The downloads area now has a theme pack download, containing eight classic graphic design themes from exsitewebware.com.  You can install these themes right into your websites, or use them as learning examples to inspect for ideas on creating your own themes.

The 3.6.1 (stable) kernel and plug-in distros are now available for download in the downloads area.  These are suitable for production website work.

The 3.6.1 plug-in distro includes a few new plug-ins, including:

• Cron - scheduled task management
• Fileserver - manage folder trees of downloadable files
• LocationFinder - searchable directory of store locations
• Login - dynamic generation of Login/Logout links and forms
• PluginBuilder - developer tool to generate plugin code stubs
• StoreAdm - manage persistent data
• SysMsg - manage system messages in translation
• Tags - keyword tagging for content
• ToDo - display webmaster to-do list for CMS tasks that need attention

ExSite 3.6 has a number of design refreshes, including a new webtop theme.  We are discarding our old blue theme for one that allows more colour.  (Okay, the theme itself is actually grey, but the icons are more colourful.)  That also means that many of the icons for the standard plug-ins have been updated as well.

Plug-ins are now displayed on the webtop, sorted by category.  There are four categories that are defined by default:

• Content Management
• Applications
• System
• Database

Plug-ins can optionally declare their category, but if they do not, they will be placed into "Applications".  For most non-standard plug-ins that is a reasonable choice, so in most cases no changes are needed to use this feature.

You can create your own categories and place your plug-ins into them, simply by having your plug-ins declare a category other than those above.

Control panels and stylesheets have been adjusted for this new look.  On your first visit to the new control panels, you may cache previous versions of these stylesheets, which will produce bad formatting.  A simple refresh of your browser should update everything.