Element Fusion

If you have a website on our WaterCMS, SkyCMS or LightCMS content management system products, you’ll notice some improvements when you log in starting in a couple of weeks. These changes don’t affect your public websites in any way. They only affect what you see when you are logged in and managing your website.

If you are a designer using LightCMS, you should take a look at our article on the LightCMS blog which overviews these coming changes from a LightCMS designer’s perspective. This article here will focus primarily on the changes as they relate to our end user clients on WaterCMS or SkyCMS.

[please note that screenshots presented here are preliminary and may differ slightly from the end product when it is released]

New look for the top toolbar

The first thing that’s changing is the look of the top toolbar. It’s being redesigned with an updated look that no longer uses drop-down menus but still gives you one-click access to the pages you need. Here’s a look at the new toolbar.

Additionally, you can customize the colors of the top toolbar if you wish. In fact, the ability to customize colors is already live and available for you, in case you want to make your adjustments before the new toolbar actually goes live in a couple of weeks. This functionality primarily exists for our LightCMS customers, but users of WaterCMS and SkyCMS my also want to take a look. Access the toolbar color settings under “My Account –> Account Settings" or find out more about setting toolbar colors on the LightCMS blog

New look for admin pages

The second big change is that all editing screens will now have a unified look and feel matching the look and feel of the top toolbar. Currently, when you go to edit a piece of content, the editing interface is presented on a template that is a part of the design of your website. We’re changing this to where the interface will be presented on a system template that matches the look and feel of the CMS tools. You'll still see the editing control bars overlaid on your website content as normal, but when you click to edit a piece of content, the controls will be presented in a unified admin interface. Here’s a look at an example, showing the WYSIWYG editor in its new interface.

There are lots of reasons we are making these changes. First off, they make a great visual improvement to the system overall. Secondly, they make things consistent throughout the system, whereas now some admin screens use system templates while others use website templates.

Perhaps the most important reason, however, is that these changes set us up to create much better user interfaces for all our tools in the future. As long as we are allowing each website to have a unique template for its editing screens, we are severely limited in how much functionality we can implement on these screens without causing conflicts or other issues. Moving to a consistent, system template for all editing screens will enable us to provide much better tools for you in the future.

Tentatively scheduled for Thursday, June 17th

We have tentatively scheduled the launch of these improvements for next Thursday, June 17th. Please stay tuned to our blog and Twitter feed for more details as the time of launch nears.