Articles - Page 132

Not All Heroes Wear Capes. Here's Why CMS Is Your 'Unsung Hero' in 2025

janus-boye

Consumers today don’t just expect relevant and contextual experiences and interactions with brands; they demand it. With the amount of data brands are collecting from consumers across various touchpoints, marketers are being pressed more than ever to leverage that data and consistently deliver meaningful, relevant experiences. At a time when consumers use multiple devices during their customer journeys, brands are often challenged with understanding each customer’s current needs specifically in context, in order to anticipate their next steps.
When it comes to the Web, data-driven insights are generated when consumers visit a brand’s Web and mobile sites. Marketers must be able to apply these insights and integrate them with valuable customer data from other interaction channels. Often times, organizations rely on multiple technologies that lack seamless integration to provide the relevant data points needed to drive the customer experience. The result tends to be a disjointed brand experience in the form of sporadic, ineffective campaigns.
To provide hyper-relevant Web experiences to consumers, brands need access to the full context of every customer interaction in one place. Helping brands achieve this, my company, SDL, recently <a href="http://www.sdl.com/aboutus/news/pressreleases/2014/SDL-empowers-marketers-to-create-contextual-hyper-relevant-customer-experiences-for-the-always-connected-generation.html"> announced </a> a new release of SDL Web, the Web pillar of the Customer Experience Cloud (CXC). With this release, SDL CXC now offers context brokering, which enables businesses to provide personal and contextualized interactive brand experiences for customers across all channels and devices.
Regardless of the technology a brand utilizes, there are four main solution areas brands should adopt to drive online presence and engagement:
<ul>
<li>
 Global web content management – A global web presence is much more than simply translating websites; marketers must ensure local relevance and responsiveness to an individual customer’s context, addressing the various elements that are dependent on culture and language.
</li>
<li>
 Multi-channel experiences – The customer journey spans multiple touches across several devices at different times and places. Brands must ensure consistency, regardless how complex a customer’s path may be.
</li>
<li>
 Targeting and personalization – It’s time for organizations to move beyond personalization toward contextualized experiences. By taking an outside-in approach, marketers can provide each and every visitor with an experience that matches his or her preferences, stage in the customer journey and unique context.
</li>
<li>
 Rich media &amp; video – Video and rich media marketing is a vitally important way to engage target audiences. Visual impact transforms imparting information into creating an experience, conveying emotion and, most importantly, desire to act
</li>
</ul>
To summarize, Web plays a critical role in the customer experience and must be seamlessly integrated with other touchpoints. Otherwise, customers are presented with disjointed campaigns, negatively impacting customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and the brand’s bottom line. In my view as a CMO, context cannot be ignored, as it will play an increasingly significant role in customer experience as consumer demands grow and attention spans dwindle.

Beyond Personalization: Providing Contextual Web Experiences to In-Demand Consumers

