Using the new design editor, you can easily modify and customize any of our built-in website designs with simple to use tools. You can make changes to fonts, colors, background images, and much more. Every change that is made is previewed in the Design Editor in real time and, when finished, you can publish the changes live or save your work to return later.

The image below gives you a look at one of the editing panes in the new design editor alongside the preview of the design being edited.

Click the image above to view actual size.

The Best of All Worlds

The addition of the new Design Editor allows LightCMS to provide world-class design options for everyone from web professionals to web novices. As always, professional designers have full code access, FTP access, and the ability to create designs from scratch using HTML, CSS and JS standards with no special languages to learn. Designers also have the ability to download the source code to any of our built-in designs and use them as a starting point for their own code customizations. Now, with the new Design Editor, users who don't have any knowledge of code can make their own customizations as well.

Empower Your Clients

If you use LightCMS to create websites for your own clients, the new Design Editor has some additional advantages for you. You will be able to enable part or all of your designs to be controlled by the Design Editor and give your clients the ability to edit their own designs, if you so choose. This will be made possible through two exciting new features:

• The Developer Role: a new role in the system that can be assigned to any user and will allow that user to access the design area of their site. Currently, only account owners (not clients) can access the design area.
• Design Editor Integration: a simple process of decorating your code with a few attributes will enable your designs to work with our new design editor. You can allow editing of the entire design or just small areas or regions.

These two new features give all LightCMS designers many more options in how they allow their clients to interact with their own designs. Of course, as always, we keep control in the hands of the designer. Unless you choose to give your clients access, they won't ever see the design editor. In fact, they won't notice any changes at all with this update.

Rolling Out Over the Next Few Weeks

The upgrades described in this post will roll out in phases over the next few weeks. Only LightCMS account owners will be able to see any of the changes resulting from these upgrades. Clients of LightCMS resellers will not see any changes when they log in (unless their account owner gives them access via the new Developer Role).

The first phase of the upgrade is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, March 1st. This initial phase will include the Design Editor with future phases adding the Developer Role as well as additional features and enhancements to the Design Editor. We will keep you informed of more details regarding the roll out on our Twitter feed and Facebook page. You can also get detailed information about system changes on the aLightCMSserver Twitter feed.

We look forward to bringing you these exciting new features! Thanks for your continued support of LightCMS.

Automatically Updated in Our Reseller Scripts

If you use our reseller marketing scripts to share marketing content on your own sites, you won't need to update anything. The Getting Started video has already been swapped out with the new version in our Reseller Video Script and our Reseller Features Script.

Directly Embedded Videos Must Be Manually Updated

However, if you have embedded our Getting Started video directly on your website, you'll need to update it with the new video. The old video will continue to work, but it is out of date, so to utilize the most recent version, simply visit our Individual Videos page or visit the video's YouTube page to grab the embed code for the video.

Beautiful, Compact Design That's Always Accessible

Just one look at the new toolbar and we think you'll be sold. It cuts the 155 pixels of screen real estate we currently occupy to an incredibly compact 52 pixels. That's a 66% reduction! Plus, the new toolbar remains fixed to the top of your browser's viewport so no matter how far you scroll down, you'll always have instant access to its controls. The toolbar's sleek new design gives every LightCMS website a polished, professional look in editing mode.

Click the image above to view actual size.

Look closer and you'll see that we've reorganized the toolbar options as well. A simple toggle control on the left edge allows you to switch between website options and store options without refreshing the page. This saves you a page load when moving between store and website controls. Account controls have been moved under the new user session menu (more on that menu below).

The New Page Bar

The previous toolbar had a third tier of controls that were related to page-level editing. Those controls have now been separated out to the all-new Page Bar. The Page Bar hovers over the top right of any page you're editing, but only when your mouse is over the page. The page bar displays the name of the current page's template and contains the fast template switcher, the "add a page" tool, the "preview page" button, and the "page settings" tool.

Left: the Page Bar overlaid in admin mode. Right: fast template switcher appears when its icon is clicked.

The New User Session Menu

On the right edge of the toolbar, you'll see the new User Session Menu. It shows the name and image of the currently logged-in user. The image uses one's gravatar by default (if it exists) but users can upload their own images on their user profiles as well. The User Session Menu shows custom options based on the user who is logged in. All users will see a link to edit their profile in the User Session Menu. This means that non-admin users now have the ability to update their own profile information, a brand new capability with this update.

The User Session Menu with all options active (account-owner view).

Account owners will also find the link to the account section and billing section under the User Session Menu. All billing-related screens (including Account Billing and Client Billing) have been moved under the "Billing" menu item. Clients who manage their own billing will also find their billing screens under the billing item on this menu.

Intelligent Help Link

The "help" item on the toolbar now links to different places based on who is clicking it. If you are logged in as an account owner, the help link will lead you to the account support page inside the admin system. Non-account-owners will be linked to our external user guide (this is where the help item currently links). Resellers can still disable the help link altogether if they choose.

Updating Your Brand

If you are a LightCMS reseller who has private-labeled our platform with your own brand, you may want to make some changes to the logo you display on our toolbar. Please note that even if you make no changes at all, your logo will still remain at the top of all websites under your account even after we switch to the new toolbar. So, technically, no action from you is required. However, we strongly recommend that you consider creating a new logo, optimized specifically for our new toolbar, in order to provide the best possible brand experience to your customers.

Toolbar Customization

With this update, we will be removing the ability to customize the colors of your toolbar. The toolbar will always be presented in the black and gray color scheme you see in the screenshots on this post. As you can imagine, offering the ability to customize the toolbar's colors places limits on what our team can accomplish through the toolbar's functionality. We regret having to remove this level of customization for our resellers, but we feel that all of our users stand to benefit far more by making this new toolbar available. Plus, the ability to customize the toolbar with your own logo still gives you the ability to create a branded experience for your clients.

