Articles - Page 111

Bland Brands Beware: Optimizely’s New Identity Brings Human Creativity to its Agentic AI and AEO Ambitions

matt-garrepy

MX Linux is a popular and fast Linux distribution based on Debian stable that is currently in version 18.2. Today, I'm going to take you through my MX Linux Review to see why this distribution is so popular.One of the best things about MX Linux is the variety of custom tools that have been built to make the life of the user easier. The team of developers at MX Linux have really outdone themselves making every single possible need as easy as possible with their MX apps.This review has been updated and is now based on the most recent MX Linux 18.2 release.<h2>What is MX Linux?</h2>According to the MX Linux website:MX Linux is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS communities, using the best tools and talents from each distro. It is a midweight OS designed to combine an elegant and efficient desktop with simple configuration, high stability, solid performance and medium-sized footprint.Installation is super smooth using their custom installer and I experienced no issues whatsoever with the process. From my experience, there were also no hardware issues but I'd be curious to know the experiences of others as well so please let me know in the comments.<h2>The MX Linux Desktop</h2>Upon first boot-up, you are presented with their customized XFCE desktop.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-linux-the-desktop_tkvgyo.png" />MX Linux – The DesktopOne of the first things you'll notice about MX Linux is that the panel is assigned to the left side of the screen. This may initially seem a bit weird but I found that once you got used to it, it actually works quite well. Having said that, moving the panel to another location is quick and easy.<h2>MX Apps</h2>The developers at MX Linux have built a number of apps to allow you to do everything from tweaking your desktop, managing repositories and users and more. I won't go through them all here but I will focus on some of the key ones.<h3>MX Welcome</h3>The welcome screen that pops open offers links to the various resources on the web for support, discussions and video tutorials as well as their tools, tweak panel and more.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-linux-welcome-screen_eoycpt.jpg" />MX Linux Welcome Screen<h3>MX Tweak</h3>MX Tweak is a simple tweak tool built by the developers to make modifying the desktop quick and easy.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-tweak_qs8vow.jpg" />MX TweakThe tweak tool allows you to make adjustments to the panel positioning, changing the desktop theme and adjusting the compositor and more.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-tweak-theme-selection_twifv6.jpg" />MX Tweak – Theme Selection<h3>MX Tools</h3>Next up is the MX Tools menu. This is where the magic happens people! There's an app for almost everything you could want / need and they all work wonderfully to get the job done. Check it out:<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-tools_w6ovip.jpg" />MX Tools<h3>MX Conky</h3>One such tool that does a great job of making things easy is MX conky. With it, you can quickly load a Conky and position it, change the colors and format without ever having to touch a conky.rc file.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-conky_bstoke.jpg" />MX Conky<h3>MX Package Installer</h3>One particularly good (and super fast) app that I'm a huge fan of is the MX Package Installer. Here you can easily manage installed apps and search for new ones with ease. Results are returned very quickly.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-package-installer_xadpgd.jpg" />MX Package InstallerYou can explore even further into the application catalog by switching repositories between Debian Stable, MX Testing and the Debian Backports.What's even cooler is the recent addition of FlatPaks to the package installer. Now, if you click on the tab, you'll see an imported list of available FlatPak applications!<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-package-installer-flatpaks_pdiz2g.jpg" /><h2>MX Linux Review – Performance</h2>From a performance perspective, when running the full desktop environment as well as a file manager, GIMP image editor, Firefox and a game, MX was showing less than half of the ram on a 2G system and minimal CPU usage. From my point of view, that's an impressive result.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mx-linux-review-performance_crizd2.webp" />MX Linux Review – Performance <h2>MX Linux Review – Final Thoughts</h2>Overall, <a target="_blank" href="https://mxlinux.org/">MX Linux</a> 18.2 is a fast, responsive, and well put together distribution. It includes tons of tools to help users and administrators get things done and it's built on a rock solid base with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>. While it's may not be as beautiful as a desktop-like <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reviews/solus-review/">Budgie</a> (in my humble opinion) it's definitely benefiting from a much larger selection of software than even the large Ubuntu repositories and is certainly chock full of useful applications and functionality.Don't forget to also check out our <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reviews/solus-review/">Solus Review – Budgie Edition</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/ubuntu-mate-review/">Ubuntu MATE Review</a> as well.Have you tried it? What are your thoughts?

