The fall football season rolls on and tonight we're rolling out a handful of new updates to the WaterCMS, SkyCMS and LightCMS systems. Please take a look through what is new and see our notes about maintenance and scheduled downtime below.

Design template archiving

For designers who work on design template files, this one is big. We're excited to add archiving of all save points on HTML, CSS, and JS template files on every design on every website. So now, as you make changes to your design template files, you can easily roll back and restore previous versions. The saving happens automatically every time you save a file either inside our editing interface or via FTP.

Non-Latin character support

We're updating our database to offer support for non-Latin characters on all user-editable content areas. You will now be able to enter content in non-Latin languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Cyrillic ... etc. The only exception at this point is our form builder, which will not support non-Latin characters just yet, though we do plan to complete that in a future upgrade. Non-Latin characters will be supported in all other areas where you enter content. This has been an often requested feature and we're excited to roll it out.

Captions in Photo Gallery slideshows

Another photo gallery slideshow enhancement is included in this release. This time, it's the ability to overlay a photo's caption on top of the lower portion of the image in slideshow mode. Simply edit your caption, then check the new box in your photo gallery skin settings.

Scheduled maintenance window and expectations

While our feature upgrades generally do not require system downtime, the non-Latin character portion of this upgrade requires us to make significant changes to the system databases. As a result, we need to schedule a one-hour maintenance window to complete these changes. During this one hour window, we anticipate a period of sporadic service and possible downtime lasting approximately 45 minutes. As a result of these requirements, we are scheduling this upgrade at the period of lowest system usage. Our maintenance window will be Thursday morning, October 22nd from 1am to 2am Central Daylight Time (GMT-5).

This morning's major server upgrades were a success. We're excited to announce that our LightCMS, WaterCMS, SkyCMS and Icebrrg products are now up and running in our much-expanded hosting environment. Everything remains hosted at our top-tier datacenter which provides multiple redundancies on all critical systems. The hardware expansions implemented this morning improve our server redundancies and exponentially expand our server resources.

Though we had scheduled a four-hour maintenance window to plan for all contingencies, system downtime during the upgrades was limited to a total of thirty minutes over the period of 1am to 2am CDT.

We are very excited about these improvements and confident that they will make a major impact on our system performance. As always, we will continue to monitor and test the system to ensure its stability and performance.

And by the way, these upgrades are not related to the Fall Kickoff upgrades I mentioned earlier this week. Those exciting new features are still in the works for this coming week, so stay tuned. Great things ahead!

If you read our blog last week, this post will sound familiar. That's because we scheduled some major server upgrades last weekend (read our post about them here) but, due to unforeseen complications, we had to revert back to our prior configuration (read details about the reversion here). At that time, we indicated we would look to reschedule these planned upgrades sometime in mid-October.

Well, our development team just couldn't let things go that long. They've been working overtime this week exploring and testing and they are confident and ready to reschedule the upgrades for this coming weekend. Just to review, here's a little bit about what we're planning.

This upgrade will add a handful of new web servers, file servers, database servers and caching servers to our already robust hosting environment. In addition, we will be enhancing our load balancing technology with the latest and most advanced equipment available. These changes are designed to increase our server redundancies and provide plenty of headroom for growth as we look to the future.

Of course, just like last time, massive improvements such as these require us to take our systems offline for a period of time while changes are made. We apologize for this inconvenience and we are scheduling our upgrades at the period of lowest possible system usage in order to minimize the impact of the upgrades. The good news is that our team is able to reduce our maintenance window by two hours this time.

Please be advised that our LightCMS, WaterCMS, SkyCMS and Icebrrg software systems will go offline for upgrades on Saturday morning, September 26th, 2009. Our upgrade window will be from 1:00am to 5:00am CDT (GMT -5). We are aiming for a total downtime of less than two hours, but we need to have the four hour window in place to plan for all contingencies. Throughout the upgrade period, we will be providing updates on our status page at status.elementfusion.com. Our status page is hosted on a completely separate system, so it will remain online throughout the upgrade process.

Thank you again for your continued support through this process. We are still very excited about these improvements and we look forward to having the systems up and running in their new configuration. These upgrades will not only provide immediate performance improvements but also set us up for continued growth and expansion for years to come.

Yesterday, we announced our plans to add some major upgrades to our server infrastructure for our LightCMS, WaterCMS, SkyCMS and Icebrrg products. Today, we initiated the upgrade process but, due to some complications, we decided to postpone the upgrades and revert to our prior hosting setup.

What happened?

We ran into some network routing complications that couldn't be adequately addressed within the confines of our maintenance window. As a result, we decided to postpone the upgrades. As soon as that decision was made, we reverted to our previous hosting setup as quickly as possible in order to minimize downtime.