Logo Replacement

Since the area in which the logo appears now has different dimensions and a dark background, you may want to make adjustments to the logo you use with LightCMS. Here is some information to help you prepare a new logo that will work well with the new LightCMS toolbar.

• Your logo should be no more than 130 pixels wide and 30 pixels tall. If your logo exceeds either of these dimensions, our system will resize your logo to fit.
• Your logo should be a transparent .png file. Files of type .gif will still be supported but probably won't look quite as clean.
• Your logo should be formatted to work on a dark background. There are several different ways to approach this. Here's a quick example using the logo of one of our LightCMS Featured Partners, Collision Media.

Collision's logo as implemented on current LightCMS toolbar

Collision's logo implemented on new LightCMS toolbar with reversed colors

Another approach, using only the mark from Collision's brand set in black for a subtle look

To help you prepare a new logo in advance of the toolbar's release, our design team has prepared a small design template which provides you a sample of the toolbar's background and shows you the area you have to work with. You can download this template for Photoshop (.psd) or for Fireworks (.png). Once you have your new logo ready, you'll simply need to upload it on your Account Settings page after we release the new toolbar.

Launching Next Week!

We're gearing up to launch these new features next Thursday, February 16th at approximately 9:30am CST (GMT-6). Stay tuned to our Twitter and Facebook feeds for more information leading up to the launch.

Much More to Come

We're super excited about this incredible update, but it's actually just a first step toward our really big launch of Project Atkinson, which is coming soon. There's so much good stuff on the way. As always, we appreciate all of your support and look forward to continuing serve as your partner.

For four consecutive years, we've been pleased to be a part of SXSW Interactive, one of the largest gatherings of interactive professionals anywhere. We'll be there again in 2012 and, if you find yourself at SXSW, we hope you'll stop by our booth (number 605) in the Austin Convention Center so we can meet you face to face.

This year's SXSW Interactive Conference takes place March 9-13, 2012 with the trade show firing up on March 12th. As always, there are a ton of sessions and talks to attend on a wide range of topics. You can get all of the information you need about SXSW Interactive here on their website.

The highlight of all highlights, of course, is the opportunity to visit the LightCMS booth, where you'll be able to meet some of our team, get a guided tour of our software, and potentially win some seriously amazing prizes. LightCMS team members attending this year include Marketing Director Tim Wall (that's me), Support Director Chad Jaggers, Creative Director Matthew Sanders, and Software Engineer / Designer Matt Grimm. We're going to have a lot of fun in our booth this year and we hope we'll get to see you there.

Are you going to SXSW 2012? Let us know in the comments below.

Ben Fjare of Prime Incorporated chose to benefit the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Gallatin County with their donation. Ben was gracious enough to answer a few questions about his Shine the Light! project. See below for more about his great work. First, here's a quick look at the organization's old site, and the new site created by Ben and his team.

Previous Site

New Site

Q&A with Ben Fjare

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work.
My name is Ben Fjare. I am a co-owner of Prime Incorporated, a small graphic and web design studio located in beautiful Bozeman, Montana. I am currently in charge of all our web design and development, and do most of our coding as well as interface design. We specialize in creative brand and marketing solutions for small to medium-sized businesses, as well as SEO and social media marketing.

Why did you choose this non-profit organization?
I serve on the board of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Gallatin County. The incredible service they do providing mentorship to youth is very important to me. Children who are either part of single parent households or in dysfunctional families are getting positive influences that are statistically shown to greatly increase their chances of success later in life.

What inspires you most about their work?
Every board meeting we have a big, little, or parent come in and discuss how the program has affected them. The stories always start with difficult situations that are less than ideal for a child. However, they always leave me feeling great about what this organization does and how greatly it can change lives. The parents just floor you with amazing stories and praise.

How did you go about addressing the specific needs of this organization?
Communicating what was wrong with the old website was, of course, step one. Then we started stripping out unneeded or excessive content and reformatting anything remaining. Angela, the BBBS-GC marketing director, did a great job of streamlining the information (there is a lot of it). She worked with me to create a structure that was easy to navigate and edit internally. This site is as much her baby as it is mine.

What was unique about this project?
I had never worked on something that was under a national umbrella this large before. It was interesting making sure the branding was in compliance and consistent.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

1. I would like to give a huge shout out to BBBS-GC's staff, board, satellite directors, and most importantly the bigs for all their hard work to help these kids out.
2. The Shine the Light! program is amazing and you guys deserve a big, awkwardly-long hug. Trust me, someday I will collect on this. We love LightCMS here at Prime and we don’t care who knows it. I'll scream it from the top of a mountain, or just type it in all caps on Facebook.
3. If anyone wants to volunteer to help their community I strongly recommend you visit your local Big Brothers Big Sisters office and see what it’s all about. I promise the child’s life is not the only one that is going to benefit.

A Few Words from the Benefited Organization

We also asked Angela Pickett, Marketing and Outreach Coordinator for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Gallatin County, if she would tell us about how this new website is helping her organization. Here's a bit of what she had to say.

"We love the look of our new web site and the fact that it is so easy to work with and update. Our new website helps us share information with our supporters, matches, communities and families. It allows volunteers to sign up and find out about different opportunities to get involved with BBBS. Through our new site, we can be more supportive of our business donors and sponsors and now support them with images and links to their sites. We hope our site will be a place where the community can come back to visit frequently to find any information they need about our organization."

To find out more about how you can participate in LightCMS's Shine the Light! program, please visit our LightCMS giving page.

Wide Open Field

The image editor is the most apparent improvement you'll see when you interact with the text editor.  You'll be welcomed with a larger, cleaner canvas to work on when you click the "Image Editor" icon.

There's something about the wider space, and the cleaner controls, that somehow makes the air around you breathe sweeter.

Cropping is easier than ever now, and you can even add some basic text to your image.  Cool!

Crisis Averted

And now for the thing that will float a lot of your boats: We finally have the ability to resize images to exact pixel dimensions.  No longer will you be forced to use a slider to merely approximate how small you want your image.

