In the summer of 1967, tens of thousands of people descended on the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco defining the hippie revolution during a season we now know as the Summer of Love. 45 years later, LightCMS is setting out to accomplish pretty much the same thing, except instead of all those people and the revolution and what not, we're going to be adding a ton of new features to our software. Welcome to LightCMS's Summer of Love!

New Features Every Week

The Summer of Love begins June 4th. We know that isn't technically the beginning of summer, but we're ready to get started so we're jumping the gun a bit. Once we're rolling, you can expect rapid-fire feature releases at a pace of about one per week. We'll be announcing everything here on the blog throughout the summer so you'll want to stay tuned.

The First Wave

Here are a few features we know we'll be rolling out as the Summer of Love gets underway. These features will go live over the first few weeks of the Summer of Love. We'll post more about each feature and specifically when it will be live as the time gets closer:

• Separate Store Option Drop-downs. This upgrade will allow you to create separate drop-downs for each product option so, for example, the user will be able to select size with one drop-down and color with another.
• Facebook Open Graph Integration. Out-of-the-box integration with Facebook's protocol will make things work much better when people share, like or comment on your site's content.
• Blog trackbacks and pings. These will be automatically integrated into the blog element.
• Blog pagination. This heavily-requested feature will allow you to break long lists of blog posts up into multiple pages.

That's just a bit of what the Summer of Love has to offer. Get ready for it. The fun starts in just a couple of weeks!

This update provides a new interface for changing and editing the background image used with your website design. Utilizing background images allows you to make dramatic changes to the look and feel of any site. This update truly opens up unlimited possibilities for customizing the hundreds of free, professional designs available within the LightCMS system.

To access the Design Editor, simply click "Design" on the top toolbar, hover over the design you want to edit and select that design's settings icon. Choose "Customize" to launch the Design Editor. Under Base Styles on the left-hand control panel, click background image settings and you'll see the panel pictured below.

Use the controls to upload your own image, establish if and how the image should repeat across the background, and set the positioning of the image.

We're excited about the new background image editor and all the functionality of the Design Editor. With this rollout behind us, our development team is already making plans for LightCMS's Summer of Love. "What is this Summer of Love?" you ask. Stay tuned for more on that next week!

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) is the largest Christian sports organization in America. With over 900 staff and thousands of volunteers deployed in locally-focused areas across the United States, FCA has a great need to provide powerful and accessible tools to allow each local chapter to thrive in its community. 

That's why FCA turned to LightCMS. Over the past few years, FCA has deployed over 200 locally-oriented websites on the LightCMS platform, each individually built and managed by the staff and volunteers in that local community. We're excited to share with you a bit about how LightCMS has enabled FCA to successfully deploy such an ambitious online strategy.

Samples of FCA Sites

Q & A with Danny Burns of FCA

Please explain a little bit about how FCA uses LightCMS.

On-page editing makes it easy for our staff members to create their sites and manage their content.

FCA has over 900 staff around the country and over 200 individual local websites. The ability for our staff members to easily create and maintain their own website is incredibly important. We spent over a year looking at different Content Management Systems. Since our staff vary in technical expertise, we needed a system that was both easy for the novice but powerful enough for advanced users. LightCMS is that solution for us.

With LightCMS, our staff members can create great local area websites and maintain them on their own. If they want to partner with local volunteers, the system can accommodate the extra help. And if they want to create a completely custom look and feel with the help of local designers, they can! LightCMS allows FCA to ensure brand consistency. It also provides an affordable solution to local staff and it is constantly evolving to add more value to those within our organization.

How does LightCMS make things easier for FCA?

On-page editing makes it easy for our staff members to create their sites and manage their content. Unlike other systems, LightCMS allows a user to see the entire page and then manipulate its content without guessing how it’s going to look. The user interface is easy to use and easy to train to. 

The recent addition of the developer role was a very significant help for us. Now, our staff can be empowered to upload templates that we provide and customize them with the built in design editor. We don’t have to login to each website to ensure the latest template is live. Site owners can easily keep their sites up-to-date.

What are your favorite characteristics of LightCMS?

First, we love its flexibility. LightCMS has made it easy for all of our staff to maintain websites, regardless of their level of web experience. LightCMS's infrastructure allows seasoned designers to create websites just like they would outside of a CMS. The flexibility of LightCMS to adapt to its website owners is paramount for FCA.