mike-johnston

Being able to monitor and study the behaviour of your website visitors is vital – and with Squarespace analytics, you can do just that.
In short, analytics help you to understand your visitors, allowing you to cater to their needs. By knowing where your visitors came from, which pages they’re visiting, and which devices they’re using, you can make better informed marketing decisions.
So, let’s take a look at just how well “Squarespace Activity” – Squarespace's built-in analytics tool – presents you with the data you need.
<h2>Squarespace Analytics: Just How Useful Is It?</h2>
To access Squarespace analytics, you only need to head over to the Activity section , which is located on the left-hand sidebar on the Squarespace admin panel.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/1700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
The Activity section holds all of the Squarespace analytics options, and the best part is, there’s nothing extra to configure or install. Squarespace does everything for you.
Within the Activity section is seven further sections which give you a break down of your websites stats. Let’s take a look at these sections individually.
<h3>Traffic Overview</h3>
One of the most important sections of Squarespace analytics is Traffic Overview. Within it is an easy to follow graph, which enables you to monitor the amount of visitors your website has been receiving over hourly, daily weekly and monthly periods.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/2700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
Further figures indicate Page Views and Visitor Counts, which include both unique and robot hits. Squarespace compute these statistics every few minutes to give you a real-time view of your numbers.
<h3>Mobile Usage</h3>
It’s important to know which devices your visitors are using, so you can ensure that your website is looking as it should for those who frequent it. To help out, Squarespace enables you to check the number of visitors using either desktops or mobile devices via a graph.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/3700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
Once again, Squarespace gives you a very useful hourly, daily, weekly and monthly breakdown of which devices your visitors are using.
<h3>Subscribers</h3>
Squarespace also provides accurate RSS subscriber figures as well as a breakdown of where your RSS subscribers are coming from. The figures displayed are estimates of the number of unique active subscribers you have from each RSS feed on your website.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/4700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
These figures are presented on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, helping you to keep track of your subscribers over both long and short periods of time. Once again, a simple graphs is used to illustrate the figures.
<h3>Referrers</h3>
Knowing where visitors are coming from is important, and Squarespace recognizes this by providing detailed referral metrics. Using this section of Squarespace analytics, you can see how many visitors came to your website directly, as well as how many came through Google, Facebook, Twitter and so forth.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/5700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
These metrics can be viewed on a daily basis, two daily basis, three daily basis as well as on a weekly and monthly basis. This time, an easy to understand coloured pie chart helps keep things simple.
<h3>Popular Content</h3>
Using Squarespace analytics, you can also check which pages on your website are receiving most traffic.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/6700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
Once again, these stats are presented on a daily basis, two daily basis, three daily basis as well as on a weekly and monthly basis. A coloured pie chart is used again also, giving you a concise overview of the popularity of each page on your website.
<h3>Search Queries</h3>
You can also monitor search engine queries via the search queries section on the Activity page. This allows you to see how your content is being found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/7700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
The coloured pie chart makes another appearance, along with options to view the stats on a daily, two daily and three daily basis, as well as on a weekly and monthly basis. The same list of keywords are then displayed in a list below the chart for further analysis.
<h3>Detailed Activity</h3>
Finally, Detailed Activity allows you to view specific visitor and visit details.These details include the IP address of each visitor, the pages they visited, and the exact time in which their visit began.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/8700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Analytics" />
These detailed activity facts are ideal for tracking and monitoring individual visitors. A handy search bar even enables you to locate certain IP addresses. Unfortunately though – unlike the other Squarespace analytics sections – there are no time-based filtering options.
<h2>The Verdict</h2>
To give you an overview of the good and bad which 3dcart has to offer, check out the pros and cons below.
<h4>Pros</h4>
<ul>
<li>No configuration needed, Squarespace Analytics just works.</li>
<li>Graphs, charts and lists keep stats and facts neat, tidy and easy to understand.</li>
<li>Nice range of time filtering options within most sections which help you analyse data better.</li>
<li>Seven different sections dedicated to certain statistical data sets makes it easier to focus on certain stats.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Cons</h4>
<ul>
<li>Mobile Usage section doesn’t tell you which mobile devices in particular are being used.</li>
<li>Detailed Activity section isn’t as detailed as it could be, with no time filtering options.</li>
</ul>
Overall, Squarespace analytics gives you a highly impressive overview of your website’s statistics.
Because Squarespace have laid these facts and figures out so neatly throughout every section, you can come to a wide range of conclusions regarding your visitors extremely easily.
It could be argued that the lack of a time-based filter on the Detailed Activity page is a possible flaw – although the sheer usefulness and user friendliness of the other sections far outweigh this minor issue. So, the Squarespace analytics section definitely gets a thumbs up from us.
For further detail on Squarespace, check out our full <a href="/squarespace-review-the-long-awaited-commerce-solution/" target="_blank">Squarespace Review</a>. Also, you can explore more of <a href="/products/squarespace/" target="_blank">Squarespace via our CMS Directory</a>.
You can also start your <a href="https://www.squarespace.com/templates">14-day free trial of Squarespace</a> today.

How Useful is Squarespace as an Analytics Tool?

It is with great pleasure that we announce the Third Annual Critics' Choice Awards will begin on June 15, 2014!  We have a host of new categories this year that will be announced on our awards site, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards/">cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards/</a> early next week so be sure to stay tuned for more details on that.
For those who are interested in trying to get nominations once they open on the 15th, use this handy badge and point your users to <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards/">https://www.cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards/</a> which is where the nomination forms will be posted on launch date (again, this is June 15).
Here are two versions of the nomination badge for you to use on your site if you wish to do so:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/nominate_us.png" /><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/nominate-us.png" />
Thanks and good luck to all!

