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.