with more specifics as we near the time of the launch, but we wanted to give you this information now to give you as much time as possible to prepare for this change.

Much more to come

This is only the beginning. We have additional plans already in the works for further improvements to the WYSIWYG interface on LightCMS. We know you are going to love what’s coming. The launch of phase one simply paves the way for future improvements. We appreciate your patience and support through this process and we work to continually improve LightCMS.

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!