MX Linux Review

mike-johnston

Graphic design has always been one of the more elusive layers of the digital stack. While websites have become increasingly more dynamic (think FontAwesome for iconography), custom graphics – at least the really good ones – continue to rely on third-party apps like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.
For CMS users, that means generating graphics outside the system and bringing them in separately. And for many content creators, it means relying on a graphic designer to do the job – someone who knows their way around Bezier Curves, or if a font is serif or sans serif.
For many design professionals, the more advanced tools of the Adobe suite will likely stay the course (although Sketch and UXPin have become great alternatives for prototyping). But they’re also not the domain of the layperson or laydesigner who simply wants to jazz up their blog or social post with a cool graphic.
Now, thanks to Canva, almost anyone can produce beautiful, custom graphics that feel like they were created by a professional agency – and start for free.
While Canva’s paid subscriptions offer more robust features and access to enhanced imagery, even their basic account lets you create some pretty awesome stuff. In just a few minutes, you can watch a design tutorial, master their intuitive tools, and drag your way to a gorgeous social media graphic or poster art.
Canva isn’t new to the graphic design scene, but they’re now integrating with CMS platforms to streamline content creation. We did a fresh review of the platform and its features, and checked out their Canva “Button,” which makes it even easier to launch Canva within your app or page, make a dynamite graphic, and publish it to your website without leaving your platform.
<h3>What is Canva?</h3>
Canva is a SaaS-based graphic design platform that lets users create beautiful graphics and visual content. That can be almost anything: presentation elements, posters, templates, background patterns, photographic imagery, and more. It’s available for both desktop and mobile, and features millions of graphics, images, fonts, templates, audio, video and other assets that are “off the shelf” and available to use in your own designs.
Founded in 2012, Canva has been something of a startup wunderkind. Last year alone, their valuation doubled from just over $3 billion to $6 billion – and they now boast an active global user base of 15 million subscribers across their free, Pro, and Enterprise offerings.
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/canva-sample-image.png" /><figcaption>Sample Facebook Cover Template</figcaption></figure>
How was Canva able to grow so rapidly? Well, it’s more than just having a great product and word-of-mouth social exposure. 
Simply put, Canva solved a problem that no one had managed to crack: making good design accessible to everyone.
There’s no questioning the value that design brings to a brand’s communication and its impact on customer experience. It’s like an unspoken language that can either help – or hurt – your brand’s perception and reputation. While every business relies on design to reach and influence their audiences, it’s not always attainable or cost effective for basic, everyday applications.
The other problem has been the complexity of graphic design programs. Photoshop can takes weeks (or more) of training to perform even the most foundational tasks, and may be overkill for most content creators. Vector graphics are on a whole other level of complexity, and really necessitate a skilled designer to create custom logos, iconography, and other assets.
This is where Canva is changing the game by offering a platform for novice or even non-designers. It simplifies the process by offering libraries of beautiful, modern design elements that are easy to access. Users can select from stock photos, background patterns, fonts, templates, and even music and videos inside an intuitive drag-and-drop interface – and customize them into their own graphic design creations.
Guy Kawasaki, who joined Canva in 2014 as Chief Evangelist, <a href="https://www.canva.com/learn/guy-kawasaki-chief-evangelist/">describes it as “a platform for democratizing design</a>” – just like how Macintosh democratized computers and eBay democratized commerce.
<h3>Create all kinds of visual content</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/canva-templates.png" /></figure>
Canva offers a sandbox of design tools and learning resources which are all available through its online SaaS portal. You can sign up for free in just a few seconds and even connect with your preferred social media account.
The first thing you’ll notice on the Canva website is the Template categories. This makes it easier for casual users to find what they need quickly and not fumble through expansive libraries like the major stock houses provide.
What’s great is that all of the template elements are ready-to-use. That means they work seamlessly on your "canvas," allowing you to drag and reposition in exactly the way you want. You can also import your own logos, images and graphics and instantly remove solid backgrounds to isolate elements (think of a headshot getting cut away from a background to use in a new layout). 
Once you settle on your graphics and images, it’s simple to add custom text to promote sales offers, event details, and more.
The main design sections include:
<ul>
<li>Social Media: Create graphics for channels like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.</li>
<li>Personal: Design custom invitations, postcards, planners, t-shirts, and even resumes to promote your personal brand. </li>
<li>Business: Build presentation templates, website graphics, logos, business cards, and tools like invoice and proposal templates. </li>
<li>Marketing: Make posters, flyers, infographics, brochures, newsletters, menus and more.</li>
<li>Education: Create lesson plans, worksheets, certificates, storyboards, bookmarks, class schedules and other educational resources.</li>
</ul>
There is also a “Trending” section where the most popular templates are displayed. These can include seasonal specific elements for major holidays or events. Need to make a Christmas graphic for your homepage hero? You can quickly create a custom holiday theme with beautiful images, iconography, background patterns and more.
<h3>Canva Features</h3>
It’s true that Canva has a lot of off-the-shelf components, and some users might worry that they’ll be using the same graphics as other brands. But Canva allows you to be free with your own designs, giving you the ability to edit graphics and templates, compose unique layouts, import your own logos and elements, and truly make any design your own.
Canva’s user-friendly editor makes it all possible. The sidebar menu includes:
<ul>
<li>Templates: Search thousands of templates by keywords to find exactly what you're looking for. </li>
<li>Uploads: Import a custom image, logo, or video from your computer and place it in your design template.</li>
<li>Custom graphic control: Group and position elements on a page and hyperlink graphics.</li>
<li>Edit imagery: Adjust the transparency and settings on photos, add artistic filters, and crop to custom sizes.</li>
<li>Elements: Select from a huge cache of free illustrations such as geometric shapes, stickers, charts, gradients, lines, connectors, and icons.</li>
<li>Text: Add and edit text within your composition. You can add a heading, subheading, or body text to your template, and also add links.</li>
<li>Videos: Browse a wide variety of free videos to add to your webpage or post. You can choose from one of the main categories or search for specific content.</li>
<li>Backgrounds: Add colors, patterns, or create your own custom backdrop.</li>
<li>Folders: With a paid Pro or Enterprise subscription, any images you purchase with a license will be displayed in a “Purchased” folder – and the photos and elements you like will be displayed in a “Likes” folder. Additionally, you can create your own custom folders.</li>
</ul>
These are just some of the core features that Canva provides, but what’s really amazing is how simple it is to start using the entire suite of tools. Unlike Photoshop, there’s no complexity around layer controls or color settings. In minutes, the most novice technical user can get a sense of the navigation and start creating custom graphics.
<h3>Learning, Training, and Tutorials</h3>
Canva’s learning resources are a huge part of their value offering. From the “Learn” tab on their homepage, you can access a library of resources, from design basics to business branding. You can also browse ideas and inspiration from articles that show you how to edit photos or design for print applications.
Canva offers its tutorials through their "Design School," which features classes like “Personal Branding with Dr. Talaya Waller.” Each course provides a wealth of insights and actionable instructions for creating your own successful projects.
As if the software wasn’t awesome enough, the learning resources make Canva nearly indispensable – which explains their explosive growth.
<h3>Canva Integration</h3>
Canva’s API has everything developers need to integrate Canva with their apps, enabling access to photos, images, and online media inside the editor. Currently, Canva has integrations with major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Dropbox, Giphy, and Mailchimp.
The newest and most popular integration is called the Canva "Button," which allows users to design with Canva without leaving the webpage they’re working on. Imagine writing a new blog and suddenly needing a custom graphic. By clicking the Canva Button, you can automatically launch the Canva editor and design a graphic or select an image. Once completed, you simply click "Publish" and your creations are pushed to the appropriate part of your page or experience.
It only takes a few of lines of code to add the Canva Button, but it does require a Canva account for a user to make the activation. To learn more about the Canva Button and how to integrate it with your website, click <a href="https://www.canva.com/button/">here</a>.
<h3>Canva and Content Management Systems (CMS)</h3>
Canva is steadily broadening its integrations with CMS platforms. For content creators, this eliminates the extra steps of uploading designs manually from Canva and switching back and forth between apps. It also gives the non-designers on any team the ability to add beautiful images and graphics to their pages within the CMS, making their content more compelling. 
While several platforms already offer a native integration, <a href="https://about.canva.com/wordpress/">WordPress provides a plugin</a> for designing custom graphics for your blog or website. Browse millions of graphics, images, and layouts in Canva – and once you're finished designing, your creation is automatically inserted into your WordPress post for publishing.
<h3>Pricing</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/canva-pricing.png" /><figcaption>Canva Pricing Plans</figcaption></figure>
Canva offers three plans: Free, Pro and Enterprise. Anyone can <a href="https://www.canva.com/signup">sign up for a free account</a> and start creating right away. But like any "freemium" software model, it does have its limitations. For example, you can't resize your designs for different form factors, and there are only a few hundred graphics and images to choose from. But with 8,000 templates to peruse, you can create some pretty cool designs – and it's all free. 
The Pro subscription, which is considered the "best value," is $9.95 per user per month (if paid annually). It's really an incredible deal when consider what you get: access to an expanded library with millions of images and graphics, over 60,000 templates, and the ability to create your own custom "Brand Kit." This is one of the most powerful features in the Pro, as it gives you control over your visual identity by collecting reusable assets like logos, fonts, colors and more – so you can maintain your brand standards.  
The Enterprise plan is built for teams, enabling you to manage Brand Kits for multiple properties or customers. You also get access to permissions that lock down template elements and limit access to specific team members, so you can protect your brand ecosystem. There's also 24/7 support, which is more apropos for an enterprise engagement with lots of customers and users. 
Licensing for graphics and images can always be tricky, particularly with stock libraries. With Canva, there's an upside and a downside: if you cancel your subscription, you won't be able to access or use any of the elements that were stored in your account. However, you can continue using the elements you created during your subscription period (for example, a blog image on a specific post). 
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
Canva is making good design more accessible, and it's worth checking out – particularly if you're a content manager or digital marketer. It's a natural addition to your CMS stack, but also brings significant value to gig-minded solopreneurs and enterprises alike. 
Like the name suggests, it's your "canvas." But you don't have to be Picasso to make it beautiful. 
To get started with a Canva account, click <a href="https://www.canva.com/">here</a>.
<h3>About Canva</h3>
<a href="https://www.canva.com/">Canva</a> empowers users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast library of templates and design ingredients such as fonts, illustrations, stock photography, video and audio content, and the power to include content from the web such as Giphy and Google Maps, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful. Canva  is available on the web, iOS and Android.

Canva “Button” Gives CMS Users Integrated Graphic Design Tools for Visual Content

paris-tuzun

When it comes to sharing your images on your website in the form of a web gallery, the CMS options for managing the same are many. Whether you wish to create an online portfolio, or simply want to share some photos, choosing the ideal CMS for your web gallery goes a long way in effectively managing the gallery! In this article, we bring to you some of the best known CMS options for web gallery management.
<h2>Zenfolio</h2>
Zenfolio allows you to create beautiful galleries for your photographs with an easy to use and incredibly powerful platform. Features include a portfolio style home page, customizable slideshows with music, custom page elements, photo blogging, scores of themes, pre-built pages that you can choose from, mobile optimization (for tablets and phones, multiple user accounts and much more. There's even an e-Commerce component should you choose to sell your photos for a fee.
http://youtu.be/FWvI-liiXec
Website: <a href="https://en.zenfolio.com/">Zenfolio</a>
<h2>Wix</h2>
Wix is a website builder but it has some amazing functionality for managing picture galleries as well. From sliders to full galleries for your photos, you are sure to find a way to showcase your pictures. The advantage to using a hosted solution such as the one that Wix offers is the speed at which the site loads. With a hosted solution like Wix, your site will not be bogged down with media.
Here's an example of one of their templates:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/f772689190b08068bff2c0c6dd8db184_wix_mp.png" alt="wix" />
Website: <a href="http://www.wix.com/" target="_blank">Wix</a>
<h2>WordPress</h2>
There are numerous themes available for creating amazing galleries with WordPress. Here is a list of direct links to places where you can find some amazing gallery / photo based WordPress themes and Plugins:
<ol>
<li>Photocrati is one of the most advanced gallery centric setups for WordPress you can find – <a href="https://www.photocrati.com/demos/" target="_blank">Try the demo</a></li>
<li>Themeforest has a wide selection of gallery / photo based WordPress themes – <a href="https://themeforest.net/category/wordpress#content" target="_blank">Visit Themeforest</a></li>
<li>Enigma by RocketTheme has an amazing gallery plugin – <a href="https://demo.rockettheme.com/joomla-templates/enigma/" target="_blank">Check it out</a></li>
<li>ElegantThemes has a ton of amazing themes and you get every theme they have for one price (less than $50) – <a href="/elegantthemes" target="_blank">Check them out</a></li>
</ol>
<h2>Coppermine 
</h2>
Coppermine is one of the most popular web gallery CMS based on PHP scripts. It employs a MySQL back end. It is highly customizable by means of plugins and seems to be a perfect choice for creating a photo blog or image gallery online.
Website: <a href="http://coppermine-gallery.net/" target="_blank">Coppermine</a>
<h2>Zenphoto 
</h2>
Zenphoto is arguably the most popular CMS when it comes to sharing images. The goal behind Zenphoto is simple: web gallery management! The interface is sleek and wonderful, with separate tabs for configuring the different components of your gallery. Further more, Zenphoto is supplemented by numerous templates and plugins (including some that feature integration with a WordPress blog).
Website: <a href="http://www.zenphoto.org" target="_blank">Zenphoto</a>
<h2>Piwigo</h2>
If you prefer having a gorgeous theme or template for your gallery (who doesn't, by the way?), Piwigo might just be the right CMS for you. With numerous themes and plugins in its arsenal, Piwigo is a popular open source CMS for web gallery management. It is packed with features, and just in case you are still looking for a web host, Piwigo.com also provides web hosting!
Website: <a href="http://www.piwigo.org" target="_blank">Piwig</a>o
<h2>Gallery</h2>
Gallery is an open source web based photo album organizer. Gallery gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you're running a small personal site or a large community site.
Website: <a href="http://gallery.menalto.com/" target="_blank">Gallery</a>