Get down to the nitty gritty and specify those pixels like it's a life or death situation.  You've got 10 seconds, and you have to set that image to 818 pixels, or the whole building's gonna blow!

Wild Wild West

This release covers a spate of compatibility improvements and tweaks that have accumulated since the last update.  We're on track keeping this text editor, and the rest of our CMS, up to date with the Wild Wild West of fast-changing browsers.

If they click the "Check out with PayPal" button, users will be taken to PayPal's website where they will login and review their transaction before returning to your site. If they check out using our system's built-in process, they will stay on your LightCMS website throughout the entire experience. No matter what the user chooses, payments are still processed through your PayPal Website Payments Pro account and the same PayPal fees apply.

This feature is great for store owners who want to provide a seamless checkout experience on their own website while still providing customers with the option of a separate PayPal checkout experience. To enable it for your website, login and visit Store -> Settings -> Payments -> Payment Gateways. Select "Website Payments Pro" as your credit card payment provider and check the box next to "Enable PayPal Express Checkout."

91% Growth

We're happy to report that LightCMS had another incredibly strong year of growth delivering a 91% increase in accounts over the past 12 months. LightCMS's strong growth landed our company on the Inc. 5000, Inc Magazine's list of the 5000 fastest-growing privately-held companies in America, for the fourth consecutive year. We're delighted and honored that so many new customers are choosing LightCMS every day. Our commitment to meeting the needs of every customer with powerful software and outstanding support is stronger than it's ever been.

Year of the Store

Those of you who were with us last year at this time will remember that "Project Tuscany" was the name of the game for the first half of 2011. Tuscany was our code name for the project that brought full e-commerce functionality to the LightCMS platform. We announced the details of Project Tuscany on May 18, 2011 and on June 8, 2011 we took it all live including the integrated store features, a redesigned LightCMS website, the newly-minted LightCMS Designer Program, brand-new e-commerce design templates, and a completely revamped support site for LightCMS customers.

This was the biggest infusion of new features in the history of the LightCMS platform, making 2011 a year that will forever be of great significance for LightCMS.

Additional Milestones

Though the store and store-related features dominated 2011, there were certainly other developments of note as well. Our Shine the Light! program continued, offering LightCMS designers the opportunity to partner with us and donate websites to deserving non-profit organizations. In fact, LightCMS's Shine the Light program even won the Beacon Award for Philanthropic Impact by a small business. If you haven't become a part of Shine the Light! yet, we encourage you to do so in 2012.

We also exhibited LightCMS at SXSW in Austin for the third consecutive year (and we'll be making our fourth appearance this year). We launched a new and improved design viewer to easily display all of LightCMS's available free templates, and to make it easy for our designer partners to do so in a white-label way. We introduced groundbreaking comment moderation and spam filtering to the LightCMS blog element, and we developed the LightCMS T-shirt Store, where we now make all of our company shirts available for purchase.

A Look Ahead

As great as 2011 has been, we believe the outlook for 2012 is even brighter. I know it sounds trite to say, but for us it is true. Every year we expect even greater things from ourselves, our products, and our service to our customers. The new year will be no exception.

Just like last year, we've got a major project underway that's due to be launched in the first half of the new year. This one is code named "Project Atkinson." Our development team has been working feverishly on Atkinson for many months. It is another major development that will make a huge impact on LightCMS. We can't wait to unveil it to you in the new year, so stay tuned!

Thanks to all of you for your continued support of LightCMS. We truly value your business and your partnership and look forward to working with you for years to come. Thank you all for a great 2011 and here's to an even better 2012!

To see all of our freely available designs, check out our design viewer. This week, we've added eight new designs to the mix. See them below. These are all available when you visit "Website -> Designs" inside your LightCMS account.

Shark

Life Fellowship

Big Lake

Second Street

RSAccounting

Lone Cross

AES Architecture

Venture Church

To use the new skin, simply visit the settings for your blog element and choose the "Archive By Year" skin. For more information, see the blog skins section of our user guide.

Pro vs. Standard

We've always had support for PayPal's Website Payments Standard, so what's the difference with Pro? The biggest difference is that Pro allows your customers to complete their entire checkout experience on your LightCMS website, without being directed offsite to PayPal's own checkout pages.

Just like Standard, Pro offers you a one-stop shop for all payment processing. Rather than having to have a separate merchant account and gateway, Website Payments Pro wraps it all up in one system and since it's PayPal, it's likely a system you're already familiar with.

The pricing structure is different with Pro as compared to Standard. Pro assesses a monthly fee but offers discounted transaction fees based on volume of sales. So, stores that generate more sales may find Pro to be more advantageous in pricing, but that decision must be made by you based on your store's situation.

Get more information about Website Payments Pro, its benefits and its pricing structure here on the PayPal website.

Ready to Integrate

Once you have a Website Payments Pro account, all it takes is plugging a few pieces of information into the LightCMS system and you'll be up and running. Simply log into your LightCMS site and visit Store -> Settings -> Payments then check the box that says "Enable credit card payments" and select "Website Payments Pro" from the list of processors. If you need help, you may contact our support team at any time at support@lightcms.com.

Use Promo Code 2011SALE When Checking Out To Claim Your Savings
Visit Now »

Big Savings On All Of Our Shirts

We now offer thirteen unique shirt designs including the very popular "Web Designers Are Sexy" shirt series (version 1 | version 2) that has been a part of LightCMS trade show appearances for several years. All shirts are custom-designed by one of our own, talented designers and most are printed on American Apparel products. Every shirt in our store can be purchased at 25% off through the end of 2011 and every shirt includes free shipping anywhere in the US.

New Fall 2011 Shirt Now Available

We've added yet another shirt to the store just this week. Our Fall 2011 design is hot off the presses and now available for purchase. As always, our very own IT Director, Chad, posed for a few pictures to demonstrate how good one can look in this new shirt while performing a variety of tasks such as staring into space and performing minor commercial construction projects.