Second, we love its continual innovation. The LightCMS team is constantly investing and deploying new enhancements and features to the product. We’ve even been able to submit feature ideas over the years and we have seen some of those come to fruition. We don’t have to worry about “falling behind” with LightCMS. LightCMS allows us to keep in stride with ever-evolving web technologies and strategies. Thanks to LightCMS our staff members can spend more time accomplishing their mission and less time maintaining their websites.

Anything else you'd like to include?

Knowing that we have the entire LightCMS team helping our team is huge.

The LightCMS support team has been a tremendous asset as we’ve grown to over 200 sites on the platform. Any questions or issues have been promptly handled. Knowing that we have the entire LightCMS team helping our team is huge. 

The fact that LightCMS is a fully-hosted solution has also been a great help to us. We simply don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to manage servers, systems or security. With LightCMS, we can go to bed at night and know that the safety and reliability of our websites are in trusted hands.

Lastly, we greatly appreciate the incentives through the LightCMS Rewards program. As a non-profit, every little bit helps and a little has quickly turned into a lot for us. Thanks to LightCMS for providing incentives for customers with significant investment in the platform.

The role can only be assigned by account owners. To apply it, account owners may simply visit a user's profile and check the box next to "Developers" under the roles section.

Account Owners see the option to assign users to the Developer Role on their profiles.

Admin users will be able to see which users have the developer role, but will not be able to assign or unassign the role, unless they are the account owner.

Administrators see if a user is assigned to the Developer Role, but they cannot change the setting.

Enabling the Developer Role allows a user to see and select the "Design" section on the top toolbar and access the Collection of designs applied to their website as well as our Design Gallery of available free designs. They may also edit designs using the Design Editor (if the designs are enabled for editing) or using the Source Editor. They can also upload new designs and they get FTP access to the "Templates" directory, which contains the source files for all designs in the website's collection.

This new feature is scheduled to be released on Wednesday, April 18, 2012.

Manage Designs With Fewer Clicks

The new Design Section is an extension of the LightCMS top toolbar that allows you to access and modify design settings while still previewing your live site content below. It saves clicks when performing most every design-related task, and it makes previewing your site with new designs a breeze.

Categorized Templates for Easy Access

The Design Section will present all of our built-in templates organized neatly into categories. Choose a category and scroll through the visual options presented. Then use the simple menus on each design to download, apply, or edit through the new Design Editor or the Source Editor.

My Designs = Collection

One important change you'll want to note is that what we have thus far referred to as "My Designs" will now be referred to as "Collection." So, look for your "Collection" in the new Design Section to locate all the designs you've previously applied to your website. Whenever you edit a design, even if that design is in the gallery, it will automatically be added to your Collection in the background.

All the other functionality of the current Design Section is still intact and very intuitive to access. In fact, you'll be able to perform most if not all functions with fewer clicks than before.

Scheduled for Launch

This release is estimated to launch on Thursday, April 12, 2012 at approximately 10am CDT (GMT -5). Just as a reminder, only account owners are able to see the Design Section, so this update will not affect your clients. In a future phase, we'll be rolling out the new Developer Role, which will allow you to grant access to the Design Section to users of websites under your account, if you so choose.

We look forward to bringing you these exciting new updates, and many more to come!

Today, I want to share with you about a recent Shine the Light! project completed by Clay Burnett and Macklin Chaffee at Inventure. Inventure is a long-time LightCMS reseller, and they recently chose to benefit Rod Dixon's Kid's Marathon Foundation of Los Angeles with a new website through Shine the Light! As is our custom, I asked both Inventure and Rod Dixon about this project in order to share their thoughts with you. Highlights from their responses are included below. But first, here's a look at the before and after images for the Kid's Marathon Foundation website.

Old Site

New Site

Q&A with Inventure

Here are a few highlights from our interview with Inventure about this project.

Why did you choose the Kid's Marathon Foundation?

Both of us here at Inventure are very active individuals, being elite middle distance runners. Rod Dixon is an elite runner and Olympic Bronze Medalist (1500m, Munich 1972) that we connected with several years ago. His program, KiDSMARATHON, is incredibly well-designed and aimed at promoting active, healthy lifestyles in young kids, age 7-12. It has grown in the last two years and was in desperate need of an online presence through which it could disseminate information to a growing list of supporters.

What inspires you most about their work?