Ten Content Management Systems for Photo Galleries

We were very pleased to have a chance to interview Dries Buytaert, founder of the legendary <a href="http://drupal.org/" target="_blank">Drupal</a> content management system. He shares his thoughts on its success, future and how it came to be in this intriguing and indepth discussion. We had so many questions, that we are only publishing part one while he works on the second half.
Here you go.
CC: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, Dries. We'd like to cover a few areas during this interview.. specifically Drupal and your latest venture, Acquia.
Can you tell us a little about your background and how you became involved in the world of Content Management Systems?
DB: I was a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium around 1999. I was doing web development with CGI and server-side includes, but I wanted to learn more about technologies like PHP and MySQL. Also, at the same time, we had the need for an internal messaging system at our student dorm. So, I wrote a simple message board. Then when I graduated, I decided to move my internal message board onto the internet.
CC: Our understanding is that Drupal originally started as a BBS system, having been very involved in the BBS realm ourselves, we find this very interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about how it came to be and was it as popular as a BBS as it is today?
DB: Drupal began as an internal message board that I used to manage my student activities. We just used it in my student dorm to communicate about dinner times, etc. Once I graduated, I began transforming it into a news and discussion website: <a href="http://www.drop.org/">www.drop.org</a>.
After a year or so, I released the software behind drop.org as Drupal 1.0.0, and Drupal officially came to be on January 15, 2001. Contributors still celebrate this as Drupal’s birthday every year.
CC: According to sources, Drupal’s name came about by accident. Is this true? Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the name?
<img title="Drupal Content Management System" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/drupal-141x150.jpg" alt="Dries Buytaert" />
DB: Yes. Initially, I wanted to register the site under the Dutch word “dorp” which in English means “village” or “small town”. While registering the domain, I made an error and typed “Drop” instead of “Dorp”. I was shocked to see that Drop.org was still available, so I decided to keep the domain. As such, the first Internet website powered by an online version of Drupal was Drop.org. Drupal did not get its name until I released it as open source software in early 2001.
CC: Did you ever expect Drupal to get to the level of popularity it is at today?
DB: Not at all, I started all this as a hobby and quickly got out of hand. After I moved it to the public internet, I continued to build on it for over a year and added a lot of features. But, it continued to be an experimental platform to learn from and apply new web technologies such as RSS feeds and content and user rating.
I increased my experiments and development and drew the attention of an audience that was also interested in the future of the internet. This audience provided suggestions and was also active with state of the art web technologies and they increasingly began providing me with feedback. At a certain time the feedback took on such a level that I thought I should provide the engine to them so they could start there own experimenting and applying there own suggestions to it. This is how it got moved to Open Source, and also how the community started.
I must say though that I felt good making it available to the Open Source community. I had looked at other similar systems such as phpnuke but with my background in computer science I could really say that the architecture and design were much better. People were asking for modifications but I thought it was really well and worth of being seen, especially compared to other state of the art Content Management Systems written in PHP. So made available without too much expectations but it got the reputation after all. I of course continued to work hard on it.
CC: What do you feel are the core strengths of Drupal and why?
DB: The core strength of Drupal is definitely the open source community that is behind the project. I am constantly amazed by the innovation that comes out of the thousands of dedicated Drupal contributors. There are thousands of add-on modules that can be used to successfully power online communities, blogs, and collaboration environments. Furthermore, Drupal’s modularity makes it much easier to use and extend than traditional content management systems.
CC: With the numerous other open source projects on the market today, what separates Drupal and helps it stand out from the pack?
DB: Drupal has been a pioneer from the start by embracing new technologies and being on the front lines when it comes to web development. But what separates Drupal is its modularity – the combination of a core package and then task-specific modules that can be added as needed.
This modularity was part of Drupal’s initial design. I was sort of shocked that most of the other systems didn’t have a modular design — to me, with my background as a computer science student, that felt like a very natural thing to do. I was also involved in the Linux project back then, working on wireless network drivers. That’s also obviously a modular system, so I may have gotten some inspiration from there as well.
Drupal’s modular design makes it attractive to both technical and non-technical users. If you look at Content Management Systems, they have eliminated the traditional role of the webmaster. This role has evolved more into a role of content editor.
My vision for Drupal is to do the same for the developers (role). I think there is a lot of room to eliminate the traditional web developer, eliminating might be a bit too strong, but re-define the role of the web developer at least. The way we try to accomplish this in Drupal is with a modular approach so users can build web sites quickly without having to do any programming, in other words one does not have to be a true developer to build a feature rich and interactive web site. I hope we can make a big step forward with this in the next five years.
CC: There are some who say that Drupal is trying to do too much too quickly… and its hard to keep up. Specifically, if you visit the Drupal site today there are 4 versions that modules are being created for. What is your response to this?
DB: A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source project, including nearly 2,000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality. Drupal’s thriving, vibrant ecosystem is the very reason that Drupal is so successful – it is its greatest strength. However, it’s true that Drupal can be overwhelming to those that don’t have the time or resources to invest in staying on top of Drupal’s latest offerings, updates, etc., which is why I founded Acquia. Acquia addresses these challenges by packaging some of the best software from the project and by providing continuously available support.
CC: What are the largest sites you are aware of that run on the Drupal platform and why do you think they chose it?
DB: A diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including Lifetime Television, MTV UK, Universal Music, SonyBMG, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Amnesty International and tens of thousands more. I believe there are 2 primary reasons people have chosen Drupal. The first is the Drupal community – it consists of thousands of passionate, talented people who believe in the future of the Web and invest their time and energy to contribute to the project. Second, Drupal’s modular architecture makes it a flexible platform to build great websites.
CC: How does someone decide whether to install Drupal 5 or 6? It seems that in order to use the majority of available modules, one must use the 5.x edition? What do you say to this?
DB: As with any software package, someone building a website in Drupal must map their requirements to the modules and capabilities available. From the beginning, I chose not to preserve backward compatibility because doing so requires that you drag historical baggage along, and in interpreted languages like PHP, this comes at a significant performance cost.
Our mission has always been to make Drupal fast, small, clean and on the bleeding-edge of technology. In the early days I focused completely on the aesthetics of Drupal's code. I spent days trying to do something better, with fewer lines of code and more elegant than elsewhere. And with me, many others. It was the right thing to do. Over the years, we've seen a lot of innovations happen that would not likely have happened while preserving backward compatibility – the node system being one of the most prominent examples.
Developers always had free reign to implement their ideas in the best possible way. It is something that Drupal has in its favor compared to many other content management systems. It's been interesting to see how Drupal has spread and how it has grown to be more flexible and cover more niches than many other systems. If anything, this needs to be attributed to the fact that we haven't cared much about backward compatibility, and our single-mindedness to get the technology right.
Over time, the vast library of Drupal modules is upgraded to support each major release – given the number of modules, this, admittedly, takes time. As part of this process, we seek to bring popular modules into Drupal core to ensure that capabilities that everyone uses are brought into the core upgrade process.
CC: Can you provide us some details on future development initiatives? Any new changes coming down the pipeline?
DB: We are currently working on Drupal 7 and I named Angie Byron, aka webchick, as my Drupal 7 co-maintainer at Drupalcon Szeged in August of this year. We are focused on improving Drupal in a number of ways – adding features in core, improving usability and performance, creating a test framework and adding lots of tests and simplifying the upgrade process.
Longer term, I see tremendous opportunities for the semantic web and search. For Drupal, this means making Drupal emit structured information. Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal's database and doesn't surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can't pick it up as a product, and they'd fail to include it in their world-wide product database.
Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.
CC: Tell us a little about Acquia and why you formed this company.
DB: Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to the advancement of the core technology and offering products, services, and technical support to simplify the deployment and management of Drupal websites.
As a thriving open source project, Drupal changes at such a rapid rate that it can be challenging to find the most useful and relevant modules, keep systems secure and up to date, and find real-time expertise and support to quickly resolve issues. By reducing or eliminating these issues, Acquia improves the effectiveness of organizations already using Drupal and brings the power of Drupal within reach of more organizations who are exploring Drupal for the first time.
CC: How successful have you been so far with this initiative? Who are your biggest customers?
DB: Acquia just launched the general availability of Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network on September 30, 2008. We’ve had more than 4,000 downloads of Acquia Drupal since we launched. We’ve received significant interest in subscriptions to the Acquia Network and have a handful of beta customers already leveraging the Acquia Network including Adobe, which is using Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network to power Flex.org.
The feedback we’ve received so far has been extremely positive supporting my initial suspicion that commercial grade support will lead to increased adoption of Drupal – especially in the enterprise.
CC: What makes the Acquia version of Drupal different from the readily available version we all know and love?
DB: There are thousands of modules available for Drupal. Acquia Drupal is simply a packaged collection of some of the best software from the Drupal project to simplify the process of getting started with Drupal. For experienced Drupal developers and users, it speeds the process of assembling the pieces to start building a website, and it provides a supported foundation should the developer, or in many cases, their clients decide they want to purchase commercial technical support.
The code – Drupal core and all the community modules – in Acquia Drupal is the same code that is available on Drupal.org. Its GPL-licensed and available for free to anyone who wants to use it. Our engineering team works closely with the community module maintainers to contribute back any and all patches we write, making them available to the entire Drupal community whether they choose to use Acquia Drupal or not.
CC: Is your goal to move Drupal away from Open Source and more into a Commercial product offering?
DB: No. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Drupal open source community members have made Drupal the innovative and widely popular social publishing system that it is today. The Drupal community is the foundation for the company and is dependent on the continued development by Drupal community members.
Acquia does not want to take Drupal away from the open source community. Rather, Acquia is stepping up as a community member to collaborate in Drupal code development, increase the industry profile for Drupal, and introduce convenient packaging, support, and remote network services that will make Drupal even easier to adopt and use. Additionally, Acquia Drupal is offered as a free download and all software included in the distribution is licensed under the GNU Public License and contributed back to the Drupal open source project.
CC: Can you tell us a little bit about each of your offerings: Carbon, Spokes, Caliper and Yellow Jersey?
DB: Acquia Drupal (previously code named Carbon) is our commercially supported distribution of the Drupal social publishing system. It is a packaged collection of some of the best software from the Drupal project offering an advanced starting point to quickly begin building social publishing Web sites that blend static pages, blogs, wikis, discussion forums, mashups, and custom content types.
The Acquia Network (previously code named Spokes) provides the essential support and remote network services to efficiently operate sites with Acquia Drupal sites. All subscribers to the Acquia Network gain access to the Acquia Network’s subscriber forums, remote network services such as software update notifications, uptime monitoring, Mollom spam blocking, and Acquia Drupal documentation. Caliper was the code name for the Mollom spam blocking service we are offering through the Acquia Network. Additionally, premium subscriptions provide Web-based ticket management, as well as email and telephone support. The Acquia Network functions as an operations portal for managing Acquia Drupal sites and connecting to Acquia support channels.
Finally, Yellow Jersey is the code name for the training and certification program we are developing. For more information on Yellow Jersey, as well as the future roadmaps for Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network, check out the community section of our website, <a href="http://acquia.com/community" target="_blank">http://acquia.com/community</a> and share your thoughts about where we are headed.

Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert Interview

Acquia continues to challenge the market with the recent launch <a href="https://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-launches-new-open-digital-experience-platform">of its new Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP)</a>. This is another bold step for the company, which continues to innovate on top of the open-source Drupal content management system. In recent years, they have invested in several strategic acquisitions that have fueled their transformation as a full-fledged customer experience platform.
When the company <a href="https://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-announces-majority-investment-vista-equity-partners">received a major investment from Vista Equity Partners</a> last year, there was some uncertainty about the future roadmap. Customers were vocally concerned about Acquia’s commitment to Drupal and the impact to the user experience. The concern was perhaps warranted given Vista's previous acquisition of Marketo for $1.79 billion, which led to led to significant changes across the company and the platform. 
At the time of the transaction, Acquia’s co-founder Dries Buytaert stated that the acquisition of Acquia would be beneficial to Drupal, and their mission to serve open source communities would remain firm. The plan was to grow Acquia’s presence in the blossoming Digital Experience Platform (DXP) category, while staying loyal to the open source Drupal core at the same time. In <a href="https://dri.es/acquia-to-receive-majority-investment-from-vista-equity-partners">a blog post</a>, Buytaert said:
“This investment should be great news for the Drupal and Mautic communities as we'll have the right resources to compete against other solutions, and our deep commitment to Drupal, Mautic and Open Source will be unchanged. In fact, we will continue to increase our current level of investment in Open Source as we grow our business.”
<h3>The New Platform</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/acquia-dxp.png" /></figure>
The Acquia Open DXP endeavors to bring marketers and developers together with an easy-to-use platform. It allows them to collaborate around building and orchestrating multi-user customer journeys across all models of customer interaction, such as touchscreens, chat, voice, and more.
The Acquia Open DXP is composed of both the Acquia Marketing Cloud and Acquia Drupal Cloud, and integrates their acquired technologies – including AgilOne, Mautic and Cohesion – with their existing core. The result is a single, open, easy-to-use platform that can be quickly deployed.
"The digital experience market continues to grow, and the subsequent need to create, manage, and deliver those high-quality digital experiences remains essential," said IDC's Jacob Groshek. "The impact of COVID-19 is only going to heighten that demand moving forward. Acquia's launch of their new Open DXP centers around empowering developers and marketers to collaborate in driving agile digital transformation across an organization. Their new Open DXP is both a timely and comprehensive response to the needs of the market.”
The expansion of marketing automation is key to Acquia's strategy. The category has gained tremendous ground in the recent years, and is expected to <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/443593/global-marketing-software-spending/">grow to $25.1 billion by 2023</a>. While big players like Hubspot and Salesforce dominate the industry, combining the features of a DXP with the enhanced capabilities of a customer data platform (CDP) will help Acquia reposition their value and compete more effectively.
<h3>Features</h3>
As mentioned, the Acquia Open DXP consists of both the Acquia Marketing Cloud and the Acquia Drupal Cloud. The combination provides a complete platform for building more personalized digital experiences that are powered by data. 
The Acquia Marketing Cloud is the essential foundation for collecting and managing customer data and driving personalization strategies. Features include:
•  Customer Data Platform (formerly AgilOne): With a built-in CDP, users can create a 360-degree view of each unique customer by integrating data across back-end and front-end systems. With open, customizable machine learning models, marketers can gain insights into new customer segments based on observed behaviors and product affinity, leverage predictions to understand likelihood to engage and convert, and deliver next-best offers and actions.
•  Personalization (formerly Acquia Lift): Leveraging data from the CDP, users can develop targeted campaigns to deliver the next-best offer across all touchpoints of the customer journey.
•  Campaign Studio (formerly Mautic): With Campaign Studio, users now have access to rich marketing automation features that are powered by Acquia's CDP. Create email campaigns that meet your custom brand requirements while easing the process with drag-and-drop builders and other simplified capabilities. Like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Campaign Studio offers dynamic content features that allow for greater email personalization – all in one place.  
•  Campaign Factory (formerly Maestro): Campaign Factory gives administrators the power to centrally manage multiple, distributed Campaign Studio instances, helping you scale marketing operations across your lines of business – from brands to regions to localized teams. Campaign Factory provides a layer of critical governance over global digital marketing operations. 
The Drupal Cloud has also evolved, and now offers a more robust set of tools. Developers can build and customize services while marketers can do more with minimal code and drag-and-drop capabilities. Some of the core features include:
•  Site Studio (formerly Cohesion): New for marketers, Site Studio introduces a low-code experience for designing websites for different devices and interaction types – without the need for an advanced developer.
•  Developer Studio: Built with more advanced developers in mind, the Developer Studio introduces Cloud IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) to build, stage, and deploy new Drupal sites and applications.
•  CMS Migrate: Includes newly added tools to accelerate migration to Drupal 9 from older versions of Drupal or any legacy CMS.
•  Site Factory: Newly updated to support Drupal 9, Site Factory enables organizations to centrally manage, deploy, and scale sites and applications.
•  Edge CDN: A global network of over 200 points-of-presence (PoPs), Edge CDN provides dependable delivery of digital experiences by continually optimizing availability and performance, and mitigating risk associated with increasing volatility in traffic due to more online customer engagement.
•  Edge Security: A new security-as-a-service solution, Edge Security mitigates catastrophic security threats in real time by leveraging data-driven insights to dynamically update and protect all sites and experiences from malicious attacks, helping to ensure brand trust.
<h3>About Acquia</h3>
<a href="https://www.acquia.com/">Acquia</a> is an open Digital Experience Platform to give enterprise companies the ability to build, operate, and optimize websites, apps, and other digital experiences. Acquia produces better business outcomes for CX leaders by enabling organizations to build, host, analyze and communicate with their customers at scale through websites and digital applications.