Just In Time For the Holidays

Nothing will delight your friends and loved ones more than waking up Christmas morning to discover they have received an entire wardrobe full of Element Fusion and LightCMS apparel! Make their dreams come true and take advantage of these great savings while they last. Remember, use promo code 2011SALE to claim your discount.

Fortunately, Wild Ink Press was kind enough to oblige our request for an interview. I hope you'll take the time to learn about this outstanding group that specializes in printing things the way they were printed a hundred years ago and how LightCMS has benefited their business.

Interview with Rebekah Tennis, Owner of Wild Ink Press

Q: Tell us about your business at Wild Ink Press.

A: My husband and I run a small letterpress studio, Wild Ink Press, in Northern California. We design and print greeting cards and wedding invitations by hand on a couple of hundred-year-old presses. 

We are really the opposite of a web-based business. Usually a card design starts with me and my trusty sketchbook and a pen and pencil. Then we have a polymer plate made of the artwork, mix our inks by hand (in very small batches), ink up the press and after a time-intesive process of make-ready, we feed each card by hand into our 1908 Chandler and Price platen press. Each color is printed separately, and then we trim, score, fold and package the product for sale. That is where the internet finally comes into play!

Q: How did you get started in the letterpress craft?

A: My degree is in Graphic Design and after working with a firm my first year out of college, I broke off and started my own freelance business. I did a bit of everything: identity, print design, websites — you name it. However, I was always drawn to paper and the printed piece — the finished printed product and its unchangeability. A logo can get tweaked ad infinitem, a website is constantly being changed and updated, but a printed piece of work? It's done — no changing it any longer! It's so incredibly tangible. 

This led me to old printing methods (which I was familiar with from college) and eventually to letterpress as something I wanted to do. My husband and I took a series of classes at the San Francisco Center for the Book, tracked down our first old letterpress (2,000 lbs!) and we were on our way.

Q: What first brought you to LightCMS?

A: I first came to LightCMS when I was still designing websites as a freelancer and needed a content management system that allowed my clients to easily update their websites. I sure didn't want to do it!

Q: In what ways has LightCMS become an asset to your business?

A: Now that I only use it for my own site, it's made it easy for ME to update my website. Also, I appreciate the fact that the CMS is constantly changing for the better. When I started using LightCMS, the gallery options were not as great and now they are wonderful and easy-to-use. Plus, the store functionality has recently been added! This is huge for my business which was, until then, selling direct to the consumer only on Etsy.

Q: Tell us about the process of setting up your LightCMS store.

A: I had a fabulous intern this summer who did most of the legwork setting up the store. He used my existing design and look and feel to create the layout and then uploaded and tagged the template and we were on our way!

Q: What would you say to someone else who was considering using LightCMS?

A: If you are a designer who doesn't want the headache of updating your clients' content but just want to give them a simple method that works, this a good fit. It's a good platform and, from what I have seen, it will continue to improve and grow.

Q: Anything else you would like to add?

A: Long Live Letterpress!!

Check Out Their Work

You can find out more about Wild Ink Press, their work and their products on their website (powered by LightCMS), their Facebook page, and their Twitter profile.

Stripe: A New Kind of Payment System

LightCMS now offers seamless integration with the Stripe payment system. Stripe is a fairly new tool, but is gaining a lot of support because of its unique approach to solving the e-commerce payment dilemma.

Stripe offers an all-in-one approach to payment processing. With Stripe, you don't need a separate merchant account or gateway. All you need is a bank account into which Stripe will transfer funds from your sales.

This all-in-one approach means that getting up and running on Stripe is fast and easy. To make it even easier, we've put together a support article with all the details you need to get started.

Stripe utilizes flat-rate pricing. Currently, Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per successful transaction. Stripe allows you to accept payments on Visa, Mastercard, Amercian Express, Discover, JCB and Diners Club cards all out of the box. Their transaction fees are the same no matter which card is used.

Currently, Stripe is only available to customers in the United States. You can accept payments from customers anywhere in the world, but you, as the store owner, must be in the US. They are working on adding new countries to the mix and you can sign up to be notified when Stripe is available in your area. You can get detailed information about Stripe on their Frequently Asked Questions page.

Payflow: a Granddaddy of E-commerce

Something old, something new — while Stripe is one of the newest payment systems on the market, Payflow is one of the grandaddies of Internet commerce. Formerly a part of VeriSign, Payflow is now owned by Paypal. Though the LightCMS store has allowed you to accept payments by PayPal from day one, standard PayPal payments are very different from the functionality offered by PayPal's Payflow.

Payflow is a payment gateway which works with an existing merchant account. If you already have a merchant account for accepting credit card payments, the Payflow gateway can allow you to accept online payments using that account. If you don't have a merchant account, you can set one up through a number of vendors.

LightCMS now allows seamless integration with the Payflow Gateway. All you need are a few pieces of information from your Payflow account. For more information about setting up and using Payflow, visit PayPal's Payflow Website.

Royce didn’t start out the way many web creatives hope to, but like many others he had an opportunity forced on him at a critical moment and he went with it. Read how Fishbowl Studios got started in Royce’s own words.

“You've probably heard this same story many times. Well, it happened to me as well. I wanted to start my own business for years. I had been planning for it and saving for it, but the time was just not right, at least not from my "fear factor" viewpoint.

"I worked at in-house design departments and advertising agencies beginning in 1986.  In 1989, I took a year off and went back to graduate school at the University of North Texas, where I began the study of computer graphics. During that time I also taught an introduction to computer graphics class for undergraduate students. However, I discovered I couldn't afford the program and decided to go back to the advertising agency world. Because of my interest in computer graphics, I began to study the internet, its beginning growth, and its potential for marketing.  I determined this would be a very advantageous direction to go in order to achieve my goal of starting my own business.

