September Recap

New Products & Benefits

• Trace - animate and draw SVG icons (formerly called SVG Paint)
• Contractor Theme (Build) - a fixed width responsive theme perfect for new Muse users
• Disqus - easily add user commenting to your website
• 3 new product tutorial videos 

In addition to the items above, we also launched a completely rebuilt (and highly optimized!) version of the MuseThemes core site. Based on our before and after comparisons, the new site loads over 1,200% faster and makes downloading products easier than ever before. Plus, we think it looks pretty sweet.

Existing Product Improvements:

• Sidebar Off-Canvas Menu - a complete widget rebuild. Improves responsive compatibility, adds additional customization and doubles the number of link options.
• Superhero - fixed child position issues and improved compatibility
  
  

Note - a great deal of our development time in September was devoted towards the MuseThemes core site upgrades, and the new projects outlined below.

October Projects & Priorities

(please note priorities and projects are subject to change)

 
New Projects:

• Snipcart Widget - Released this week, Snipcart is a powerful ecommerce system that features customer login/logout, a shopping cart and customizable cart buttons. Based on your feedback, we’re looking at adding subscription and recurring billing support immediately to this product so stay tuned for an update.
• Navigation / Gallery System - We are working on an extremely flexible gallery and site navigation system that can be used for very large projects and updated remotely by your clients or customers. I’m really excited about this product (more information below).
• Superhero Slideshow - A highly requested upgrade, we’ve modified our Superhero widget to also work as a fullscreen slideshow. Development is done and we’re currently testing this updated widget for release.
• Stacks - We have a new set of Stacks ready for production! The design is done, and we just need to build out the Muse files and package them up for release. Here’s a sneak peek:

Final Thoughts

Mega Navigation / Gallery Project

A common question and complaint we hear is that the Muse widget option panels are too limited. Users want to be able to add tons of images to galleries, add SEO information to those images (alt text and titles) and easily update the widget without redoing all of their work. It’s often a challenging decision for us to strike a balance between a flexible and customizable widget, without a huge intimidating option panel containing 1,000 options.

Our team has been researching new ways to “load" gallery or navigation content, and we’ve recently found a great way to do it (thanks to our developer Arifin for the discovery!). This new system uses a comfortable format that most computer users are familiar with, and supports clients making remote edits that update instantly on the live site.

I personally think it’s pretty ground breaking in the Muse space, and I’m super excited to release our first widget that supports it. While these products are still in testing and subject to change, we’re planning to push them live over the next two weeks.

Agent / CMS System

Agent has been quite the project for us – we’ve certainly learned a ton throughout this process. Our initial version of Agent CMS was nearly fully functional, but we ran into late roadblocks that really limited the flexibility of the system. It felt like we were taking away the freedom that Muse gives you, and creating a monster that would require us to rethink our entire company. I made the decision that it wasn’t smart for our small business to neglect the very thing that got us to this point (quality widgets / themes for Muse designers) and I had serious concerns about the ongoing support, development and security aspects of launching a proprietary CMS.

Rather than continuing to pursue Agent as something we built in-house, we began looking at other CMS systems that may play nice with Muse, and we found one that caught our eye. While not as powerful as a completely custom content management system, it does seem to satisfy many of the major requirements our users have asked for in a CMS. Based on our initial tests it works as expected, is simple to setup and even supports Business Catalyst (crazy right?).

So what does this all mean? It means we’re shutting down ongoing development of Agent, and shifting gears to an existing CMS. Please accept my sincerest apologies we did not deliver Agent as promised. We should not have announced it until we were 100% certain it was ready to go. Hindsight is always 20/20, and although I don’t regret taking on an aggressive project, I do realize we made a huge mistake announcing our plans too early and putting you in a tough spot with your clients.

Now to this existing CMS (no, it's not Wordpress). We’re planning to roll out training and setup instructions for it by the end of the month, pending the results of our final testing. Initially we may provide a couple of sample widgets for you to try out and provide feedback on. If you believe this CMS will satisfy your needs, we’ll dig deep into it and see how far we can expand it. If you don’t like it, we’ll shift gears to something else. We’re moving gently on this one...

As you can see we have a big month ahead! Lots of exciting new products on the horizon, along with some groundbreaking techniques that really push Muse beyond it’s current capabilities. The MuseThemes team will also be attending Adobe MAX in early November, so we may have a light week coming up while we’re away promoting Muse and actually interacting as physical beings (as opposed to online only).

Thanks as always for supporting MuseThemes.com – you guys are awesome!

Cheers
SH