Preparing for the Nomination stage - Critics' Choice CMS Awards

Zikula's Content page editing module has been updated to version 4.1.0, bringing about a number of fixes and improvements.
<a href="http://zikula.org/" target="_blank"> Zikula</a> is a free and open-source web application framework released under the GNU General Public License. It can be used to develop robust, interactive, and customizable websites, portals, and web based applications.
This new Zikula Content module release is targeted for the latest Zikula Core 1.3.7. It comes bearing a range of bug fixes, several code tweaks, UI improvements, and works together with Scribite 5. Since it is now fully hook-based it should also work with Scribite4.
<img style="max-width:253px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula-1.png" alt="Zikula" /> 
Zikula's content module is one of the platform's most vital content creation arms, and so this news like likely impact a vast majority of Zikula users.
<h3>Here's a quick overview of what's new and improved:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Fully hook based, so the module will work far smoother with Scribite (fully tested with Scribite 5)</li>
<li>Bug fixes on several points; Search fixed, drag-and-drop fixed, upgrading from 3 should work better now, subfolder install fixed, category selection improvements, ToC fixes</li>
<li>You can enable/disable content item on the fly with Ajax in edit page</li>
<li>The edit page icon can be placed on top or below page</li>
<li>Graphical trail for breadcrumbs</li>
<li>Page title option accessible via header plugin</li>
<li>You can now insert blocks with the drop-down list</li>
<li>Translating HTML is now easier</li>
<li>HTML plugin cleaned up from legacy</li>
<li>Extra free field per page to be used as you wish</li>
<li>Extra plugin styles added</li>
</ul>
Zikula Content 4.1.0 can be <a href="https://github.com/zikula-modules/Content/releases/tag/4.1.0" target="_blank">downloaded here</a>. Find out more about Zikula by <a href="https://ziku.la/" target="_blank">visiting their website</a>.
Also, be sure to check out <a href="/products/zikula/" target="_blank"> Zikula via our CMS Directory</a>.

Zikula Content 4.1.0 released

As you may have heard, Acquia recently picked up a Toronto based company named focused on personalization for websites / commerce sites called TruCentric.
We took this opportunity to chat with Acquia about this acquisition and find out their motivations behind the purchase.
What spurred the acquisition of TruCentric over other players in the industry?
Digital marketers need to gain a deep understanding of all site visitors, including those that are anonymous, in order to grow their audience and drive conversions. Acquia is acquiring TruCentric, because it provides high resolution, real-time customer profiling for every site visitor based on their online behavior and preferences. With that information, digital marketers can deliver engaging, hyper-personalized experiences that appeal to site visitors and compel them to take a desired action.
Will the employees of TruCentric be taking on similar roles within Acquia now?
All TruCentric employees will join Acquia.  
What are the long term plans for Acquia now that this acquisition has been announced?
Acquia helps businesses build and support digital properties, so they can out-compete their rivals among a the rapidly changing digital landscape. Personalized engagement and commerce are important revenue drivers for today’s digital-first businesses, so with this acquisition, Acquia is expanding the digital engagement and commerce segment of the business. TruCentric will extend the capabilities of Acquia Lift. TruCentric’s analytical insights, paired with Acquia Lift’s testing and personalization capabilities, will allow digital marketers to transform digital interactions into hyper-personalized experiences.
Can we expect to see a form of marketing suite integration into the Acquia platform?
Digital is disrupting every all modern business processes, not just marketing. In order for businesses to win against competitors, they need to drive digital transformation across their entire company, including commerce, customer support, employe engagement and more. We’re not building out a marketing suite, we’re building out a platform for digital business optimization — one that unifies content, community and commerce, offering much more than traditional marketing suites.
What type of competitive advantage does Acquia hope to gain from this new acquisition?
This acquisition will accelerate Acquia’s leadership in website personalization. The combination of  Acquia Lift and TruCentric will provide marketers with deep insight, and the ability to automate changes to Drupal-based sites accordingly. The joint solution will seamlessly integrate known data with anonymous data, building the level of understanding across customer segments necessary to increase conversions.
To learn more about this acquisition and the companies involved, visit <a href="http://www.acquia.com/products-services/trucentric">http://www.acquia.com/products-services/trucentric</a>

