It's an exciting time for the Element Fusion development team. Right now, there are several major enhancements to our CMS systems that are in development. These are huge improvements and therefore, they require significant development time. So, we wanted to give you just a glimpse at what's on the horizon so you can be as excited as we are about what's brewing.

Complete billing and account management overhaul

This is the grand daddy of all upgrades. In fact, it's not just an upgrade, it's a complete rewrite of the entire billing and account management functionality in the CMS system. It's been in development for months and we're still about a month out from having it ready, but let me assure you, the wait will be well worth it.

I don't want to overstate things, but let's just say ... um ... you're going to love it. We're talking easier management of websites, better billing options, and detailed reporting on charges and invoicing. The feedback we've received from you over the years has guided this development.  We can't wait to show it to you.

This upgrade is priority number one and will be the next big thing to roll out on the CMS. In a happy coincidence, it will line up perfectly with our appearance at SXSW this year.

New element, Photo Gallery improvements, and more

In addition to the monster overhaul described above, we're also working on a few other things simultaneously. These will likely roll out after the billing system, but you can look forward to a brand new element (a secret for now), plus further improvements to the Photo Gallery Element and several other enhancements to our server infrastructure to keep things running smoothly.

Tomorrow morning, we'll be rolling out improved search functionality on our LightCMS, SkyCMS, and WaterCMS systems. All websites running on these products will receive the upgrade automatically at no extra charge. The search functionality is completely rebuilt, offering a much improved experience. Here's a look at what will change:

1. Everything runs faster and indexing takes place a lot faster, so content can be indexed more frequently (two times per day).
2. Search results are generated at the page level instead of the element level, making the results much easier to decipher.
3. Search results are paginated for a more orderly display.
4. The search terms are now highlighted on the search results page.
5. The search field now supports some basic inputs such as boolean logic (using "AND" or "OR"), phrases (using quotes), and exclusions (using NOT).

There you have it. The upgrade won't require any changes on your part. Just go searching and things will work a lot better. And also, stay tuned in the weeks ahead as we've got even more search improvements on the horizon.

Scheduled downtime

The update is scheduled for 9:00am CST (GMT-6) on Thursday, December 18th, 2008. There will be a minimal period of downtime (estimated at less than 5 minutes) as the changes go live on the system.

One of the new features released yesterday was the addition of a slideshow skin to the photo gallery element. This allows for some exciting new applications, including the ability to create a feature image slideshow to really spice up your site. The tutorial video below demonstrates the new photo gallery features and shows you how to easily replace the feature image on our included templates with your own slideshow.

We've got a major release of new features scheduled for tomorrow on our LightCMS, SkyCMS and WaterCMS products, so we wanted to give you the heads up. These are some major enhancements and some items that many of you have asked for so we know you're going to really love this release. We'll follow up in a couple of days with more details.

Blog tagging or categories

Some call 'em tags, some call 'em categories. We're calling 'em tags but they also work just like categories. You'll be able to assign any number of tags to any blog post. It's easy. Then, once you've added tags to your posts, you can create lists of all of your tags where users can click a tag to view all posts with that tag. And, for the super fancy blogger out there, we've even created a built-in "tag cloud" view as well. Of course, for the designers, the tag lists are marked-up as lists so you can style them however you want.

Photo gallery slideshows

The photo gallery gets a huge upgrade with the slideshow skin. This lets you display the images in your photo gallery one at a time, transitioning  from one image to the next. You can control several settings including whether you want the system to resize your images and to what size, how you want the slideshow to transition (fading, scrolling, or no transition), plus length of transition and duration of each slide hold. This hugely requested item is super easy to set up, giving you the power to make a real visual splash on your site.

Improved photo gallery captions

Also on the photo gallery, you will now have the ability to add longer photo names and rich text captions, including links. The new image information can be edited via our familiar WYSIWYG editor allowing you to set up detailed image information.

Launch and downtime

This exciting release is scheduled to launch tomorrow morning, Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 7am Central Standard Time (GMT -6). There will be a minimal period of downtime (less than 15 minutes) as the changes are rolled out. We will follow up with more information including links to new support articles on using these features soon after release.