Acquia Launches New Open Digital Experience Platform

Percussion is a company that has been steadily growing in the CMS space and we decided to take some time to get to know the company and their products a bit further. We had a chance to connect with Joseph Wykes, President of Percussion and here are the results of that interview.
CC: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to be with Percussion?
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wordpress-v-logo_nxe2ba.png" alt="Joseph Wykes - Percussion" />
JW: I had been practicing law in the UK and realized how much I enjoyed the business development side of the law firm. I found myself energized by the opportunity to build a business, build relationships, and grow my career, and jumped at the chance to be part of the early stages of forming the Percussion business. In a bit of an unusual move, I left London to help launch Percussion’s content management product—then called Rhythmyx—in Santa Monica. When it came time to expand the business overseas in Europe, it was natural for me to “come home” to London and establish our UK office. Once the UK Operations was ramped up, I came back to the States; first to San Francisco, and then to Boston. It has been an exciting journey and I am very glad I made the leap from Law to software.
CC: How did Percussion come to exist? What is the back story behind the CMS?
JW: Percussion was originally incubated as a set of tools that focused on content transformation, database integration, and security services. As these tools grew into products, addressing hot spots in the technology market, sister companies were spun off. Rapid7 was first spun out in 2000 to focus on a security and threat management opportunity. Later, Axceler initially spun off from Percussion to focus on an integration with Lotus Notes (as a relational database opportunity), and then more recently to focus on a SharePoint data migration opportunity. Percussion launched its web content management offering in 2000, and since 2006 has stayed exclusively focused on the web content management market.
In 2000, we recognized that as web sites became more sophisticated, managing content was going to be a major challenge. At first, this meant building tools to manage the Create, Approve and Publish processes that we are familiar with today. As we move forward, we are focused on returning web content management to its true product roots, rather than abide by the complex, custom built services frameworks the market has become. This is our core focus for the company today.
CC: Can you tell us about the differences between CM1 and CM System?
JW: Sure. We think that the market for web content management has gone through a number of fundamental shifts over the last 10 years as web sites have evolved, and consumer behavior have shifted in how they interact with the web. As sites have become more complex, content has taken a back seat to other dynamic site features creating even more complex technology solutions. In turn, this makes attempting to deploy an “all in one suite” incredibly difficult, leading to services-to-licenses ratios of 6, 7, and even 8:1. Percussion’s CM1 and CM System attack this over-customization head-on, and provide an alternative product strategy for both the business and IT departments.
At their core, both CM1 and CM System are based on the same dynamic code structure, and are both fundamentally de-coupled architectures; meaning that Percussion’s products do not require clients to add any technology on the delivery tier. This is important particularly for companies with higher-end websites, who have invested substantial amounts of time and money into a complex delivery architecture. These companies appreciate the fact that Percussion can publish content to the site without requiring changes to that architecture. For sites like AutoTrader.com and Weather.com, this is their number one requirement. Furthermore, since higher end sites like Healthcare.gov and Vegas.com often have other complex applications running in their delivery tier, CM System has a number of integration points to ensure that the WCM technology can be configured to fit their environment.
The WCM products’ roles in the market diverge from here. CM1 was designed and developed to address this critical issue noted earlier: systems are just too complex to deploy and use and are getting more complex every day. This results in companies paying relatively little for the software license, but then spending a massive amount in services to deploy the software and get it working.
Unfortunately, once deployed, user adoption is often low because these more complex WCM systems are not easy for the content owner to use and still require ongoing support from the web development team. For a company with a relatively small web marketing team, this appears to be an extremely daunting task which is why a large number of companies still use custom developed Dreamweaver-type applications to run their sites.
Through its “drag and drop” style user interface, CM1 returns control to the marketing/business owner. Marketers are now able to make the vast majority of changes they require; from content updates, to new template creation, to navigation changes, forms, etc., without having to go back to their IT teams for assistance.
Also noteworthy; CM1 uses a widget-based approach to new functionality. New features are made available as a widget that can be plugged directly into the existing installation. This gives marketers the flexibility to take advantage of new features when the need arises, rather than trying to guess at what their needs might be in the coming years.
In short, CM System is most appropriate for high-volume, highly complex web sites with thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of pages. Whereas CM1 is the perfect solution for the smaller organizations that do not have a large web support team, but recognize the value of a true content managed website.
CC: What success stories has Percussion had over the last few years? Have there been any significant implementations that you are especially proud of?
JW: The last several years have been quite good for Percussion and we are pleased with our results so far. On the product side, we’ve made some significant enhancements to CM System as it reached its 7th major version. And we are particularly proud of the effort to launch our CM1 offering as an alternative for companies in search of a WCM solution with features similar to more complex products, but more streamlined for non-technical teams.
With CM1 we set out to fundamentally re-think how web content could be managed. We looked at the key problems that were still unresolved in the market, and determined that giving the power of controlling content creation and delivery back to the Marketer was a critically important need not being addressed. In general, Marketers were continually making trade-offs between the promise of the web; and what was possible with their systems, and between what was required; and how much bandwidth IT had to develop against those requirements.
Starting with that basic buyer pain, we examined every aspect of managing content to identify ways to apply innovation and “change the game”. We started with the user experience. The dynamic approach that we took to the UI in CM1 is fundamentally different than anything we have seen in the commercial WCM market to date. We developed the user experience with the business user in mind, adopting their language for activities, and designed things such as; the ability to create new templates with a “drag and drop” style to empower the business user to do more on their own. We were recently named a MITX Award finalist for Best UX which was an extremely gratifying testament to what we have achieved.
The second area we applied innovation is around “how to get started using web content management”. Most commercial systems require a substantial investment in services to customize and integrate the technology framework that the vendor provides. We wanted to deliver a system that the organization could deploy on their own, with little intervention from the web development team, and most importantly, no involvement at all from a services organization. Our support team assists when needed, but our clients appreciate that they can cut out the services investment and just focus on buying a software product.
As CM1 approaches Version 2.0 we have made significant inroads into the market. Right at the end of June, two new customers—Saba Software and MacPhail Center for Music—went live on CM1 and the momentum continues to build.
We have had a number of other very exciting developments on the customer front, including a new win with The Weather Channel’s weather.com. And long-time customer AutoTrader.com continues to transform their publishing model to ramp up the volume of content. They are going from a pace of under 100 new articles in a full year, to one where they publish over 10 new articles a day — a pretty dramatic transformation for sure.
Our work with the US Department of Health and Human Services continues to ramp up as well. Our success here has created a number of different partner ecosystems around Percussion, both in the technology and integration communities. Embracing these new channels is leading to some new and interesting opportunities in the near term.
Perhaps one of the most interesting stories came from our work at HHS (US Department of Health and Human Services). We were recently asked to deploy a new site www.stopbullying.gov in just six days! The President and First Lady were planning to announce a major anti-bullying initiative through Facebook this past March, and the main website needed to be live to support the scheduled launch date of March 10, 2011. Therefore the new site had to be developed and deployed in an extremely tight timeframe. Needless to say the President’s deadline was not arbitrary, and we made it easily.
CC: What do you think differentiates Percussion's CMS product line from the numerous other products on the market?
JW: We have our opinions on what differentiates us for sure. These are generally on our bias towards product rather than frameworks, our decoupled architecture, and our relentless focus on control over web content for the end user (Marketers). But we prefer to let the work we are doing with our customers define that point of differentiation.
I talked a moment ago about Weather.com. We have a great video on our site offering a testimonial on why they chose us. Interestingly, they had already evaluated other vendors in the market and had resigned themselves to building a content management tool internally. When they saw that they could get a fully functioning web content management system, and not have to make ANY changes to their newly launched website, they saw tremendous value in Percussion’s decoupled architecture.
From the perspective of CM1, we are providing our customers with an un-matched level of control. We have a few customers who have taken on the deployment process themselves, with only “check-in” help from us. And now that they are live, will have greater flexibility than ever before, as we discussed earlier.
There are many features along the way that are truly different, but the value we provide our customers — to help solve their most pressing challenges — is the true meaning of our differentiation.
CC: There is a strong call for social enablement and integration within websites and intranets nowadays, how does Percussion handle these requirements?
JW: I would have joked that “Social is the new black” but it has become clear that actually “Mobile is the new black”, and Social is the black shoes that you just have to have in your wardrobe—you are never sure when you are going to wear them, but you know you have to have them.
Knowing that most companies are still testing “how they will drive social engagement”, we handle this in two distinct ways:
The first pivots on our integration capability with other systems. If you already have a social CRM or personalization process in place, we simply plug into that rather than requiring that you rip it out and start over with ours. That approach substantially lowers the risk to the organization in rolling out our web content management products.
The second approach for companies embarking on this journey, is through our community marketing modules. This is an add-on module that allows companies to get started with delivering personalized content, manage things like favorites, comments and ratings, and user generated content. And of course our blog platform provides a strong content managed blog that integrates with the overall structure of the site, and enables content re-use across the blog, the site, and micro sites.
In addition, as part of our ongoing quest to give greater control and flexibility to our customers, we are working to make this even easier to install down the road. We hear often from prospects that they are “thinking that they want to do personalization but just not yet….” In short, they want to know that they can embark on the social enablement journey when they are ready, rather than being forced to take it on when they first deploy the WCM.
CC: What do you consider the most important / powerful feature of your software?
JW: As noted earlier, the ability to return control over content to the business user, while giving the technology team the flexibility to easily deploy a web content management product is Percussion’s most important development.
CC: What can we expect to see from the next release?
JW: Everything we are focused on is to make the experience of managing content easier for our customers. With that in mind, we aim to make each release even more about product, and less about services. We work to provide greater control and flexibility for our customers to do what they want to do on the web today, and prepare better for whatever is coming next on the web.
CC: We often ask each of our intervieweeʼs to share their personal definitions of the word CMS? These are shared on our <a href="/what-is-a-cms">What is a CMS?</a> page.
JW: Over the last few years there have been many shifts in how people use this term. We have WCM for web, WEM for experience or engagement management “suites” etc. Most of it is driven by vendors trying to carve out a space for themselves in the market.
We are pretty comfortable with sticking to the term web content management as a definition that supports publishing content out on to the web. However, clearly the concept of “the web” has morphed from your static company site, to reflect new channels and communities like Facebook and mobile.
So today we think much more broadly about where that content winds up then the old year 2000 view of the web. But at the end of the day, companies need to push content (and much more than ever before), in many forms, out into many more digital channels. For now, and the foreseeable future, a web content management system is your best platform to achieve that goal.
CC: Thank you sir, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
You can learn more about Percussion from their website: <a href="http://www.percussion.com">Percussion CMS</a>