How long was the system down?

Though we had scheduled a six hour maintenance window to allow for this contingency, the system was only down a total of one hour and fifteen minutes. This downtime was spread out over the period of 1:30am to 3:15am CDT. For approximately thirty minutes of what we are calling "downtime," the system was actually up and running with only a few pieces of functionality unresponsive.

What's the plan now?

For now, everything has been restored to full functionality exactly as it was before the upgrade attempt. It is still our plan to perform these upgrades, and we are tentatively rescheduling the upgrades for approximately one month from now, or sometime around mid-October. We will, of course, provide more specifics as the time approaches. 

Why wait so long?

One reason is so that we can fully investigate the issues we encountered before making a new attempt. The other reason is to avoid interfering with some additional upgrades we have planned to roll out on the system in the next few weeks. There are some exciting things in the works that we'll be sharing more about hopefully next week.

Is your current hosting infrastructure sufficient?

Yes. We have more than enough server headroom to accommodate our current traffic loads and even multiples of them. While we are very committed to accomplishing these new server upgrades, we do not consider them essential to our service at this point. That said, we are constantly monitoring and working to improve our system and we will respond as needed to any issues that may arise.

Thank you for your support

Thanks to all of you for your support. We received several positive emails in reply to yesterday's announcement of our upgrades and we appreciate that greatly. Rest assured, these scaling plans are still in place. We look forward to continuing to serve as your online partner.

As a part of our continuing effort to stay ahead of demand and provide our customers with the best possible experience, we are planning a major upgrade to our hosting infrastructure this weekend. This upgrade will add a handful of new web servers, file servers and caching servers to our already robust hosting environment. In addition, we will be enhancing our load balancing technology with the latest and most advanced equipment available. These changes are designed to increase our server redundancies and provide plenty of headroom for growth as we look to the future.

Unfortunately, massive improvements such as these require us to take our systems offline for a period of time while changes are made. We apologize for this inconvenience and we are scheduling our upgrades at the period of lowest possible system usage in order to minimize the impact of the upgrades.

Please be advised that our LightCMS, WaterCMS, SkyCMS and Icebrrg software systems will go offline for maintenance on Saturday morning, September 19th, 2009. Our maintenance window will be from 1:00am to 7:00am CDT (GMT -5). We are aiming for a total downtime of less than two hours, but we need to have the six hour window in place to plan for all contingencies. Throughout the upgrade period, we will be providing updates on our status page at status.elementfusion.com. 

Thank you for your patience and understanding. We are excited about these improvements which will not only improve things immediately but set us up for a host of performance improvements we have planned for the coming months. We look forward to continuing to serve as your online partner in the years ahead.

We're continuing to roll out pieces of our billing system overhaul, heading toward the big finale coming soon. Today, we added another step in that direction with the launch of our account messaging system. This system provides notices to you, as the account holder, about important issues with your account, especially relating to payment problems that could lead to service interruption. These messages are never seen by your clients or other website users. Only the account holder sees these messages when logged in.

We've added this feature to help ensure that we're communicating with you in every way possible regarding your account. We already send out email notifications whenever there is a critical message to communicate. This internal messaging just adds another layer of communication. Please keep in mind that if there is ever a problem with payment on your account and you need help, we are always here to work with you so please just contact us and we'll walk you through what you need to do.

One nice thing about the new messaging system is that you can "close" messages after you have read them and they will go away.

The new messaging system rolled out alongside a bunch of other behind-the-scenes improvements, taking us another step closer toward our new account and billing interface. Stay tuned.

Here's a look at how the messages will look inside your account.

On Monday, March 30th, 2009, we have scheduled a maintenance window from 1:00am to 4:00am Central Daylight Time (GMT-5) for the servers powering WaterCMS, SkyCMS, LightCMS and Icebrrg. This window will be used to upgrade our server configuration to increase performance and accommodate the growing demand for our products.

Potential downtime

The system will go offline during the upgrade process which means that all of the products and the websites running on those products, will be inaccessible during the upgrade. While the window of potential downtime is three hours as outlined above, it is highly unlikely the downtime will last that long. In the past, similar upgrades have resulted in between 10-15 minutes of downtime and we anticipate similar results this time. The downtime could happen at any time during the maintenance window, but we anticipate it happening at the beginning of the window.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this downtime — especially to those of you outside of the Americas where the time of this upgrade is potentially more inconvenient. We have to make difficult decisions about when to schedule downtime based upon the usage patterns of all our customers, and we appreciate everyone's understanding in the process.

Thanks again and we look forward to continually providing you with the best possible performance and support.