We’ll be sending more information about these merchandise updates out to all our Fotobroker users early next week, but just in case anyone misses the memo… here’s a summary of what’s been changed.

First and foremost, we’re adding an entirely new stainless steel water bottle for use with photo reprints. Enameled in white, these lightweight, eco-friendly bottles have easily the best reproduction qualities of any merchandise we’ve ever seen, so your photos will print crisp and true on a long-lasting product. They’re a little lighter-duty grade of water bottle than the backpackers use, but still well made. They come with a black mini-carabiner and black plastic top. Suggested retail, printed with the photo of choice, is $24.95.

Second, we’re happy to announce the return of the black 110z enamel mug, by popular demand. It adds a little variety, at very little extra cost, for your most-popular-product class. Suggested retail is $14.95. See the sample photos at left/above, shown here with a truly great summer feature photo by Rick Cinclair of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Gryphon’s user base is growing more and more rapidly of late, and we’ve been thinking it’s about time we created a forum to help staffers at our client publications connect and share ideas. In that spirit, we just opened a Google Group for users of the Gryphon CMS and other Detroit Softworks services. We hope it will prove a useful venue to discuss the software and online journalism in general, as well as to interact with Detroit Softworks’ staff outside of the formal “support” apparatus.

Intrigued? Head to groups.google.com/group/detroitsoftworks to join.

The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina has relaunched its website this week using the Gryphon CMS, and we couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. The DTH has been a Fotobroker user for years — and they’ve held the #1 spot in our records for one-day sales by a college newspaper for almost as long — so we already know they do things the smart way. We’re looking forward to watching them make the most of what Gryphon has to offer.

We’d like to offer a big round of Detroit applause (breaking glass, gunfire, sirens, loud guitars and thumping bass :) and our sincere thanks to Kevin and Erica and their gifted crew for their efforts in bringing this all together. Welcome, Heels.

It’s a good news/bad news kind of thing, but the photo-printed sweatshirts are no longer available through Fotobroker – and they’ve been removed from our product lists for every site. This only affects a small percentage of Fotobroker users, as not very many of you offered the sweatshirts.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the sweatshirts will be replaced with pullover ‘hoodie’ sweatshirts sometime before the cold weather sets in. We’ll be sending more info to all of our users once we have the specific product information all nailed down.

We’re looking forward to adding The Daily Reveille, the student newspaper at Louisiana State U in Baton Rouge, to our list of Fotobroker users later this summer. A tip of our hat to Ellen K. for her assistance in getting that rolling. Thanks!

And now freshly out of development is Texas Tech University’s The Daily Toreador Fotobroker site at reprints.dailytoreador.com – thanks to Andrea W. and Susan P. for their help with this one. Texas Tech and LSU… football season may never be the same.

In what has become an annual tradition, we’d like to extend a big Thank You to the folks of WAUPM. We’ve just returned from the Western Association of University Publications Managers’ annual meeting, hosted this year in downtown San Antonio, Texas. As usual the location was picturesque and the food terrific (thanks Susan and Linda!), and like last year, we came away with a deep sense of gratitude for the things we learn while in the company of this group. (And I’m not referring specifically to the Margarita recipe, as far as you know, nor the fact that we can now tell the difference between good tequila and the kind with the plastic hat.)

It was just a year ago — during the 2009 annual WAUPM meeting in Baltimore — that we first announced our hosted CMS service. Since then, we’ve added five more newspapers to our CMS client roster (two of them WAUPM members), revamped our Fotobroker Admin Tools, launched a bunch of new Fotobroker sites, upgraded all of our hardware and moved into a new colocation facility. It’s been a big year, and thanks are due in no small part to strong support from WAUPM member schools — more than a dozen of them use Gryphon or Fotobroker (or both) — that we’ve been able to survive the economic rollercoaster of the last two years in order to reach this turning point in our company’s evolution.