Interview with Joseph Wykes, President of Percussion

After many a poking and prodding and finally having to show him some whisky to get him off his pirate ship, we finally managed to snag some time with Franz Maruna of Concrete5. Be prepared for an entertaining read.
CC: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, we know it's hard to find time amidst developing to break for some good quality questioning ?
FM: <a href="http://www.concrete5.org/" target="_blank">Concrete5</a> is revolutionizing content management. It’s so easy to use – people can’t believe it. Finding the time to talk to people about c5 always easy and fun. Thanks for listening!
CC: Tell us a little about yourself and how you came to get involved in the CMS world.
FM: I have a background in both software engineering and liberal arts. I was programming by first grade, running BBS’s in the 80’s, and doing multi-media art throughout. When I went off to college to study art and philosophy, I had pretty much burned out on computer science.
Strangely, in school everyone was making “pages” about their cats and girlfriends, and sharing them on the internet – which to me had really only been a way to &lt;pause&gt; well… make long distance calls for free. It quickly became clear that a technologist with an eye for design would be in demand. I dropped out of college, and I started as a web production programmer. Through the years I have done absolutely every job in the spectrum of rolls that now go into delivering top-notch websites.
In the early days we were using Server Side Includes and then simple header calls to make our lives easier. Over time the web became more of a middleware, and now a browser based development environment. Concrete5 is the result of years of these trials and tribulations.
CC: What is Concrete5 CMS and how did it come about?
<img title="Concrete5 Content Management System" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/concrete51-141x150.jpg" alt="Franz Maruna" />
FM: Concrete5 is a building material for great websites. It runs in PHP and MySQL on your live web server. It adds a toolbar at the top of your website, so you can easily make changes and additions as you browse. It does this with out creating restrictions around what a designer and developer can dream up.
It started as an internal toolkit we developed for some client work in 2003. We sold it as a commercial product, and after a complete interface and architecture overhaul, we gave it away for nothing under the very flexible MIT open source license this summer.
CC: Who are the other key players in the organization?
FM: Concrete wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for Andrew Embler, our brilliant CTO. Every day he battles client challenges in new projects, trouble shoots servers and systems that are already built, maintains the core c5 code base, and periodically listens to me dribble on and on about what we’re going to do next. That man deserves an award. I’m sure he appreciates that you’re reading this instead of him.
There’s a long list of freelancers and employees who have contributed over the years, but we really also owe a lot to Ryan and &lt;coughs&gt; el Nino – as well as Matt, our interface designer.
CC: What makes Concrete5 different from myriad of other CMS' on the market?
FM: There are so many CMS’ today because it is a real need that isn’t yet being well served. People desperately want to express themselves as freely online as they can with a pen and paper. If FrontPage, a blog, and MySpace templates is as good as we can do; we’ve failed. It’s impossible to do a market comparison in a couple of paragraphs, but there’s a few huge differentiators that make us unique:
It’s TOTALLY open source. The MIT license because it lets you do ANYTHING you want short of suing us. If you’re building a startup, and you want to get a jump on the competition but truly own all the code you write – our MIT license makes that very easy. As a developer you don’t have to submit your code back to the project. For all I care you can package c5 up exactly as it is today, call it ‘cement6’ and go sell it on CDs in Wal-Mart. We also went ahead and chose SourceForge for hosting the files, so this decision can’t really be un-done later. C5 is free. Period. We strongly believe in the power of free information, so after years of pretending we didn’t, this complete openness makes us feel great.
It is middleware based, not a “publishing system.” A lot of solutions like FrontPage or Contribute let you edit your website locally and then “publish” up to the live site. We think that is awkward at best, and misses a huge opportunity for interactivity and communication with your audience. If you can’t easily put a form on a page, you’re just making a brochure on the web.
It wasn’t something else first. A lot of what the world uses as CMS actually started as a specific app. We use WordPress for our corporate blog today, because it’s a great blogging platform. That doesn’t mean it’s great for everything else too. The same can be said for any number of news portal apps that are considered general CMS.
Concrete was always designed to be a site building toolkit. We’ve got a flexible permission system and a very intuitive user experience, so we’re not giving you app you have to hack into something else. I remember working on a Mambo project years ago where I was asking myself “gee should I handle these pages with ‘sections’ or ‘topics’ – they seem to basically be the same.” That’s not good. C5 is the building material that brings blocks of content and functionality together into ANY type of website you choose, with ease.
All these other apps are GI-Joes and Barbies – great for playing one type of game. We’re Lego’s – go get creative!
It’s written in the best platform for the web. I know I’m gonna step on toes with this one, but I don’t care. LAMP is still where it is at. Don’t believe me? Go ask Twitter how Rails is doing, ask Friendster about Java, and if you feel a need to ask Microsoft… well, meh. I don’t know why people think PHP has gone out of vogue. It still serves almost all the porn on the web, let the biz dev wankers make idle promises about that! &lt;pauses for laughter&gt;
Now to mitigate the flame war I’m starting, let me point out I think smart programmers with good communication can make a stellar application in anything – even Cold Fusion…And vice-versa is true; no language guarantees a great product without a great process… But, PHP is free, it’s everywhere, it’s fast, it’s OOP (yes c5 is object oriented) and it has stood the test of time as a basic part of the web’s infrastructure. We want to be right there with it as part of the glue that holds the web together.
Most importantly, we have a unique perspective we’ve put into c5. Fundamentally we think there will always be two types of parties working on a web site – the builders and the owners. A builder might be the neighbor kid with a hacked version of Photoshop in his basement, or it could be Razorfish; their goal is to get in and out successfully.
Owners have to live what these builders made. They need it to last for years, not months. They need it to change with them as their
businesses and organizations change. They need to actually be able to use the thing in new ways without being afraid. We think most of our competition serves one side of this equation or the other, and few demonstrate deliberate thought about that conundrum. C5 serves both sides very well. 
CC: You recently were honored with Project of the Month @ Sourceforge. Why do you think that is?
FM: I hope SourceForge appreciated our passion and dug it. This isn’t some business we’re hoping to flip in 18 months, we genuinely think the web could have the same impact on the world as the printing press did, if it gets easier to use.
I also think they played with the app and were impressed. I’d encourage everyone to take 5 minutes to mess around with the shared demo at concrete5.org/demo – you’ll get why it’s compelling pretty quickly. We’re only a 3 month old project, but we’re growing fast, I believe <a href="http://sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">SourceForge</a> saw an opportunity to help some good folk trying to do a great thing. We appreciate the honor very much.
We’re very appreciative about being here too, CMSCritic is a great site that is as comprehensive as you can get in this huge space.
CC: What drove your decision to take what was once a commercial product and make it open source?
FM: Sleeping at night, or lack of it. I just had my second kid. I wasn’t doing anything meaningful, just selling software like my dad. It was time to make a difference in the world. It was always a pleasure seeing the faces of our clients’ light up when we sat down for training at the end of a project and it ended up being just 30 minutes of “hey if you want to change that, just click it. – good luck!” I wanted more people to have that experience, and I didn’t want to run a web shop with 50 employees.
CC: Do you have any regrets with this move? How has it impacted you from a financial standpoint?
FM: I have absolutely no regrets, going open source easily ranks in the best half a dozen decisions of my life so far.
Giving away free software is expensive. Producing Open Source Software (by Karl Fogel) argues that it actually costs more to get to market going open source than going commercial. I don’t know if that’s true yet, but having done both, I can tell you it is quite different. ? So buy a c5kit on our site, or choose us as your hosting provider! Help feed a generous developer!
CC: There are so many big names in the CMS market today, how do you see Concrete5 performing in the next year in comparison?
FM: Being big doesn’t help you deliver great software; in fact the opposite is true. Typically big ideas come from small teams in basements and garages. We’re in a really unique position here – we’ve had the benefit of being a commercial product for years, but we never had so many clients on previous versions of concrete that supporting and updating their installs became overwhelming. We’ve got all the passion of a garage team, but with the experience of a jaded old web shop under our belts. We also don’t have $7m of someone else’s money we have to spend quickly, and make a 20x return on. The way I see it; we’re in an enviable position.
I hope we continue to see exponential growth over the next 14 months. Being the underdog right now is a real pleasure, and keeping the flexibility to act quickly is important to me.
CC: What are your favorite Concrete5 driven websites?
FM: I love the promise behind <a href="http://schoolpulse.com/" target="_blank">SchoolPulse.com</a>, the design behind <a href="http://monsoonworks.com/" target="_blank">MonsoonWorks.com</a>, and the purpose of <a href="http://jtfp.org/" target="_blank">JTFP.org</a>. You can check out a bunch more at getConcrete5.com
CC: If you could change anything about C5 what would it be and why?
FM: I would stop time, go to a beautiful house on the beach with Andy, and write a thousand pages of documentation around how to best use c5. I guess we don’t need the house on the beach, and that does read a little weird now that I’ve written it, but I still think it’d be nice.
CC: How can the community help?
FM: Help yourselves first – design themes or build new blocks, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do with projects that have been open source for much longer. We have a marketplace in the works where you’ll be able to sell your work, or give it away for free.
Help others get going. People need help with everything from installing to building. Start playing around so you can become an expert early, as the market for c5 developers is now emerging. Tell us what we should be doing differently. Send us links to your c5 sites. Tell your friends to check out c5.
CC: Are there any themes or plugins available for C5?
FM: C5 is built around a Themes, Blocks, and Apps architecture that makes it inherently easy to customize without compromising further extendibility.
People around the world are already making stuff for c5 as I type. We’ll be launching a marketplace for them before the end of the year. We’ve got a forum app and an eCommerce app that we’re porting from the previous version of concrete and hope to launch on the marketplace quickly.
CC: What other services does your firm offer? Is CMS your only product offering?
FM: We sell a few smaller software products including AjaxFTP and FlashFloorPlan. We do some high-level support work for other web shops that handle most of the client facing c5 opportunities we hear about. We still do build some web apps and online communities for experienced entrepreneurs, so if you’ve got a big idea you should certainly ask us what we think about it.
CC: Can you provide a sneak peak into upcoming features or changes?
FM: Some small improvements around validation in the blocks that come bundled with the core. The big thing we’re working on now is multi-language support for the dashboard and editing UI. We’re also working on that marketplace &amp; community I mentioned.
CC: Any parting comments?
FM: We’d like to thank CMSCritic for giving us the opportunity to pontificate. Keep up the good work.