The truly inspiring thing about this non-profit is that it doesn't just raise awareness for childhood obesity, it also actively engages kids and shows them that running is fun! The kids are educated on the issue, empowered to believe in themselves, and inspired by Rod and other charming and accomplished speakers. This program one of the rare few that is actually solving problems.

What was unique about this project?

Clay, our president and lead designer, has coached youth and teen runners for seven years. So, his passion for design was aligned with his passion for coaching and educating young people about fitness. Whenever we have the opportunity to combine work and play, the project is always rewarding.

Can you tell us a little about your company and your work?

Inventure is a web design and development company founded in 2001. We specialize in custom design. We work tirelessly to ensure that every client's website projects the precise brand image that they wish to display on the web. We've delivered LightCMS based websites since 2007 and we firmly believe that LightCMS is the premier CMS on the web.

A Few Words from the Benefited Organization

We also posed a few questions to Rod Dixon of the Kid's Marathon Foundation. Here is some of what he had to say.

How has this website helped your organization?

The new website will assist the teachers and parents by providing information, skills, and ideas to help kids be more connected to activity and healthy eating choices. Kids will also be able to see stories and examples of what others are doing at schools and running clubs around the world.

What's your favorite part of your new website?

Everything! The kids' expressions through their drawings and art are very special. I'm so excited about the team of Macklin Chaffee and Clay Burnett. Their creative experience, together with their ability to communicate my ideas into the website have allowed us to create something which I believe will inspire and motivate.

Keeping up with Facebook can be a challenge. It was just a couple of years ago that we published this tutorial on setting up custom tabs on Facebook pages using FBML. In the year following that article, Facebook announced they were deprecating the FBML standard and actually turning off all FBML page tabs by June 1, 2012. So, we spent some time figuring out how to convert our page tabs to the new iFrame standard, and put together this guide based on what we've learned in the process, publishing it in October of 2011. Now, a few months later, Facebook is again making changes as they shift all pages to timeline view. So, we've updated and republished this article to reflect these changes.

The Impact of Timeline View

The changes Facebook is making correspond to their migration of all brand pages to the new timeline view. The new timeline view affects how custom page tabs are integrated. Here are a few significant changes:

• Wider Content. Content on page tabs was previously restricted to 520px wide, but now content can be up to 810px wide, offering a much larger canvas for displaying content.
• No More Default Landing Tab. With Timeline, all traffic to a brand's Facebook page will end up on the main timeline, whether or not the visitor already likes the page. Previously, Facebook allowed the page owner to specify a tab to serve as the landing page for non-fans when they visited. This is no longer possible.
• New Branding Opportunities. Page tabs now provide an opportunity to insert additional branding onto the main timeline page. Each custom page tab can have a 110x74 cover image that can be displayed in the boxes below the timeline's main cover image. There are four boxes, of which one (the "photos" box) cannot be moved or changed. The other three can be replaced with custom imagery through the use of page tabs. You can see how we've replaced two boxes with custom artwork on the LightCMS Facebook page in the image below.

That's an overview of the most recent changes Facebook has made. Now, let's take a look at how you can put together your own custom page tabs.

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. Whatever content you create, it needs to be no wider than 810px 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 you must be able to provide secure hosting for your content or Facebook won't allow it. This is one 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 you or your clients to update and change the content on the Facebook tab 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 will create the tabs 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 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 five fields. Complete these fields as follows (see image below for reference):

• Page Tab Name - put the words you want to use to represent the tab. You can actually override this setting when you add the tab to your page so the name used here isn't critical.
• 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-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-tab
• Page Tab Edit URL - you can leave this field blank.
• Page Tab Width - choose either Narrow (520px) or Wide (810px). Wide is recommended.

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. Facebook has, unfortunately, made this harder than it needs to be. The best way I've found is to paste the following URL into your browser's address bar:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL

Replace "YOUR_APP_ID" with the numerical ID of your app and replace "YOUR_URL" with the URL to the iFrame content you have created. Accessing this URL through your browser will bring up Facebook's dialog allowing you to choose the page on which you want to install your app.

Adjust the Look

Visit your Facebook page and you should now see the new tab added to one of the boxes below the main cover image. If you have a lot of boxes, you may have to click the arrow at the far right to expand the second row of boxes. Once you click that arrow, you can hover over any box and select the edit menu at the top right of the box to change its position. Remember, the "Photos" box is the only one that can't be moved.