Speaking of evolution and Thanks Due, this month marks Patrick Wellever’s first anniversary with our company. I think it’s fair to say we’ve been pleased with his performance, given that he’s improved everything he’s touched in a nonstop, rarely-sleeping kind of way since we first convinced him to leave Beijing and start working with us last spring. His work is remarkable when viewed up close, for sure, but when you step back and see how much ground we’ve covered in the last year thanks to his efforts, it’s downright startling.

Using Fotobroker’s ‘Gallery’ feature and .jpgs made from nearly 250 ‘Baby Grad’ announcements – and a targeted marketing campaign – the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina has come up with a clearly successful way to close out the first term of 2010. Traffic and sales statistics would indicate that this is an idea whose time has come. But don’t take our word for it – see the gallery at photos.dailytarheel.com for yourself.

Kudos to Kevin S. and Stacy W. at the Tar Heel for coming up with – and successfully executing – this idea. Aside from the business angle of a successful promotion, we’re always happy to see someone making the most of their Fotobroker account.

Detroit Softworks will be traveling to the annual Western Association of University Publications Managers conference next week, down in San Antonio, and we’ll be looking around for more good ideas like this one to share with you. If you’re a Fotobroker or Gryphon user, and you’ll be at WAUPM next week, please come and see us. We’d love to hear what’s working for you.

We’re happy to announce that both Wayne State’s South End and Grand Valley State’s Lanthorn have re-launched their websites using the Gryphon CMS and the Detroit Softworks suite of services. A tip of our virtual hat to the South End’s Shawn W. and the Lanthorn’s Jon R. for their efforts. Both sites turned out quite well, we think, and we’re very proud to have been a part of this reconstruction. A word of thanks, too, to the folks at Eastern Michigan’s Echo and Michigan State’s State News who gave us thumbs-up recommendations.

If we could briefly digress into shameless self-promotion, the South End site also introduces the brand-spanking-new Housing Guide tools, now out of testing (shiny flying colors!) and available for all our CMS customers. It’s another brainchild of Gryphon’s father, programmer Mike Joseph, and frankly, we think it’s pretty cool.

We’d like to take a moment to acknowledge some of the unsung labor performed by our programmer-types in the last few weeks. Moving the Fotobroker center of operations out of our previous colocation facility – and into a new facility AND new hardware halfway across the country – required a pretty heroic level of effort from our crew. And they delivered.

Now that the bulk of the work is complete, it’s time to say thanks to Blake Girardot, our lead programmer, who orchestrated the whole shebang and is largely responsible for the fact that everything still works. Thanks also to Patrick Wellever, our lead designer, who managed all the Fotobroker site updates that went in at the same time as the server switch.

We think this move represents a significant upgrade to our Fotobroker service in several ways, and we hope you feel the same way. Thanks for everyone’s cooperation during this busy time – and we appreciate your continued support.

The Lanthorn, student newspaper of Grand Valley State University in Allendale and Grand Rapids, Mich., will launch a new Gryphon-powered Web site this Spring.

Work on the design is well underway, and it’s a continuing pleasure working with Jon and the GVL Web team. Their skill and professionalism has made the process so far as smooth as we could hope for.

We are proud to welcome another home-state school into the fold, and we look forward to a long and prosperous relationship.

The new find-by-ID box makes marketing specific images easier than ever.

Recently, the folks at the Daily Emerald (Univ. of Oregon) asked us about creating an extra search box for their Fotobroker site that would allow customers to plug in any known image ID number, so that the paper could advertise availability of specific images and then give customers the fastest possible way to find them.

We’ve had our quicklinks system running for quite a while now, and it’s been great, but it was pointed out to us that remembering a number is just easier than remembering a web address, even a short quicklink.

We’re very pleased to announce that Wayne State University’s student newspaper, The South End, will soon be starting with our Gryphon CMS service. Thanks to Shawn W. at the paper for the assist, and a special shout out to the folks at the Eastern Echo for giving us a good recommendation in the first place.