Concrete5 founder, Franz Maruna Interview

<a href="/products/motocms">MotoCMS</a> is a popular website builder that’s been around since 2009. The site takes a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) approach to website building, and allows users to design, edit, and publish their own website.The WYSIWYG setup means that this process should be pretty simple and intuitive.The software is updated on a regular basis and is designed to appeal to beginners and professionals alike. But does it?I decided to check it out for myself. Read on for my MotoCMS review.<h2>Getting Started</h2>They don’t make this easy. To get setup with MotoCMS, you have to go on a bit of a field trip. Here’s how the process went down:First, you click on the button to get started. This will take you to a screen where you select your chosen industry design.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen_shot_2016-03-05_at_12_40_29636x0-is.png" />After you’ve done this, you can select a template.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen_shot_2016-03-05_at_12_40_53725x0-is.png" />Then, a box pops up to insert your email address and your name.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen_shot_2016-03-05_at_13_46_53490x0-is.png" />And when you’ve done all of this, you receive an email confirmation. Once you click on that, you’re all set.It all felt a bit time-consuming for my liking and it tainted my first impression of the site. There’s an optimal phone verification feature built into this process also, but I felt it just got in the way at this early stage – especially since it doesn’t replace mail verification.Whilst the setup is generally pretty simple, I’ve reviewed a few of these sites now and I’ve come to expect a speedier signup process.<h2>Usability</h2>Once you get to the main site, users are greeted by a ‘Welcome To The Future’ slogan with the MotoCMS logo presented on a plain background. This is bordered by the admin panel, and the overall look is pretty sleek and sophisticated.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen_shot_2016-03-05_at_12_47_14902x0-is.png" />The admin panel utilizes the WYSIWYG system and drag-and-drop functionality, which means that you can see each change as it's implemented. This is especially useful for novice users.A number of step-by-step tutorials are available via popups and this makes the process pretty easy to navigate – especially when it comes to adding pages.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen_shot_2016-03-05_at_14_12_41710x0-is.png" />To add a new page to the site, you simply click on ‘add page’ and a popup will come up asking for the page name and URL. You can then edit the page properties using the options in the right-hand column, such as assigning a URL name and assigning parent pages.If you head over to the ‘Design’ section, you can also edit page specific options such as hiding certain page sections – e.g. the header and footer. By clicking on the viewing tool, you can preview the page to see the exact results.I found the editor to be perfectly fine – the interface was quite quick and lag-free on all the contemporary browser platforms. The UI seemed to lag on the older versions of Firefox, which might be a concern to potential clients on older machines.<h2>Design</h2><h3>Responsiveness</h3>MotoCMS have made great efforts to make their templates as responsive as possible and there are a wide variety of mobile screens to test your designs on. The platform also allows users to hand edit certain elements of the templates. This is a pretty useful feature, as some of the native content can look a little disjointed.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen_shot_2016-03-06_at_22_54_05.png" />This screenshot is a random example. As you can see, the picture box is slightly misaligned. Whilst this won't be a massive issue for everyone, it may irritate the design perfectionists out there.<h3>Templates</h3>MotoCMS offer a wide range of premade templates in various styles and tones. There’s enough variety to meet the design requirements of most businesses, and the templates are arranged by industry type to ensure an easy selection process.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen_shot_2016-03-06_at_22_57_59476x0-is.png" />However, as I mentioned earlier, some of this design excellence is lost in the transition to mobile.<h2>Features</h2><h3>Social Media</h3>MotoCMS have a social media widget that is quite easy to use and allows you to integrate <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/?lang=en">Twitter</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a>, and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.pinterest.com/">Pinterest</a>. It does this quite well, but it would be great to see a few more integration options available.<h3>Extras</h3>In MotoCMS, each template has an option for a few extra paid plug-ins like an SEO Audit and in-Depth Preloader Customization. These vary according to template.MotoCMS do have some basic features like Google Analytics available for free, but that’s a bare minimum for most CMS these days.<h3>Widgets</h3>A wide range of useful and functional widgets are available as drag-and-drop items on the page editor. This selection includes galleries/portfolios, contact forms, text boxes, videos, and google maps.The eCommerce widget is a premium extra and it’s quite expensive (up to $159), but there’s no other option if you want eCommerce functionality on your MotoCMS site.<h3>Blogging</h3>Only some of MotoCMS’s templates feature a blogging section, which will create a bit of a roadblock for many potential users. They have a <a target="_blank" href="http://www.motocms.com/blog/en/motocms-templates-with-blog-functionality/">few</a> templates with blogging options as standard, but the selection is extremely limited.<h3>Pricing</h3>MotoCMS offers a 14 day free trial period. After this, you're provided with a range of price options that are arranged in pack sizes. This applies to your own drag-and-drop creations.Their basic price option includes a MotoCMS 3 website template for $199 and a HTML template for $139. There are optional extras available such website installation, an eCommerce plugin, an Advanced eCommerce plugin, or a ready-made website.All of their plans and templates come with 24/7 customer support which doesn't discriminate by price. The pricing is very straightforward and transparent.<h2>Pros:</h2>The full hosting package gives users a comprehensive website including hosting.The site has a nice range of contemporary templates that are perfectly suited to their ‘genre’.The WYSIWYG interface is straightforward enough.Sleek UI and UX design means that navigating is a breeze.<h2>Cons:</h2>The interface is a little clogged with sales pitches, offers of customer support help and calls to action. Distracts a little from the experience.Signup feature is a little clunky and time consuming. Too much market research crammed in.The responsive versions of the main templates look very disjointed.Only some templates have blogging features as standard.<h2>Conclusion</h2>MotoCMS is a decent CMS option for small businesses. It’s a bit lacking in the features department, and the page editor is just about average, but it does provide good value and excellent hosting capabilities.The template selection is decent and their template + hosting package is definitely good value.The problem with MotoCMS is that it isn’t really the obvious choice for either the beginner or the professional. It sits on the fence a bit in this regard.The design professional may not be overly impressed with the features available, and the less experienced site builder may find it a little too complex. Not a massive issue, but it’s worth noting.Overall, MotoCMS provide a decent service at a reasonable price, and you can mix and match the plugins as you need. The lack of a blogging platforms available will be an issue for some, but this is still a site builder that’s worth checking out.For more information, visit the MotoCMS site <a href="/products/motocms">here.</a>Have you used MotoCMS or are you interested in trying it out? We'd love to hear from you in the comments section below.

MotoCMS Review 2016

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Volusion Review

The final version of <a href="http://buddypress.org/2014/09/buddypress-2-1-patsy/" target="_blank">BuddyPress 2.1 has been unveiled</a>, just days after the Release Candidate went live.
Following the same trend as WordPress, BuddyPress also name their major releases. However, instead of famous musicians, they opt for eateries. BuddyPress 2.1, therefore, has been named after  <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patsy's_Pizzeria"> Patsy’s</a>, a classic pizzeria in East Harlem, NYC.
As mentioned in my <a href="/buddypress-2.1-release-candidate-now-available/" target="_blank">previous look at BuddyPress 2.1</a>, this new release brings about a new @mentions interface, better translations and much more. So, let's take a closer look at Patsy.
<h2>More Translatable, More @able</h2>
<img style="display:block;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/buddyp.png" alt="BuddyPress" /> 
Previously, you needed to know the username of the member you wanted to mention in the activity stream, but not anymore. In BuddyPress 2.1, typing the  <code> @ </code>  key will bring up the new suggestions panel, making it easy to @ the user you intend, by simply choosing them from a list.
Also, the BuddyPress team have worked alongside the WordPress team to get BuddyPress translation files downloading automatically to your WordPress installation. So, BuddyPress is now more translatable – and more readily translated – than ever before.
Another addition is the new URL field type, which allows your users to enter URLs in a number of formats, and ensures that they’re properly linked when displayed on member profiles.
<h2>Something for the Devs</h2>
BuddyPress 2.1 introduces dozens of improvements with developers in mind:
<ul>
<li>Access control in  <code> BP_Group_Extension </code>  has been completely overhauled, allowing plugins to manage access to their nav items on a fine-grained basis.</li>
<li>A new  <code> group_activity </code>  sort order has been added for Groups queries.</li>
<li>A  <code> no_access_url </code>  parameter has been added to  <code> bp_core_new_subnav_item() </code> . This allows you to set the URL that users are redirected to when they do not have permission to access a sub-navigation item.</li>
<li>Extra CSS classes have been added to Profile Field visibility field elements, allowing greater CSS customization.</li>
</ul>
For a detailed look at the hundreds of bug fixes and feature enhancements in BuddyPress 2.1, check out the <a href="https://codex.buddypress.org/releases/version-2-1/">official 2.1 changelog</a>.
Additionally, be sure to explore more of <a href="/products/buddypress/" target="_blank">BuddyPress via our CMS Directory</a>.