To customize the image used to represent your tab, click the edit menu on the appropriate box and choose "Edit Settings." You'll be able to upload your own 110x74 image to display in the box. You can also adjust the text that is used to describe the tab (overriding the Page Tab Name you set when you created your app). Click your image and you'll be taken to your custom tab, displaying the custom content you created.

Overriding iFrame Height

One problem we ran into is that the content we set up on our custom tab was taller than the iFrame Facebook created to display it. This caused the browser to add scrollbars which really looked messy. Fortunately, there is a way to tell Facebook to increase the height of the iFrame by including some Javascript in the code of the tab page itself. We'll include the code below in case you run into this issue. You would only need to include this if your iFrame content is more than 800px in height.

Include the following in the head of your html document. Replace HEIGHT-IN-PIXELS with the desired height for the iFrame. Be sure to replace it in both locations below.

And include the following just before the closing body tag. Be sure to replace YOUR-APP-ID with the numerical id of your app.

We took the plunge this week, updating the LightCMS Facebook page to work with the new timeline. I thought I'd take just a moment to share some tips and some of the things we learned in the process of updating our Facebook page.

The new LightCMS Facebook page in timeline view.

You Need a Cover Image

The cover image is the most striking improvement in timeline view and the only extra thing you absolutely must add to ensure your page looks right after the transition. Without a cover image, your page will look kind of strange in timeline view. But with a cover image, you can truly express your brand in a way never before possible on Facebook.

The cover image space is 851px wide and 315px tall. If your image isn't these exact dimensions, Facebook will size it to fit and allow you to drag the image up and down to center it on the part of the image you want to highlight. But why not create an image at exactly those dimensions so you can completely control the look and feel?

Your Last Uploaded Image is Now Very Important

In timeline view, Facebook now displays the last photo you uploaded in a very prominent place, just below the cover image at the top of your page (see the image above). This box cannot be moved or hidden and it will always show the last image uploaded. If you don't upload images to your page very frequently, an image may stay in this spot for a significant amount of time. So, it's worth checking how your images look in this space and, if you upload one that looks awkward here, you can always re-upload a different image to force it to display in this area.

New Opportunity for Branded, Custom Content

The other boxes to the right of the photos box now offer a new opportunity to integrate custom, branded content into your Facebook page through images representing your custom page tabs. If you have custom page tabs, you can now select custom imagery to place in these boxes and, when clicked, this imagery will direct you to your custom page tab content. These 110x74 pixel images give you a great place to add even more branded content to your main Facebook page. In the image above, you can see that we have added two custom images (the ones that say "Take the Tour" and "For Designers") in this way.

In typical Facebook page style, the method for updating the imagery to associate with your custom page tab is a little obscure, so we've laid out the steps for you below.

1. Once your custom tabs are installed, visit your Facebook page and click the small down-arrow icon to the right of the four boxes.
2. Hover over the tab whose image you wish to edit and click the edit icon that appears at the upper right.
3. Select "Edit Settings" from the menu that appears.
4. On the settings screen, you can change the Custom Tab Image and specify new text to use in the caption under the custom tab image as well.
5. Click "Okay" when finished.

In case you're wondering "What is a Facebook custom page tab?" you can check out the tutorial we wrote on creating custom page tabs last year. Just be aware that things have changed a bit since we published that article and we're working on an updated version of this tutorial to release soon.

A Few Other Items of Note

Here are a few more things that struck me as I began exploring Facebook's new timeline layout for pages.

• With Timeline, you can no longer set a default landing tab for non-fans who visit your page. All traffic to your page will be directed to the initial timeline view. We used to force non-fans to land on our "Welcome" tab when they visited our page. We can no longer do this, so we've gotten rid of the welcome tab and created tabs for other purposes. You can still link to a page tab with a direct URL.
• You can now allow Facebook users to message your page. Once they do, you can respond to them and have a private message conversation as your page. This was not previously possible.
• The timeline gives you the ability to highlight updates (which makes them span two columns and use larger text) and pin an update to the top (which keeps it at the top for seven days). These two features offer some nice, new opportunities to control the way updates display on your timeline.
• My favorite part of the new timeline is the ability to create milestones to tell the story of your company or product. If you enter the year you were founded, Facebook creates a "founded" milestone for you that you can edit to add more information and even photos. You can then add additional milestones for your company, associating pictures with them if you want. This is a neat way to document some significant things on your timeline.

I hope this has given you some insight into what's necessary and what's possible with Facebook's new timeline view for pages. Best of luck updating your own pages. If you have a page you've updated, please share it with us in the comments below. We'd love to check out what you've done!