A chat with Acquia about their recent TruCentric Acquisition

As I'm sure most of you are aware, I'm a designer / developer who spends quite a bit of time building and managing WordPress websites.Now with the newly launched Open Source Critic, eCommerce Critic and PlayStation Critic, not to mention my wife's website (easily the most complex of the bunch) <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thekitchenmagpie.com">The Kitchen Magpie</a>, I spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking and modify plugins and themes to meet both her requirements and mine.While there are certainly lots of things that are great about WordPress, today, there are also plenty of things that drive me nuts about it. Today, I thought I'd share with you the 5 WordPress plugins that drive me nuts.Let's start with the one that almost everyone installs by default…<h3>Jetpack</h3>Jetpack is one of those love it or hate it plugins. Personally, I hate it. Here's why. My wife is absolutely obsessed with looking at her stats and why wouldn't she be? We both spend out time at home nowadays making our money through our websites so stats are definitely important but there are several things about Jetpack that make it one of my least favorite plugins.<h4>Here's something you may not know: It slows down your website</h4>You would think that something designed for the WordPress community by the very company that produces WordPress would be streamlined and efficient and not adversely affect your site wouldn't you? You'd be wrong. Jetpack, by default, slows websites down and here's why.<ul><li>When there's a new feature added to Jetpack it's activated by default, whether you want it or not.</li><li>When you first install it, it activates all kinds of ridiculously useless plugins such as Gravatar Hovercards (really? Who wants these ugly things on their site) that bog you down with extra javascript.</li></ul>Don't believe me? On a base WordPress install with Jetpack installed by default my average load time was 1.7 seconds. As soon as I removed Jetpack and deleted the plugin, that load time dropped to 510ms. I'd consider that a fairly significant savings of speed but that's only on a base install. When you are operating a huge website like my wife's, every second counts. Especially when it's so graphic heavy. On her site the difference is larger because she was using more of Jetpack's functionality. The problem we have, however, is that we use the related posts plugin from Jetpack to make a nice image grid on her site and if we disable it, it means more coding for me so for now, it stays but I have my sights set on you Jetpack. You will fall.Why do people install it? Mostly due to lack of knowing any better. People assume (like I did initially) that because it's provided by Automattic, it's something that should help your site and that's true to some degree. 90% of the people who install Jetpack install it for WordPress.com stats (such as my wife for instance). The problem is that there are plenty of analytics out there that do a far more accurate job of capturing far more data than Jetpack does. While I know lots of people use Google Analytics, I personally dislike it and find it to be far too complex for the average user. My personal favorite is the one and only <a target="_blank" href="http://clicky.com/66435163">Clicky Analytics</a> which gives you way more information in a much nicer presentation and includes the ability to see heat maps of your pages and see who's online real time via the Spy feature.<h3>WordPress SEO</h3>I love WordPress SEO. I truly do. In fact, it's the only SEO plugin I rely on when it comes to my sites. What drives me nuts about it is this:<h4>It updates constantly.</h4>More so than any other plugin I have installed ever. Sometimes it feels like there's a new update every day for this plugin which is extremely discouraging when you've just updated all of your sites and tested the changes and then the next day, there's yet another update to test before going live. Is it good that it's updated? Absolutely. Is it necessary to update it so frequently? No. Simply take your time and plan out a release schedule that's less annoying and stick with it.  Don't get me wrong. I don't pay for the plugin and it's not that I don't appreciate the hard work that goes into it but do you really need to release a new update every day? Make it monthly unless it's a bug, you will eliminate so many headaches.The other issue I have with it is that it sucks at getting Google Authorship working easily. Yes, I know, several of you I'm sure think it does a great job and it may be working for you but the fact of the matter is it does not load the authorship code into the header and as a result, with some themes, it just doesn't work properly. I've had to install yet another plugin specifically for Authorship in order to prevent myself from punching the screen with frustration trying to make the Rich Snippets Tool confirm that authorship is working properly.This may sound whiney and unappreciative but as an administrator of several WP sites, I feel I have a right to complain. And it's my blog, so you can't stop me ?The issue with alot of plugins is that they are not vetted out by anyone. A random person can submit a plugin for inclusion to the directory and it could be the absolute most horribly coded thing in the world but if named correctly and you include pretty screenshots, people will install it not knowing any better. There are tons of absolute crap plugins in the WP directory (some with 2 ratings, both of which are friends of the author) that lead people to believe they are good when in the end, they actually cause tons of headaches and issues.This is one of the reasons why website owners really should have someone managing their WordPress installs for them. People who know what they are doing and can prevent these types of headaches from happening in the first place. For those of you out there who are fed up with trying to figure this stuff out for yourself, <a href="/contact">drop me a line</a>.