We’ve always had strong support from Michigan schools and newspapers, thankfully — but this is the first time our software will be running for a Detroit newspaper, so it’s a real treat to make this announcement.

We’ll have more information in the weeks to follow.

We’re very pleased to welcome the venerable Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper for Southern Illinois University, to the ranks of collegiate Fotobroker users. Thanks to Ashley A. and Kelly T. for their help with getting the site rolling — you can see it at reprints.siude.com

With the recent announcement that CoPress is ceasing its operations, the college media community loses an innovative voice. Although they were a competitor, our companies shared many of the same goals, and we are sorry to see them go.

Through June, we are offering a 50% discount (savings of at least $1,000) on data migration for new CMS package customers moving from CoPress. For those publications looking for a new CMS provider, we hope this will make the transition a little easier.

To learn more about what Detroit Softworks’ CMS package can do for your publication, contact us today and schedule a free demonstration.

The Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State University’s student voice, has just relaunched their online presence at Collegian.com with Detroit Softworks. Congratulations and welcome to the staff in Fort Collins.

The Collegian offers a fine example of the flexibility of Gryphon’s templating system. The design of the new site is 100% their own, masterminded by their (now graduated) webmaster Trevor Simonton. Thanks to Trevor for his efforts throughout the development of the site, and we wish him the best in all future endeavors. We’d also like to thank Jenny, Virginia, Larry, and everyone else who had a hand in getting the site rolling — not least incoming webmaster Tyler, who handled the transition like a pro.

If you’ll excuse us a tired cliché, we think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Yes, we’ve got themes — and you’ve got options. One is to let your creativity run wild. Maybe you want total control over your site’s look and feel, or you already have some mockups in the works. Great. Our custom install option is for you.

On the other hand, maybe you want to deploy a great-looking new site fast and with minimal hassle. You can save both time and money with our basic install option. Our new Theme Gallery showcases our growing list of standard template options. Browse live demo sites and choose which of our robust, grid-based designs best fits your publication’s needs.

All of our themes include some basic customization at no extra charge, so you don’t have to worry about being locked in to a completely inflexible design.

What better way to ring in the new year than to introduce a brand-new, entirely redesigned Fotobroker administrative user interface? The release will officially hit the figurative streets soon, but for now we would like to invite you to take the new system for a test drive on your Fotobroker site. Give us some feedback, and we’ll use it to make improvements before the final release.

Check out the new Fotobroker Features page to learn more about what the new UI has to offer. If you decide you want to give it a try, contact us and we’ll set you up.

Don’t forget: Today the sun sets on the era of Context Craft — we are now Detroit Softworks, through and through. Please direct your support queries to support [at] detroitsoftworks [dot] com. Read more about the name change in this post. Happy 2010.

The holidays may be the perfect time for sitting around eating chocolates, but the internet never sleeps. We’ve been hard at work of late, and we bring you these tidings…

E-fulfillment is a reality. It’s long been a feature of Fotobroker, but this year interest picked up for the first time, and we’ve activated sales of high resolution digital downloads on several of our client sites. You can have it too. Just give us the word, and you can jump on the bandwagon with these happy campers:

The Daily O’Collegian
Petaluma Argus-Courier
The Ocala Star-Banner

We’ve been making a big push during the past couple months to expand the scope of our documentation. Now, the fruits or our efforts are available online in our newly-launched Support Center at detroitsoftworks.com/support. There you’ll find instructive screencast videos, downloadable documents, tutorials, and other useful resources. We will be expanding this new section continuously, so be sure to bookmark the page and visit us often.

A few highlights:

• Brand new Fotobroker Admin Guide PDF
• Gryphon tour screencast series
• Tutorials with illustrative screenshots
• Free DSW digital swag!

If you have suggestions for additional resources you would like made available, drop us a line. We’re always in the market for good ideas.

Built-in mobile interface templates guarantee a rich browsing experience for viewers visiting Gryphon-powered Web sites from phones and other mobile devices. Our latest screencast shows the mobile interface in action.