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.

As of ExSite version 3.6 (entering beta at this time), ExSite will be adding Safari to its list of browsers that are supported for WYSIWYG HTML editing.  This brings the list of supported Browsers to:

• Firefox (all versions)
• IE version 6 and up
  
• Mozilla version 1.4 and up, and related Gecko browsers like Seamonkey and Camino
  
• Netscape version 7 and up
  
• Safari version 3 and up
  

Safari version 3 is required, which is standard on OS X 10.5 and Windows Safari releases.

We added a plug-in index, which contains documentation on usage and setup for various plug-in modules.

We have 40 or 50 plug-ins that should probably be entered into this index when we have the time, so it will grow as we get the time to do this.  In the mean time, we've added some of the basic plug-ins to get things started.

We recently took some time out to refresh our graphic design.  The old design was getting a little stale, and we thought it might also make a useful tutorial about graphic design with ExSite if we wrote it up.  So we did.

Despite appearances, the site content has not changed much.  A few things may appear to have moved around due to the new layout, but it's actually pretty much the same.  Try the search link at top if you're truly lost.