"I began to study everything I could about the internet. Those in the agency I worked for became aware of my interest. One day one of the account executives asked me if I was interested in taking an HTML class given by his wife at a school in Dallas. Of course I was! Within a few months I was building websites on the side. Soon I moved to a new job working for a multimedia firm in North Dallas.

"At the multimedia firm, I was getting a huge amount of experience and knowledge of multimedia and the internet. But I just didn't think I was ready to go out on my own. Maybe another couple of years and then I would make the move. Well, my plans changed when I returned from a vacation to discover that my position was terminated. I knew it was time. So I jumped on the phone and started calling everyone I knew, telling them I was ready to take on projects. Within a month, my schedule was full and Fishbowl Studio was on its way. Thirteen years later, we are still going strong and have some very exciting plans for helping our clients with the newest marketing opportunities being provided by the internet."

Thanks to Royce for sharing his inspirational story with us. I’m sure he’s not the only LightCMS customer with an interesting story to tell. We'd love to hear your stories about how you got started or anything else. If you'd like to share your story and possibly be featured on the LightCMS blog, please let me know. You can contact me, Stacey, at stacey@elementfusion.com.

Videos are Automatically Updated in Our Reseller Scripts

If you use our reseller marketing scripts to share marketing content including our videos, on your own sites, you won't need to update anything. The Getting Started video has already been swapped out with the new version in our Reseller Video Script and our Reseller Features Script.

Directly Embedded Videos Need to be Manually Updated

However, if you have embedded our Getting Started video directly on your website, you'll need to update it with the new video. The old video will continue to work, but it is out of date, so to utilize the most recent version, simply visit our Individual Videos page and grab the embed code from the Getting Started video there.

A few years back, in preparation for our first visit to SXSW, we came up with our very first "Web Designers are Sexy" T-shirt. It was a simple concept, designed to express LightCMS's true affinity for web designers. After all, it is, in our humble opinion, the world's best CMS for said web designers.

We gave these shirts away at SXSW and we were overwhelmed with their popularity. We printed more shirts and continued to give them away at conferences and through various promotions on Twitter and Facebook. A year or so later, we developed a new version of the shirt, which was met with even more demand. Over the years, we've even compiled a photo gallery featuring pictures of our followers wearing their Web Designers are Sexy shirts.

Thus far, the only way to acquire one of these shirts has been to receive it through one of our various promotions. But now, you can acquire your very own Web Designers are Sexy shirt through the brand new, LightCMS Store.

Many Exclusive Shirts Available on the LightCMS Store

In addition to our two Web Designers are Sexy options, we're making all of our exclusive company shirts available for purchase on the LightCMS store. Every quarter, one of our own designers creates an original shirt design which we have printed for our employees. We're opening up the remaining inventory on all of these shirts. Take a look at all of the possibilities here on the site. You'll be the envy of all your encounter sporting one of these delightful, unique designs. And, of course, our shirts make excellent Christmas gifts.

Just One Question ... Why?

Good question. One reason we created the LightCMS Store is to ensure that we are using our own recently-released e-commerce solution in a live application. Of course, we also wanted a way to make our Web Designers are Sexy shirts more widely available and, while we were at it, we figured we might as well make all our shirt designs available as well. Oh, and it was also fun to get everyone up here to put on a different shirt and take some photos. All good reasons to start a store, I think.

So, take a look at the all-new LightCMS Store. The design you'll see is actually one of our free, built-in e-commerce templates, with some modifications made by our design team. We offer free shipping on all orders in the USA with reasonable International rates as well. But hurry, because quantities and sizes on all shirts are limited.

Carrier-Calculated Shipping for Your Store

You can now tie-in with Fedex, UPS and USPS to have your store calculate shipping rates in real time. When your customers checkout, they will be presented with shipping options and pricing calculated by the carrier you choose based on the weight of the items purchased. This can streamline the shipping set up process and also allow you to charge your customers more accurately for their shipping requirements.

Setting up carrier-calculated shipping requires some specialized account set-up with the carriers you would like to use (such as Fedex, UPS and USPS). We have provided some instructions on setting up your carrier accounts and getting the information you need from your carrier accounts on the LightCMS User Guide at the following links:

• General set-up instructions
• Instructions for Fedex
• Instructions for UPS
• Instructions for USPS

The resources above are also available in white-label versions that you can share with your own clients if you wish. The white-label versions can be accessed at the following links:

• White-label general set-up instructions
• White-label instructions for Fedex
• White-label instructions for UPS
• White-label instructions for USPS

Carrier-calculated shipping is already live inside your LightCMS account. Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Keeping up with Facebook can be a challenge. It was just over a year ago that we published this tutorial on setting up custom tabs on Facebook pages using FBML. In the course of the past year, Facebook has announced they are deprecating the FBML standard and actually turning off all FBML page tabs by June 1st, 2012. So, we've spent some time figuring out how to convert our page tabs to the new iFrame standard, and I thought I'd put together this guide based on what we've learned in the process. I hope you find it useful.

The Upside

The good thing about the new standards Facebook is enforcing is that they work off of iFrames. This means that you can essentially create any website content using HTML, CSS, and JS standards and show that content through an iFrame on your Facebook page tab. Using LightCMS, you can create the content you want to show on your Facebook page tab in a way that makes it easy for your clients to control. Once set up, your clients will be able to change the content on their custom Facebook page tab by simply logging into their LightCMS website and using our system's simple tools to make changes.

Create Your Content

First, you need to determine what you want to include on your custom page tab and then create your content in HTML, CSS and JS standards. One common use of the Facebook page tab is as a "Welcome" page. That's what we've created on the LightCMS Facebook page. Facebook lets you set a default tab that non-fans land on when they access your page. Setting up a custom welcome tab and making it the default can be a great way to introduce new visitors to your brand or product and pitch them on the benefits of liking your page.

Whatever content you create, it needs to be no wider than 520px and you should remove any margin or padding around the body of your content so that it fits exactly in the space Facebook provides.

