November Recap

New Products & Benefits

• Age Verification – New widget offering website access restriction based on birth date. Updated mid-November to include language options and other features based on user requests.
  
  
• Photo Filters – New widget that allows you to apply photo filters (black and white, sepia, etc.) to placed images using CSS. This saves you from having to use separate images for rollovers and reduces load speed.
  
  
• Stack: Move – Fitness-inspired Stack featuring our OnLoad Animator widget, adding subtle motion effects.
  
  
• Surreal CMS Training Series – A complete training series outlining how to integrate the third party CMS system, "Surreal," into Adobe Muse sites.
  
  
• 6 new and updated product tutorial videos.

HTTPS Transition – You may not have noticed, but we also transitioned the entire MuseThemes site to HTTPS this month (rather than just payment / checkout pages). This improves site security and better complies with Google's recommendations for the future. All MuseThemes links will now redirect to the https version, and display a valid lock symbol in the address bar.

Adobe MAX – The MuseThemes team attended Adobe MAX in November, where we had a chance to catch up with the Adobe team and make some requests to the future development of the product. Fingers crossed we see some of these additions in the following year! We did also manage to have some fun while we were at it (and nearly die surfing).

Existing Product Improvements:

We pushed out a ton of product updates this month!

• Carousel Image Slider (v1.3) - Doubled image capacity from 20 to 40 images.
  
  
• Sidebar Connect (v1.3) - Fixed text alignment issues, as well as H1 tag text sizing bug. Also added color control for arrows within menu items.
  
  
• Instagram Feed (v1.6) - Improved lightbox support and open location on mobile devices.
  
  
• Animated Page Transitions (v1.1) - Optimized javascript library.
  
  
• Tockify Event Calendar (v1.1) - Optimized javascript library.
  
  
• Cinch Slideshow (v1.5) - Fixed bug causing images to stack after page reloads in IE and Edge browsers, fixed bug causing nav dots to become displaced in IE and Edge browsers.
  
  
• Custom Cursor (v1.1) - Fixed issue causing widget to malfunction in IE and Edge browsers. Page must be published to see custom cursor.

December Projects & Priorities

(please note priorities and projects are subject to change)

 
New Projects:

• Compose Theme – A single page responsive theme, perfect for text content-rich websites. This one feels a little less artistic and more utilitarian than our other themes, and works well for clients without a wide selection of imagery or photos to work with.
  
  
• Chart Connect – 1 of 3 new Connect series widgets under development, Chart Connect lets you create beautiful bar, pie and line graphs using a linked Google Sheet.
  
  
• Content Connect (BETA) – We're aiming to push out a beta release of our Content Connect widget before Christmas, which is designed to create articles and text content using our Connect system. This one is exciting but complex, and we may push the beta release to the new year if quality concerns arise.
  
  
• Table Connect (BETA) – Table Connect will use our spreadsheet integration system to pull in data tables in a slick Muse format. Stay tuned for this beauty.

Final Thoughts

Looking Back – 2016 Releases

Wow, it's hard to believe another year has passed! 2016 was an epic and crazy year for Adobe Muse, with the introduction of responsive design. Responsive Muse certainly introduced some challenges to our business, causing unexpected widget behavior and interesting (...infuriating) development obstacles to find our way around. It took a few months, but we've now got a good handle on responsive and how to develop seamless widgets going forward.

Thanks for sticking with us through this transition and giving us time to adapt to the new version. I'm proud to say in 2016 we released the following:

• 12 Themes
• 21 Widgets
• 4 Stacks
• 92 Widget Updates
• 70 videos, including two full training series

We sent an email update every single week this year, with the exception of our Adobe MAX conference week. This totals over 2.6 million emails to Muse users just like you.

Looking Forward – 2017 Planning & Survey

With 2017 fast approaching, we're sitting down to plan our goals and release calendar for the upcoming year.

For several years now we've done a Customer Survey at Christmas to get some feedback from our users on products they would like us to build, and the areas we could improve. We always donate $1 from every completed survey to charity, and your responses this year will push us over $10,000 donated to charities for children.

Watch for our annual survey to hit your inbox within the next week. It's quick, taking only 5 minutes to fill out. Each response is reviewed closely, so if you're dying for a particular product here is a great chance to get it on our radar (plus donate to charity!).

Lastly, our team will be taking some time off over Christmas to rest up, build new products and "get pumped" about the year ahead. We will continue to offer product support over the holidays, however there will be no new product releases between Dec 21 and Jan 4.

That’s a wrap for 2016! Thanks for another great year, and for your continued support. Happy holidays from the team at MuseThemes, and we hope you have a great holiday break.

High five!