BuddyPress 2.1 Patsy Released

<a href="https://www.oxxy.com/" target="_blank"> Oxxy</a> has launched its public beta for the first time, having completed a closed beta phase. 
 As the new website builder on the block, Oxxy describes itself as being part of the new generation of HTML5 website building platforms. 
 The team behind Oxxy have been busy developing a technology with a focus on the web building experience that aims to be simpler and more intuitive than any other platform on the market. 
Here's an introduction video for Oxxy, followed by some highlights of its main features.
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cUEwAgtaqyI?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<h2>Chrome Touch Support &amp; a Smoother Support System</h2>
Alongside standard website building capabilities, Oxxy has a few interesting features. 
 For example,  Oxxy currently has full touch support for Chrome, with all other browsers in the works too. Their focus for the future development in this direction is supporting all popular browsers and multi-touch support.
<a href="https://www.oxxy.com/" target="_blank"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/oxxy.png" alt="Oxxy" /></a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGysWMR_dYY" target="_blank"> The Oxxy style editor </a>  has been moulded and inspired by existing UI/UX experience like Phothoshop, Illustrator and Gimp, making it accessible for beginner and advanced users. The same goes for the workflow in working with elements while building your website pages. Interactivity like selecting multiple elements in the same manner you select and drag around the icons on your desktop, full control over the dimensions of your elements, free style editing with no template-type restrictions over the layout of your pages. 
 For the users who don't wish to arrange/style/design their website, Oxxy offers templates which are built using the very same Oxxy Website Builder. They also plan to introduce a feature for saving sites as templates, to be distributed and perhaps sold in a future template market. 
 In addition to the phone support, their live chat support is integrated directly in the editor. That means that you can chat with the support while building your website without switching browser tabs or windows. This naturally keeps the user focused on their website building experience. 
 Plus, Oxxy provides a free domain with all yearly subscriptions.  
 To find out more about Oxxy, and to take part in the public beta, <a href="https://www.oxxy.com/" target="_blank"> visit their website</a>.

New Website Builder Oxxy Launches Public Beta

<a href="https://buttercms.com/">ButterCMS</a> is an API-based or “headless” CMS enabling developers to query the Butter API to pull content into the app, using any tech stack of choice such as <a href="https://buttercms.com/angular-cms/">Angular</a> or <a href="https://buttercms.com/react-cms/">React</a>.
ButterCMS eliminates the need for setup and configuration and has a pre-defined data structure optimized to handle a variety of content. Developers can use their preferred tools and frameworks to build interfaces for marketing teams. Creating different content delivery channels is achieved with minimal effort.  Marketers and non technical users can easily create and edit content without concern for different channels, administration issues and technical aspects.
Users experience a faster and more responsive application while consuming high quality content on any delivery channel. In continuing to simplify content management and provide high performance, here are some product updates since our last post.
<h2>New Knowledge Base</h2>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/buttercms_knowledgebase.png" alt="Butter CMS Knowledge Base" /><figcaption>Butter CMS Knowledge Base</figcaption></figure>
ButterCMS launched a brand new knowledge base, a repository for How to’s, FAQ’s, different uses cases and examples on Write API.  The objective is to gain the most value from Butter by 
investigating all the different features, capabilities and discovering new Butter use cases. This knowledge base highlights other ideas for  maximum value with Butter beyond blogging.
<h3>New RegEx Validation Field Validations</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/specific-patterns_v1.png" alt="Butter CMS RegEx Validation Field" /><figcaption>Butter CMS RegEx Validation Field Validations</figcaption></figure>
With our recent additions to set the minimum/maximum length for a short text field in a long text field, we have now enhanced the fields to use specific patterns (technically regular expressions). This means the content editor can set the format for how the specific short text should be formulated.  So for example, if an email address is needed in the short field, you can specify that pattern to be the pattern of an email address.  Users are required to put in the correct text answer of the needed information.
In addition to the default patterns to choose from (E-mail, URL, US Phone number, US Zip Code), users can also select, ‘Custom’ and designate your own pattern. This is a very powerful feature as one can customize and require the answers to be the exact data needed while reducing time and error.
<h3>Previewing Blog Posts</h3>
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/blog_post_preview_v1-1.png" alt="Butter CMS Blog Post Preview URL" /><figcaption>Butter CMS Blog Post Preview URL</figcaption></figure>
ButterCMS has improved the blog post tool by adding the preview draft post functionality.  Content editors can easily view draft blog posts, after pressing the preview button and make changes before the post goes live.
Butter CMS is an API-driven CMS enabling developers to use modern technologies to build websites and applications. The goal is to launch the CMS capability faster so users can focus more on the business.
<h3>Wrap up</h3>
A headless CMS presents itself as a developer friendly alternative to traditional CMS's like WordPress.  ButterCMS has a pre-defined data structure optimized to handle a variety of content while also eliminating the need for set up and configurations. Providing localization, multi-site support and search engine optimization, developers can use their preferred tech stacks to build interfaces. Marketers can easily create and edit content without having technical skills. If you’re wondering if a headless CMS is a right fit for your project, ButterCMS offers a 30-day free trial for you to try out and provide content migration support if you’re moving from an existing CMS.

ButterCMS launches New Knowledge base with enhancements

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As of January 14th, Microsoft has officially stopped supporting Windows 7. If you’re still using this operating system on your computer, there are some important things that you need to be aware of. The end of support may have a significant impact on both your day to day computer usage, and any activities related to running your website(s). This end of support is a normal part of the Microsoft planned life-cycle, which promises technical support for ten years for each operating system. Windows 7 was first released in October of 2009.
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/image-12.png" /></figure>
<h3>What Support is Ending?</h3>
For the last several years, Windows 7 was technically only supported under their ‘extended support’ solutions. This means that they continued to provide security updates and software updates to support new devices. Users could also get direct technical support if they were willing to pay for it. All of these options have now come to an end and Microsoft will not be patching or updating this operating system at all going forward. Individuals and businesses who choose to continue using Windows 7 will not be able to get any support from Microsoft engineers.
<h3>Risks of Remaining on Windows 7</h3>
While Windows 7 will continue to function normally, those who do not upgrade to Windows 10 (or at the least, Windows 8.1, which is still supported through 2023), will face additional problems. The following are the most significant risks users need to be aware of if they keep running Windows 7:
<ul>
<li>Regular Security Patches – Microsoft will not be releasing any further updates to Windows 7, which means their normal security patches will end. This leaves users at risk for viruses, malware, and other issues. A computer infected with these types of things can easily spread them to their managed websites as well.</li>
<li>Known Security Fixes – When a significant security issue is found, Microsoft will no longer provide ‘zero day’ fixing. While under support, a patch would be developed and rolled out very quickly to combat major security flaws that were found.</li>
<li>Updated Drivers – Drivers will no longer be updated, which means computers running Windows 7 will be increasingly unable to run new types of hardware.</li>
<li>Support for Software – No new software, or updates to existing software, will be made to run on Windows 7, and Microsoft won’t update the operating system to run modern software. Over time, users will have more and more problems running the latest software (including CMS’s).</li>
</ul>
<h3>What Options Do You Have?</h3>
Those who are still running Windows 7 have several options available to them. For the vast majority of people, the best course of action is to simply upgrade to Windows 10. This is the latest version of Windows and is the best supported. While the initial roll-out of Windows 10 did have some problems, the OS has been greatly improved and most people are now very happy with it. That being said, it will have a slight learning curve associated with it, so keep that in mind.
To get Windows 10, users can purchase it (currently $139) online and install it. For now, Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users can also participate in Microsoft’s free upgrade program, which gives a full version of Windows 10 to all users. This program was scheduled to end back in 2016, but is still active. Instructions on this, click <a href="https://www.cnet.com/how-to/rip-windows-7-upgrade-to-windows-10-free-heres-how/">HERE</a>.
The least popular option is going to be to upgrade to Windows 8.1. This version of Windows is still supported through 2023 using Microsoft’s extended support category. There are no real advantages to moving to Windows 8.1 instead of going directly to 10, however, so this isn’t a good option for most people.
The final option, which is not at all recommended, is to remain on windows 7. While most users won’t experience any immediate issues, they are putting themselves at an ever growing risk. It can make sense to keep running Windows 7 for a short period of time while preparing for an upgrade, moving up to Windows 10 should be a priority for all users.

What You Need to Know About the End of Windows 7 Support

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