With the Store Manager role, a user will be able to:

• Access the store menu items on the top toolbar 
• Adjust all store settings
• Add, edit and delete products
• Edit the settings on any product listing

The Store Manager role will be assigned by visiting a user's profile page. You'll find a check box for the Store Manager role immediately below the Administrators role. This check box will be visible only to Administrators and Account Owners who will be able to assign the role to any additional users on their site if they so choose.

The Store Manager role is scheduled to be released on Thursday, March 15th at approximately 10am CDT (GMT-5). We look forward to bringing you this update.

From left to right: Tim Wall, Marketing Director; Chad Jaggers, Support Director; Matthew Sanders, Creative Director; and Matt Grimm, Software Engineer and Designer.

The booth is looking great this year, with a new banner reflecting the design of the new LightCMS website and including an "iPad, please!" thought bubble. "Why the thought bubble?" you ask. It's a part of our iPad giveaway. Visitors to the LightCMS booth can take their photo under the thought bubble and tweet it to be entered to win an iPad. So far, we've had a good number of fun tweets and photos. You can check some of them out by searching Twitter for LightCMS.

Of course, the best part of any conference is always getting to have conversations with so many great people about the LightCMS product. We've talked to designers and agencies who make websites for their own clients as well as individuals looking to build websites for themselves or for their businesses. It's always great to see and hear their feedback as we demonstrate the product to them. 

This is the first conference we've attended since rolling out the new toolbar interface and the feedback on its look and feel has been very positive. "Beautiful," "sleek," and "intuitive" are some of the words we commonly hear from visitors to the booth as they interact with LightCMS. We also hear a lot of great reaction when we demonstrate the online store and how easily it integrates into any site. Of course, the flexibility of design and the reselling tools like client billing are always big hits with those who sell websites to their own clients.

Matt and Matt answer questions about LightCMS while Tim demonstrates the software.

Every year, it seems that the familiarity with software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms like LightCMS increases. When we started at SXSW four years ago, most people were familiar with downloadable products but had less familiarity with the concept of using an SaaS model. But each year, the pendulum shifts more toward the SaaS model. This year continues that trend, which helps to solidify our belief that the SaaS model provides a very desirable option and that LightCMS is on the right side of that trend.

That's the report from Austin for today. We appreciate those of you who have stopped by to see us while here. For those of you who are not here in Austin, we've got another announcement for you that should be posted tomorrow. It's a nice little feature add that's scheduled to roll out later this week so stay tuned!

Here's a typical view of the foyer of the Austin Convention Center. We took this from the level above. As you can see, there are lots of people here.

The big story thus far has been the rain. It has been raining in Austin since before we arrived here. As I am typing this, I am just seeing the clouds break up and rays of sunlight beginning to come through. That's a welcome sight.

Of course, this part of Texas desperately needs the rain so we can't complain too much. The only problem is that SXSW sessions take place in a number of buildings scattered across downtown Austin, so there is often a lot of outdoor walking involved. And, unfortunately, we only had one umbrella among the four of us. I had another umbrella, a nice big blue and white one I bought at Walmart before I left, but I conveniently left it in the registration room on day one and was unable to recover it. All this to say, we have gotten a little wet down here. In fact, here's a picture of Matt and Matt after walking to the convention center Saturday morning. I'm sorry the photo is a little blurry, but I just had to include it to illustrate all of this talk about the rain.

Matt (left) and Matt (right) after walking from the parking garage to the Convention Center in the rain.

Despite the rain, there are still plenty of good times to be had. Though we've been at SXSW for four consecutive years as an exhibitor, this is the first year we've actually been able to attend any of the sessions. In previous years, we've arrived just in time to set up and operate our booth. But this year, we came in early so we could be a part of the educational sessions SXSW has to offer.

There are hundreds of solo, dual, and panel-driven sessions on a wide-range of topics here at the Interactive Conference. From design and development to emerging technologies to PR to Journalism to Marketing and beyond. There truly is a lot to be learned here. Anyone involved in the Interactive space should be able to find sessions of interest to them.

One of my favorites so far has been an interview with Vic Gundotra, Senior VP Engineering for Google+ in a session devoted to talking about Google+. Now, I'm no Google+ devotee, but I do use it (did you know we actually have a LightCMS Google+ page?) and of course I'm interested in where the product is heading. Mr. Gundotra was a masterful presenter. If nothing else, I learned a lot about how to present your product in the best light possible. By the end of the session, my esteem for Google+ had increased at least ten times over due almost entirely to his performance.