Host Your Content

You can host your tab content anywhere you like, but as of this month you must be able to provide secure hosting for your content or Facebook won't allow it. This is another reason that hosting the content on LightCMS is a convenient option. With LightCMS, SSL security is built into the publishpath.com domain and every LightCMS website can be accessed through the secure publishpath URL. You can provide your website's publishpath address to Facebook to retrieve the content without ever exposing the publishpath address to the public.

Of course, another plus for putting your content on LightCMS is that you can utilize LightCMS's content management tools, making it easy for your clients to update and change the content on their Facebook tabs without having to edit any code. Simply create a design template and apply it to a hidden page on your LightCMS website to establish the page you'll provide to the Facebook custom tab.

Set Up Your Facebook App

To set up a simple page tab, Facebook requires you to create a custom Facebook App. Fortunately, this is actually much easier than it sounds. While there are several Facebook Apps out there that you can add to your page to create the tab for you, I'm always a fan of doing things myself when possible and, in this case, it's a very simple process so I think it's worth it. Here's a quick rundown of the process:

Go to the Facebook Developer Website
Visit https://developers.facebook.com/apps. You must be logged in to Facebook to continue. If this is your first time to create a Facebook app, Facebook will ask you to authorize the developer tools, which you will need to do.

Click "Create a New App"
You'll be asked to provide a name for your app. The name can be anything just to help you remember what the app is for. You don't need to put anything in the "App Namespace" box.

Fill in the Details
Facebook Apps have tons of settings, but there are only a few you need to worry about. When you edit the settings on your app, look for the section called "Page Tab." Click to enable that and you'll see four fields. You only need to fill in the following three fields:

• Page Tab Name - put the words you want to show up on the actual tab. For example, on the LightCMS Welcome Tab, we put "Welcome."
• Page Tab URL - put the URL to the directory containing your iFrame content. This can't be a URL to a specific file, but must be to a directory or shortcut path. If using LightCMS, this is simply the URL to the page you set up earlier such as http://[yoursite].publishpath.com/facebook-welcome-tab
• Secure Page Tab URL - this is the secure version of your content. If using LightCMS, you simply need to add an "s" to the "http" as such -- https://[yoursite].publishpath.com/facebook-welcome-tab

That's it! Now you can save your changes.

Add the Tab App to Your Page

Now that your app is set up you need to add it to your Facebook page. To do this, you need to visit the app's profile page. You can find the app's profile page by editing the settings of your app and looking to the lower left for the "View App Profile Page" link. Once on the profile page, look to the lower left for the "Add to My Page" link. This will bring up a box of all the pages you administrate and you can add the app to the page(s) you choose.

Final Tweaks

Visit your Facebook page and you should see the new tab added to the list of tabs on the left. Click the tab and you should see the content you created showing through to your Facebook page. Now that this is set up, any changes you or your clients make to the source page should be immediately reflected on the Facebook tab.  

You will notice that the icon used for the tab is quite generic by default. If you want to customize the icon, you can do so back on the settings screen for your app (look at the very top). You can also reorder the tabs on your Facebook page by clicking the "EDIT" button below the tab list. And, if you want to make your new tab the default tab for new visitors, click the "Edit Page" button at the upper right and look for the "Default Landing Tab" selector.

I hope you've found this tutorial helpful. If you have any additional thoughts, questions, or insights to share, please leave us a comment below.

The New Comment Control Menu

Every comment on your blog now has its own control menu. You will see a gear icon next to a comment when you hover over the comment while logged into your LightCMS website. If you're on a touch device, the gear icon will always be visible when logged in so that you can access it without hovering.

The options available in the menu will vary depending on the situation. Possible options include:

Delete - this option is available for every comment. This replaces the inline "Delete this comment" link that you used to use to delete comments. Clicking delete will immediately remove the comment from your site.

Spam - this option is available for every comment. Click "Spam" to mark the comment as spam and immediately delete it from your site. Marking comments as spam trains our system to better detect spam comments.

Not Spam - this option is available on comments that have been automatically marked as spam by our system (see more on this below). These comments will not be visible to the public, but will be visible to administrators. Marking these comments "Not Spam" makes the comment live and trains our system to better detect spam comments.

Unapprove - this option is available for every live comment but only if you have checked the "Approve comments before they are made visible" box in your blog's settings. You can unapprove the comment to take it off the live site but still keep it available.

Approve - this option is available for all unapproved comments and only if you have checked the "Approve comments before they are made visible" box in your blog's settings. Unapproved comments are not visible to the public. Approving an unapproved comment will make it immediately live on the site.

Automatic Spam Detection

We've also integrated an automatic spam detection engine to help protect your blog posts from unwanted spam comments. This automatic detection is in addition to our built-in Captcha system. Together, these two features launch an all-out, double-barrel assault on spam comments across the LightCMS platform.

When the system automatically detects a comment as spam, the comment will not be visible to the public, but will be visible to blog editors who log into the site. The system will not send email notifications for comments that are automatically detected as spam. These comments will display a "Spam" tag, highlighted in red, to denote their status. Using the new comment control menu, the blog editor may delete the comment, or mark it as "Not Spam."

Comment Moderation

We've always had the ability to require approval before comments are posted live. That functionality is now integrated with the new control menu. When you check the "Approve comments before they are made visible" box in your blog's settings, all comments will be hidden from the public until they are approved by a blog editor. Comments will display an "Unapproved" tag to editors when they are logged in. Editors can use the control menu to approve the comments, delete them, or mark them as spam.

More to Come!

We're excited to bring you these great improvements to the LightCMS blog element. There are many more improvements on the way so stay tuned!

Third & Grand Website Design

Sean Alsobrooks owns Third & Grand Website Design which is based in Knoxville, Tennessee. His company has created several websites on LightCMS and is a member of the LightCMS Network.

Recently, we came across Sean's site for Risen Music Publishing, a Christian Music Publishing House also based in Knoxville. The Risen Music website is utilizing LightCMS's Online Store functionality with one very unique customization that caught our eye.