WordPress Plugins that Drive me Nuts

<a href="http://www.wix.com/" target="_blank">Wix</a> users have been spoilt for choice this month, thanks to the popular website builder unveiling a whopping 50 new features.
As one of the world's leading website builders, Wix offers a user-friendly interface and a huge range of templates to help individuals and companies create simple, good-looking, and functional websites.
These 50 new features have been, “specially developed to help grow your business”, and so I'm sure Wix's 46 million-strong user base will want to get to grips with what's new.
<a href="http://www.wix.com/" target="_blank"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wix700x0.png" alt="Wix Update" /></a>
<h2>From ShoutOut Newsletters to Mobile HTML Editing</h2>
From amongst the long list of tools, apps and templates listed by Wix, you'll find the following new Apps:
<ul>
<li> ShoutOut Newsletters: Send beautiful newsletters to your audience and increase customer engagement. You can also share eye-catching updates, news items, promotions and more.</li>
<li> Visit Virtual Tour: Give your website visitors a tour of any location with an interactive, 360° view.</li>
<li> Poll Generator: Add a fully customizable, mobile-responsive Poll to any webpage in seconds.</li>
<li> POWr Mailing List: Manage your email subscribers, collect user information, and grow your audience with this easy-to-use, fully-customizable Mailing List signup app.</li>
<li>Google Events Calendar: Organize your schedule and share important events with visitors directly on your site.</li>
</ul>
And those are just the tip of the iceburg. Further new features include mobile HTML editing to resize and reorder elements in your mobile site, store product image zooming, mobile page hiding, new button designs and much more.
Not to mention, Wix users can enjoy browsing through a over 30 new templates relating to business, sports, entertainment and food.
The full list of 50 tools, apps, and templates <a href="http://www.wix.com/lphtml/june-features?" target="_blank">can be found here</a>.
Sign up to create your <a href="http://www.wix.com/" target="_blank">free Wix website today</a>.
Also, you can explore more of  <a href="/products/wix/" target="_blank"> Wix via our CMS Directory</a>.

Wix Reveals 50 New Tools, Apps & Templates

Hotjar - Spot what confuses

Spot what confuses your users with Hotjar & AI

#ffffff

Today, I am pleased to announce that the Third Annual Critics' Choice CMS Awards will begin June 15, 2014!  For those of you who have been emailing me all year asking when they start, this post is for you ;).
While we have maintained the majority of categories from last year's awards, there have been some changes and we've included a few others that we think are suitable. The full list of categories will be announced in the next few days but I wanted to take the time to let everyone know that there is indeed an official launch date.
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards/">Read the rest of the details (including timelines) over at our awards site by clicking here</a>.