We also took a break from the sessions to drive our little van into the giant exhibitor loading bay and roll our booth materials into the trade show area. We're in booth #605, which is a quaint little booth in a nice neighborhood with good visibility to the Northeast trade show entrance. We haven't met all of our neighbors yet but Red Laser is the big end cap on our aisle and directly across from us.

We're not finished setting up the booth just yet, but we'll post again soon with more pics of the booth and more details on the trade show portion of our trip. We're exited to be giving away three iPad 3s at the SXSW trade show so if you're here, be sure to come by for details on how you can win.

That's it for now. More details to come from Austin soon.

In this post, we're going to take a closer look at how the Design Editor works and how you can enable your own designs to work with it, if you so choose.

One of LightCMS's built-in designs loaded inside the new Design Editor. Click the image to view full size.

Accessing the Design Editor

Currently, account owners can access the Design Editor in the same way they have previously accessed our code-based editor. First, select "Design" on the top toolbar and then select the "My Designs" tab. This will show you a list of all the designs enabled on your current website. Select a design and then select the "edit" button. This will load up the new Design Editor.

Once the Design Editor loads, you may get a message indicating that your design isn't set up to work with the Design Editor. This is because all designs must be specifically enabled to work with the Design Editor. We have enabled all of the designs in our built-in design gallery. To grab one of our built-in designs, select the "Design Gallery" tab, choose a design and either apply it to your website or add it to "My Designs" (note: if you already have a design by the same name in "My Designs" the system will overwrite it with the design from the gallery).

Once you have an enabled design set up in "My Designs," you should be able to access the editor's controls.

Templates and Panels

Once the Design Editor is up and running, take a look at the very top left. You'll see the name of your design and just below it, you'll see the name of the currently-selected template. Selecting the template name will open a drop-down list of all the templates that can be edited within your current design.

Just below the template name, you'll see the name of the currently-selected panel. This will say something like "Base Styles," "Wrapper Styles," "Header Styles" ... etc. Selecting this will open a drop down of all the available panels for the currently-selected template (see image to the right). A panel is basically a set of controls that are assigned to a particular area of your template. For example, the "Nav Styles" panel presents a set of controls that adjust the design of the site's navigation. Each template may present a different list of available panels. This is because the designer of the template can determine what areas of the site are able to be controlled by the Design Editor.

Global vs. Template-Specific Panels

The Base Styles panel and the Nav Styles panel will make global changes to your design. Edits made on these two panels will be reflected across every template in your design. 

On the other hand, all other panels make template-specific changes. This means, for example, that you can adjust the sidebar or the header uniquely on each individual template in the design. Or, you can set them all the same. The choice is yours.

Behind the Scenes

The Design Editor implements its changes by creating a new CSS file called userstyles.css. This is an actual file that exists in your design files and it can be edited via the Advanced Editor (see below) or via FTP. However, each time new changes are saved by the Design Editor, the file is rewritten, so it is not advisable to make changes to the userstyles.css file directly as they can be easily lost.

The Advanced Editor

Our built-in code editor is still available by selecting the "Advanced Editor" button at the bottom of the Design Editor. The advanced editor functions exactly as it did before, allowing you to edit any of your HTML, CSS, JS and INC files directly inside the system. Of course, you can also still access these files by FTP.

Design Integration

One of the most powerful features of the Design Editor is the fact that it can be easily enabled to work with your own custom designs. The integration is simple, but done in a way to give the designer complete control over how his or her designs can be edited, if at all. You can enable editing on entire designs, specific templates, or even very specific areas of a page. Or, if you don't want to allow your designs to be edited, you don't have to.

Enabling the Design Editor on your designs is a simple process. We've recently published complete documentation on Design Integration which you can find here on our support site. If you need more information about creating custom designs for LightCMS in general, please see this section about Creating Designs.

Of course, you may be reading this post on the new LightCMS website and, if so, you've already seen this new design, but if not, you can take a look at it in the screenshot below and at www.lightcms.com.

Though much of our content remains the same in this version, it has been adapted and polished to fit with our sleek new design. The design was created by our very own Evan Brandell and, of course, our new site is powered by the world's leading website platform ... you guessed it ... LightCMS!

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.