Several new elements have been added to the CMS to lay the groundwork for some new ways to display content on the public site. These new elements are in beta right now, but we want to mention them since you'll see them appearing in your menus in the CMS.  This will give you a sense of some of the new features you'll have available to in the coming months:

Where did the "Pages" menu go?

Pages are now found under the new 'Content" menu.  The content menu contains your pages as a sub-menu item,  as well as a new menu item for future use called "Content Types"

Content Types will be used as a method of organizing your content for use in the new listing blocks that we're adding to the CMS for future use:

New Blocks:

You'll see three new block types under the blocks menu that are in beta and being tested for future use:

Featured Oportunities Block (HOC3-1742)

The featured opportunies CMS Block will allow users to display a selection of opportunities based on specific criteria pulled dynamically from a search.  It'll make it possible to dynamically show a list of opportunities based on a stated criteria such as "upcoming opportunities" 'Featured Opportunities" "Holiday Opportunities" etc. You'll be able to display these opportunities in a number of different formats.

Listing CMS Block (HOC3-1821)

This block will allow users to organize and display 'list-like' content such as events, blogs, job opportunities, news, etc.  You can organize page content here by creating 'content types', and in the future you'lll be able to create lists that pulll data diretly from from Salesforce. We're also planning to make it easier to bring in content from external feeds, Rss, etc.

Search Result

This one is so super-secret the developers haven't told us what wonderful thing they have in store for us in the future.  We'll tell you more about what this will be used for as this block enters its beta phase.

For now, don't worry about these new blocks. But we wanted you to know that these are laying the groundwork for a more powerful CMS, that can display your content in smart and attractive ways. We'll be providing you with more information in the coming months on how to use these exciting new content options.

The Image Slider block has a number of new options in the advanced settings section of the block:

• You can disable auto play  (pictures won't automatically change, unless you click on the butons to move to the next image.
• Effect - you can choose to have images 'slide' or simply change from one image to the next "fade"
• Images per slide:  If you don't want to have a single, large, cinematic landscape image in the slider, you can now choose to display more than one image across the space used by the slider.

We continue to make improvements to each of the new themes available for HandsOn Connect.  Each of the six new themes  has its own style sheets and as these new themes are starting to be used by more and more 3.0 customers, we continue to make improvements to the look and readability of each theme.  

This release includes a number of theme improvements and fixes, as well as improvements for those 3.0 users using 'custom themes'.

Issues with white text not being visible in some themes and color schemes have been addressed and corrected.

For a short while, the previously available "log in with Facebook" and "register with Facebook" buttons were no longer visible.  This has been fixed.