SmugMug's Don MacAskill

We finished phase 2, are thrilled with the result and the reception, and dismayed that the rollout didn’t go flawlessly. That’s life, I guess, but we learned some lessons and will get better with our next release. Thanks for sticking with us – you really are the best customers anyone could ask for.

Phase 3 is coming right along, and should be a quick release. We’ll finish adding the new CSS code to the remaining Styles (Journal, Slideshow, Traditional, and All Thumbs) so you can continue to customize to your hearts content. Ditto for your personal homepages, community homepages, and misc other pages.

Phase 4, though, will be the really interesting one. I’m going to break company policy just this once, and talk about a future feature. We’re calling it ‘Themes’ and we’re only just beginning to flesh out how it will work. The basic idea, though, is that all smugmug accounts – Standard included – will have access to ‘Themes’ on a per-gallery basis. Think ‘Birthday Party’, ‘Halloween’, ‘Tropical Vacation’, and the like. Your entire gallery would then take on that ‘Theme’.

Even better, though, is we’ll have a great WYSIWYG interface where you can create your own themes, giving them your own names, and changing *every* detail within your gallery – from font colors to dashed lines to backgrounds. You then can save it and re-use it on any galleries you’d like. Don’t like the new green? Simply use one of the other Themes or create your own.

Note that this isn’t complete HTML and CSS control like Power Users and Pros get – you won’t be able to create your own banners for the header and remove the footer. This is purely making the gallery look & feel match the occasion behind the gallery.

No promises on when it’ll come out – we’re a ‘when it’s done’ company, so it could be quite awhile, but I wanted everyone to know that it’s coming.

Meanwhile, enjoy Phase 2. 🙂

Got a bunch of fixes and updates rolled out. I think everyone likes the speed increase the most. 🙂

Funny thing is, it was a stupid bug we introduced ourselves. Argh. Oh well, live and learn.