Gutensite is a powerful Content Management System, with lots of industry-specific, niche functionality, as well as a lot of advanced settings that give you a lot of control over various aspects of your site. But our goal is to keep things as simple as possible so that it's intuitive and easy to use.

One of the ways we do this, is by allowing you to specify which features you want on your site. So we have a features page that lets you toggle features on/off as you need them. This will hide unnecessary fetures in the Admin, so if you don't need "communities", "service directories", "links", etc., just toggle them off. You can reactive them if you change your mind.

We've gone through the entire CMS and replaced the old Flash slideshows with new HTML5 compatible slideshows that look much nicer and best of all will display on iPads, iPhones, and other Mobile Devices that support HTML5.

We've also simplified the way slideshows are created throughout all the content types. Before you had to create a slideshow and then select it in the page you wanted to display it on. But now, you just select the images you want for whatever content type you are editing, e.g. blog, news, portfolio, etc. And if there are multiple images, we automatically turn it into a slideshow. It's super easy!

We've made some important changes to the portfolio that make it much easier to create/manage your portfolio, and also added features that help the portfolio better looking for your visitors.

Easy Slideshows. If you want a portfolio piece to display a slideshow of images, we no longer require the additional step to create an independent slideshow. Instead, you can just select or upload multiple images directly.

HTML5 Slideshow. We've gotten rid of the old Flash slideshow, and we now use our standard HTML5 compatible, mobile friendly slideshow.

Slideshow or List View. Sometimes you want to show a slideshow of your images, while at other times you may want to show a list so people can see all the images in a single view. We now give you the option to choose how the slideshow appears by default, and visitors have the option of toggling between the two views if there are 4 or more images in the list. In the list view, if there are less than 12 images, we display a two column layout with larger images for a more impressive page. If there are 12 or more images, we show a three column layout with smaller images. From the list view, if a visitor selects an image, it will load the slideshow view and display the requested image in the list. Then visitors can scroll through the other images in the slideshow, or go back to the list view if they want.

One of our biggest problems is finding enough time to promote ourselves. We are adding powerful new features to Gutensite all the time, which meet client needs or wishes, but we don't have time to brag about them because we're off to the next project. But over the years we've created a very powerful eCommerce Store with loads of options for customization. We have some companies with highly complex product requirements that stretch us to innovate features that meet their demands.

This week we added some brand new features and revamped some old ones. Existing functionality allowed you to create Custom Fields that could be attached to products. These fields could be admin-facing (require input from the administrator when the product is created and later display static content to the customer) or they could be customer-facing (require input from the customer when they checkout). Well, we just recently added the ability for customer-facing Custom Fields to have specific Price Modifications for each option.

So lets say you sell t-shirts, and you want people to choose a size. You can create a customer-facing select field with options for small, medium, large and XXL. And then for the XXL option, you may want to specify that it costs $2.50 extra. So when they choose XXL the cart adjusts the price. You also have the option of specifying whether or not the price modification is effected by discounts and/or if it should flag for manual processing for some business reason. If the person uses a coupon for 10% discount, you may not want the price modification to adjust but remain a flat $2.50 because the extra cost is related to an external non-discountable factor, so they would get 10% on the base t-shirt price and then another $2.50 added on if they choose XXL. Price Modifications can also be negative numbers, so when a customer selects an option with a negative price modification, their total is reduced (comes in handy sometimes).

While we were at it, we revamped the cart so that the subtotals update with the complex combinations of coupon and membership discounts, quantity, and custom field price modifications. We also revamped the custom delivery options, which allow for a lot of complex user and product specific checks to determine eligibility for specific shipping options.

We believe these new features will come in real handy to a lot of clients. If you have your own ideas on how we can improve things, let us know.

If you looked at our Blog, lately, you might conclude one of two things: 1) Gutensite must not have much to report, 2) Gutensite must be too crazy busy to blog about all the great things that are happening. If you chose door number two, you win. Go have a free website, on us. Unfortunately, I have to admit, blogging is not a high priority compared to all the other important things that demand my time (as much as I would love to spend my day sitting in a coffee shop blogging about how cool we are).

But the truth is, we've been working on lots of great new features that we've been releasing to our community. We've also hired three new people in the last couple months to help meet your needs in a timely fashion and help us meet our own ambitious development goals.

Here is a list of the top of my head of some of the things we've been doing (on top of all the custom work we do for specific client projects, which keeps us extremely busy):

• Released Total Overhaul of MLS Pages and Features for Realtors.
• Added Directions to the "Map & Directions" Page.
• Major Server Upgrade.
• Comprehensive Data Caching to dramatically speed up page loads.
• New Admin Controls for Tons of Display Preferences.
• Additional Calendar display feature now hides past events in list view.
• New Social Media Sharing and Printing options for Articles, News, FAQ, Portfolio, Property Pages (in addition to Blog)
• New Promo Module Options for Link Lists, Multi-Tab Popups, etc.
• New Discussion Forums Functionality.
• Third Party API for the Store, Accounts, and others.
• Exciting new "Site View" (in progress) to redefine the way you build your site and organize your menu in one fancy visual interface.

I'm sure there are a lot more things but I've gotta get back to work!

We are proud to announce the launch of a new flagship Gutensite website for Alain Pinel, a local Luxury Real Estate Broker with about 1300 agents in the San Francisco Bay Area. We created the first Bay Area Open House Search website, which has integrated live property data from the four independent Multiple Listing Services in the area. This in itself was a Herculean feat, since they all follow separate data standards, so we had to create a shared standard of our own. The new seamlessly integrates this data, and provides additional features such as: map based searches, property mapping, street view, directions, favorites, RSS subscription, email alerts, and open house route planning for multiple properties.

Alain Pinel has created this site as a way to save them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by weaning themselves off weekly print advertising for open house announcements which costs them a fortune. This website can not only save them tremendous amounts of money, but it also gives people the ability to view live results with all the extra features of searching from the convenience of their home whenever and wherever they want. It's a huge improvement for their customers, and we hope it becomes the favored standard for property searching in the Bay Area.

The new APR site used our standard core MLS functionality but we used this opportunity to make a lot of improvements that we've been planning for a while. So in time, our other clients will find many of these same features integrated in the default MLS features that power their site as well.