Adding Multiple Variants to Cart at One Time

By default, the LightCMS store allows a user to add one variant or product to their shopping cart at a time. But Sean had a different idea for the Risen Music website.

"Each product on the Risen Music website is really several different products," Sean explains. "Each song has different versions and up to 20 unique musical charts -- all of which needed to be purchased separately. So, we altered the cart javascript to allow for back to back cart requests to LightCMS's server, which required other updates (such as creating cookies ... etc.). In the end, we were able to change the drop down menus to checkboxes and enable customers to choose multiple product variants and add them all to the cart at the same time."

For an example of how this looks, see this product detail page on the Risen Music website.

Great for the Customer. Great for the Client.

Sean explains that his project had two goals. Naturally, the customer experience needed to be as streamlined as possible, the javascript modifications described above were a part of that goal. But also, the site needed to be very friendly for the client, who would be the one managing and updating the store. 

"It had to be simple to add/edit/delete products and the LightCMS store really helped make that possible," he says. "The client was really pleased with the outcome and has been very happy with the Store Admin area. LightCMS is a fantastic platform and it provided us a great base from which to get started on the Risen Music online store."

To the Possibilities

Certainly, this level of advanced customization isn't necessary on every website, but it's nice to see creative customizations like this one made when the project warrants it. We want to say thanks to Sean and his team for their great partnership and for allowing us to share this case study with you.

Have you created any LightCMS sites with interesting customizations you'd like to share? Let us know in the comments below.

Our company also partners with designers around the world who donate their own design services to non-profits through our Shine the Light! program. Be sure to check out Shine the Light! and join us in providing some amazing websites to the organizations that keep our communities strong.

There are a host of pros and cons for using Facebook Comments and we're not going to debate them all here today. I will just say that, in my opinion, the biggest thing Facebook Comments has going for it is the fact that when users leave comments on your site, those comments are, by default, posted back to their Facebook profiles. This means those users' friends will see stories in their news feeds with their friends' comments and links to the posts on which they left the comments. Plus, if their friends leave comment replies within Facebook, those comments are cross-posted back to your blog as well. This feature alone creates the potential to greatly expand the reach of your blog posts and the interactions that happen on your blog.

Integrating Facebook Comments with LightCMS

Facebook provides many tools for developers to use when integrating their social plugins. For the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to cover the most basic approach to integrating Facebook Comments with LightCMS.

Set Up a Blog Detail Page

You will want to create a page on your site to function as your blog's detail page. This should be a hidden page and its only purpose will be to serve as the "framework" onto which the system will display your blog posts. You will then want to create a separate blog detail template that you will apply to this page.

Set Your Blog Element to Use Your Blog Detail Page

Once your blog detail page is set up with your blog detail template applied, you need to tell your blog element to use this blog detail page for blog post display. You do this by visiting the blog element settings -> advanced tab and looking for the "Detail Page" selector. Choose the page you just set up and save your changes.

Once this is complete, any changes you make to your blog detail template should be reflected on the detail pages of every blog post.

Disable Built-In Comments on Your Blog Element

While you're editing the settings for your blog element, go ahead and visit the "Basic" tab and uncheck the box that says "Let people comment on my posts." This will turn off the built-in comment system. You can technically still use the built-in comment system in addition to Facebook comments, but in most cases, disabling the built-in comments is probably a good idea.

Add the Facebook Comments Code To Your Blog Detail Template

The final step is adding the Facebook Comments code to your blog detail template. You'll most likely want to add this code directly below the MainContent region. To get the code you need, you can visit Facebook's reference page for the Comments social plugin. There you can enter the URL to comment on (see more on this below), the number of posts to show at once, the width of the plugin and the color scheme (you have a choice of "light" or "dark"). Facebook will then provide you with a snippet of code you can paste right into your template where you want the plugin to appear.

Replace the URL with LightCMS's URL Token

One little tweak to Facebook's generated code is needed. In order to be able to use the plugin code across multiple blog posts and/or pages, you need to replace the URL used in the code with LightCMS's dynamic URL token. 

Look in the code Facebook provided you for the following:
data-href="example.com" 

and change it to:
data-href="<$url stripQueryString="true" /$>"

The "stripQueryString" attribute is needed because Facebook treats every URL, even URLs with different query strings, as separate entities. So, comments left on http://example.com would be separate from comments left on http://example.com?x=1 and the like. To ensure all comments left on your post are grouped together and visible whether query strings are used or not, our URL token provides the option to remove all query strings when outputting the current page's URL.

Taking It Further

The above is all that is necessary to get comments running on your site, but there are a lot more settings and features you can play with as well. Continue reading down Facebook's reference page and you'll find information about how to set yourself up for moderating comments and controlling other aspects of the plugin.

Also, you might want to look into implementing open graph tags on your blog pages as well. These tags can shape and improve the way your content is rendered on Facebook when your pages are shared or commented upon. For details on how to do this, see Facebook's Open Graph Protocol reference page.

I hope this brief tutorial gives you an idea of how you can integrate Facebook comments with LightCMS. If you have experience using Facebook comments, please share your thoughts in our comments section below.

Our best projection is that LightCMS websites may experience periods of slower-than-normal response and possibly even brief segments of downtime over the course of this window. Past updates such as this one have generally resulted in very minimal periods of downtime, but we want you to be prepared for the possibility of longer periods of interupted service. Our team will be monitoring progress during this maintenance window and will post updates as needed to our status blog at status.elementfusion.com.

We apologize for this inconvenience and we appreciate your understanding as we work to keep the LightCMS system at the top of its game.

This video joins our collection of white-label videos that have always been available for you to use. It's also already been added to our reseller video script and our reseller features script. These marketing scripts are freely available to you and they provide automatically-updated marketing content for you to use on your own websites. We encourage you to check out all of our reselling and marketing resources if you haven't already.