The Third Annual Critics Choice CMS Awards

<a href="http://www.nuxeo.com/" target="_blank"> Nuxeo</a> have announced the release of a beta for their new hosting service, Nuxeo.io.
Nuxeo is an open source enterprise content management system used by professionals such as architects and developers to build, deploy, and run content-centric business applications.
Nuxeo.io, Nuxeo's latest offering, is a hosting service for building and managing Nuxeo Platform clusters in the cloud.
As a service of <a href="https://connect.nuxeo.com/nuxeo/site/connect/trial/form" target="_blank">Nuxeo Connect</a> – the subscription service providing support, maintenance and access to Nuxeo Studio – Nuxeo.io is a development environment offering quick and easy access to lightweight Nuxeo Platform instances on demand.
<img style="max-width:345px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/nuxeo_logo-1.png" alt="Nuxeo" />
<h2>Arken Built, Docker Based</h2>
The cloud-based development environment offered by Nuxeo.io makes for quick and easy access to lightweight Nuxeo Platform instances on demand.
The technology used to build and prop up Nuxeo's new hosting service is as follows:
<ul>
<li> Built with Arken:  nuxeo.io is built with Arken, an open source software infrastructure for instantiation, provisioning and resilience of application instances, on premises or on the Cloud. Arken was developed by Nuxeo.</li>
<li> Uses Docker:  Docker is a lightweight virtualization engine, or container. It provides the isolation of a VM, without the overhead of a machine, OS or hypervisor. Arken organizes Docker containers using CoreOS.</li>
<li> Runs on Amazon AWS/EC2:  nuxeo.io runs on Amazon AWS, but Arken is infrastructure independent;  it can run anywhere, so you can deploy nuxeo.io on premises as a private cloud installation or in the cloud in any IaaS environment.</li>
</ul>
Naturally, Nuxeo.io was built with developers with content-centric apps in mind. However, Nuxeo have claimed that Nuxeo.io is also a perfect fit for Nuxeo-based SaaS (Software as a Service) providers. This is thanks to the ease Nuxeo.io brings when it comes to building an environment to help manage services for your customers, while also managing your application infrastructure.
Additionally, because Nuxeo.io uses Docker – which relies on low-level features of Linux – SaaS providers can measure CPU usage for each customer, delegate isolation to the kernel and benefit from an environment which is far more secure.
The CEO of Nuxeo, Eric Barroca, made these comments regarding the release of Nuxeo.io:
<blockquote>“In a typical Nuxeo project lifecycle, dozens of instances of the Nuxeo Platform can be started and stopped: development, test, plugins, sandboxes, QA, and so on. Nuxeo.io provides Nuxeo customers easy and quick access to development instances that can be used for the entire lifecycle of a project from development to production.
The digital services­based economy is driving enterprises to provide solutions faster than ever before. Project teams need to be able to provision new environments quickly to build and adapt content­centric business applications that support their customers’ needs. SaaS providers have the same challenge, needing to offer new or enhanced services for their customers quickly. nuxeo.io is a great way to provide both a cloud­based infrastructure and application environment for the Nuxeo Platform to help them do this.
It’s lightweight and flexible, with low overhead required to get a new hosted Nuxeo Platform environment up and running. You can start and stop an instance in 20 seconds ­ now that’s quick.”</blockquote>
Existing Nuxeo Connect subscribers can sign up for the Nuxeo.io beta as of right now. If you aren’t yet a Nuxeo Connect subscriber, you can <a href="https://connect.nuxeo.com/nuxeo/site/connect/trial/form" target="_blank">sign up for a trial account</a> and give Nuxeo.io a whirl.
To find out more about Nuxeo, <a href="http://www.nuxeo.com/" target="_blank">check out their website</a>.
Also, be sure to explore more of <a href="/products/nuxeo/" target="_blank"> Nuxeo via our CMS Directory</a>.

Nuxeo Rolls Out Beta of Hosting Service Nuxeo.io

<a href="http://ez.no/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> eZ Publish</a> have released version 5.3 of their popular platform with an impressive 59 new features, 233 bug fixes &amp; 69 improvements.
The Content Management (CMS) &amp; Customer Experience (CXM) platform offers many tools to help publish content across multiple channels, create eCommerce websites, and more.
Version 5.3 of eZ Publish is the fourth major release in the 5 series, and has been labelled a Long Term Supported release (LTS). This means that it will be supported up to end of May 2019 with extended support.
Now, let's take a look at what's new with eZ Publish
<h2>Developer Ease in Mind</h2>
eZ Publish 5.3 puts a lot of effort into making things easier for developers to use the platform efficiently.
At a glance, eZ Publish Platform 5.3 brings the following key benefits:
<ul>
<li>A Long Term Supported release.</li>
<li>Making it easier for developers to understand and learn.</li>
<li>Making it easier for developers to develop and deploy.</li>
<li>Updated Demo site with more ready-to-use features like “Places”.</li>
</ul>
One of the ways eZ Publish 5.3 helps developers, is through improved documentation that will naturally make it easier to anyone to get started.
Furthermore, version 5.3 brings about drastically improved integration of the Symfony environment, along with the capability to easily build websites relying on the “eZ Platform” stack (“New Stack”) – removing dependencies on the legacy stack (4.x).
The eZ Publish Demo Site has also been improved to progressively become the reference for developers to see how features can be used to build their Websites.
Among the many enhancements made to the Demo Site, is the ready-to-use feature called “Places”, which shows ou how to best deal with geolocation and how to search on geolocated data, thanks to the latest improvement in the eZ Publish API and in SolR. Essentially, the “Places” feature enables you to quickly create your own listing of places (such as a business directory) and display them efficiently.
For more information on eZ Publish, <a href="http://ez.no/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> check out their website</a>.
You can also explore more of <a href="/products/ibexa/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">eZ Publish via our CMS Directory</a>.