To demonstrate, we put together this quick look at several site designs that were created by simply modifying one of our existing LightCMS design themes. LightCMS offers a large selection of design themes that are freely available to use and modify as you see fit, giving LightCMS designers a great resource of design starting points at no cost.

Now on to our examples. Here's the original theme as seen in our design viewer:

And here are a few designs created by modifying the theme above:

Conquerors Church

New Life Coaching

Destiny House

Gracie Lane

To set up discount codes, log in to your site and click Store on the top toolbar, then select Settings -> Discount Codes. Here you'll see a list of your discount codes. To set up a new code, click the "Add New Code" button.

The new code screen will suggest a random code or let you set your own. You can choose to discount by an amount or a percentage, add a code description, and set limits on your code like a time period, a minimum order amount or a number of times the code can be used.

Once set up, simply share the code with the appropriate customers and they'll be able to enter it to receive their discount when checking out.

We hope you enjoy the new features. As always, there's more good stuff to come so stay tuned!

This year’s list tracks growth from 2007-2010. During that time frame, we saw an increase in revenue of 39%, landing us at #3,773 out of all private companies in the US and #260 in the software industry. Thanks yet again for all of your support which has made this growth possible. We look forward to being your partner for years to come.

For more details, see Element Fusion's profile on the Inc 5000 website.

What Makes Us Tick

Wondering if you'd feel at home at LightCMS? Here's some information about how we work. You can find out more about us in our company section and our careers page.

We're All About Learning

Are you a software engineer? Do you ooze a passion for learning? If so, that's good because we learn as we go, and as you get started with us you'll have to learn more than ever before. On day one you'll see a giant codebase in front of you, freshly pulled down from Git and sporting namespaces starting with "Water.*".  "Why Water?" you will ask. "It's the name of the first version of our CMS," other team members will gladly tell you. You see, we have a highly collaborative team environment here, and you'll have direct, immediate access to everyone on the team. That is, unless they're in the groove with their door shut and their chat turned off.

We Love Our Customers

Every so often you'll take a month-long rotation on programming support dealing with technical issues that arise from time to time. These stints on support are great for keeping you tuned in to the thousands of end users who use everything you write. Our customers are everything to us, though we have yet to come up with a catchphrase or song expressing our dedication to them.  "Customers, we love you and we're here for you," isn't a real slogan, but it truly is how we feel, and I occasionally catch myself singing it aloud.

We're Constantly Challenging Each Other to Grow

Are you stronger with database design than you are with front-end JavaScript? Good, then you have the next JavaScript task. Your specialties will certainly play a role in our critical projects, but we also want and need you to learn to stretch beyond your comfort zone.

We are all about sharing.  Teach us what you learned last week.  Make us privy to your thought process of why you designed our new search engine the way you did, and why you chose to base it on the tech you did.

We Focus on the Details

Did you finish a project?  Did you really finish it?  Did you write critical unit tests, test it manually, and test it even once more?  You're a hero if it passes the internal review process unscathed.  The fewer "tennis matches" (submitted for review, then rejected, then submitted for review, then rejected, etc.) you enter into, the better.  We're all about reducing friction, from task assignment all the way to deployment.  Without friction, our customers get the features they need faster and more error-free.

Skills You Need to Have

We are looking for candidates who know their ASP.NET, C#, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), SQL Server, and MongoDB.  We use various other backend techs that are pretty specialized but are easy to grasp if you know this subset.

The Positions Defined

Senior Software Engineers really know their stuff. They attack the codebase like a lion. They see the big picture. They know when not to re-invent the wheel and when the time is right to invent something new. They handle critical portions of our code from anything dealing with money to complicated database migrations.  They are in the pool for eventual advancement toward Product Manager. They mostly work on new features, and at night they dream about performance optimization.

Software Engineers split their time between new features and maintenance on pre-existing features. They work with Senior Software Engineers and Designers on most projects, and in some cases they'll lead their own.

Software Engineer Interns come into their positions with an unmatched zeal for learning. They immediately step into a fast-moving, crash-course of real world experience. They learn from the best, surrounded by our collaborative team that is always willing to help. Their work is not only a huge learning experience, but also an opportunity for advancement, as we've had a number of interns turn into full-time positions over the years.

How to Apply

Think you're ready to step into the fast-paced world of development at LightCMS? Then check out our careers page and submit your resume using the form at the bottom of the page. We look forward to hearing from you!

This post assumes a basic knowledge of using JavaScript libraries. If you're not sure how to use JavaScript or jQuery with your LightCMS site, check out our blog post "Using jQuery with LightCMS".

Below is an example of a site in need of some fancy admin doctoring. The main area up top is called #featuredImages, and it's part of a custom jQuery photo gallery called cycle. Directly below #featuredImages are two blue boxes referred to as #cta.

The Front

The design looks great, but when you log in, you can see that the positioning applied to #cta causes it to block the "Add Element" button for the Featured Images region. Check out what the problem looks like below.

The Back

To clean this up, we can use jQuery for a simple fix. The following conditional statement will allow you to add jQuery that will apply only if the user is logged in and in admin mode:

This checks for the presence of both the #adminbar and the #toolbar. Ensuring you are both logged in and in admin mode before applying the rest of the jQuery, below.

The Result

So, what happened?

First, we targeted #featuredImgages and changed some of the custom photo gallery's settings for users in admin mode. We set the timeout to 0 so that you don't have to worry about it automatically scrolling when you try to edit it. We also set #controls to be shown, so you can switch between #featuredImages manually (you can see the "prev" and "next" buttons at the top of the image above).

Second, we added some CSS to be applied only when the user is in admin mode. We targeted #cta and then changed the CSS attribute margin-bottom, pushing the #cta section down so that it no longer covers the "Add Element" button. 

While this is a fairly simple example, you can see the possibility is here to add any amount of CSS to only be utilized when the user is in admin mode.  So whether you just want a visually clean site when you log in personally or if you're wanting to clean things up for your client, using jQuery to situationally alter your CSS can be a fantastic choice.