eZ Publish Platform 5.3 Released

The <a href="https://contao.org/" target="_blank">Contao CMS</a> team have released version 3.3.0 of their platform, following four months of development and two months of testing.
Formerly known as TYPOlight, Contao is an open-source content management system offering a sleek interface and a number of useful content publishing tools.
The development stage of Contao 3.3.0 saw one beta release followed by two separate release candidates – all leading up to this release. In fact, 120 tickets and pull requests have been completed during the six months of development and testing.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/contao.png" alt="Contao 3.3.0" />
<h2>TinyMCE 4, Responsive Back End Themes &amp; More</h2>
Contao has integrated a host of improvements and additions to their platform with the release of version 3.3.0. These include evident front-end changes and less apparent framework tweaks.
Here is an overview of what's new with Contao 3.3.0:
<ul>
<li>Flexible &amp; responsive back-end theme.</li>
<li>Drag-and-drop file uploading.</li>
<li>Theme import/export permissions.</li>
<li>TinyMCE 4.</li>
<li>Front End Preview as a member.</li>
<li>File content versioning.</li>
<li>SCSS and LESS integration.</li>
<li>And much more.</li>
</ul>
For the details of each of these updates, check out Contao's feature announcements <a href="https://contao.org/en/news/contao-3_3_RC1.html" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://contao.org/en/news/contao-3_3_beta1.html" target="_blank">here</a>.
To find out more about Contao CMS, <a href="https://contao.org" target="_blank">check out their website</a>.
Also, be sure to explore more of <a href="/products/contao/" target="_blank">Contao via our CMS Directory</a>.

Contao 3.3.0 Released With Numerous Enhancements

Blogging is becoming increasingly important in terms of marketing and relationship building between company and customer.
Thankfully, blogging on <a href="https://www.squarespace.com/" target="_blank">Squarespace</a> is an option – but just how good of an option is it?
If you’re looking to use Squarespace to build a blog, you’ll need to assess just how much functionality the platform offers, and how easy it is to blog on Squarespace on a regular basis.
To explore exactly those areas, read on.
<h2>Blogging on Squarespace: Good Enough for Your Blog?</h2>
Squarespace’s blogging feature can be found within the “Content Manager”, accessible from the left-hand sidebar.
From there, you can click “Add Page”, and then select “Blog”.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/blog.png" alt="Squarespace Blogging" />
Once your blog page is set up – which takes you a matter of seconds, SquareSpace allows you to start blogging straight away. Which is also just as simple. All you need to do is click “Add Post” in the top right-hand corner.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/untitled-1024x195700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Blogging" />
You can then type in your blog post title, and all of your required text.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/bpost700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Blogging" />
Furthermore, you can start experimenting with Squarespace’s extensive content block options.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/blocks700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Blogging" />
These content block options include inserting more text areas, products, maps, menus, videos, galleries, social buttons, Flickr widgets, Instagram widgets, and much, much more. It’s all as easy as selecting which content block you wish to use.
Once you have finished inserting your text, videos and other blocks, you’re all set to publish your blog post.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/publish700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Blogging" />
All you need to do is click “Save &amp; Publish”, and you’re done.
After creating a few blog posts, your blog management page will begin filling up. The neatly laid out list displays all of your posts, along with some minor details and an option to edit them further.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/bloglist700x0.png" alt="Squarespace Blogging" />
<h2>Squarespace Blogging Extras</h2>
Some handy extra options are also available for blogging on Squarespace. These include:
<ul>
<li>Post tagging</li>
<li>Categories</li>
<li>Geo-tagging</li>
<li>Post by email</li>
<li>Podcast support</li>
<li>Customizable URLs</li>
</ul>
These additional options really help round off the Squarespace blogging experience, allowing it to go above and beyond standard blog post publishing.
<h2>The Verdict</h2>
To give you an overview of the good and bad which Squarespace blogging has to offer, check out the pros and cons below.
<h3>Pros</h3>
<ul>
<li>Incredibly simple to put to get started with, with no tricky controls or menus.</li>
<li>The blog list view is easy to understand and thus easy to manage.</li>
<li>Huge amount of content blocks which make embedding videos, maps, menus and so forth a piece of cake.</li>
<li>Long list of optional extras like tagging and customizable URLs to add some depth to your blog if necessary.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Cons</h3>
<ul>
<li>No toggle option between HTML &amp; Visual mode, as with most other blogging platforms.</li>
<li>No blog post preview option.</li>
</ul>
All in all, blogging on Squarespace is – like the rest of the platform – simple. There aren’t any technical options to get confused with, whilst all the additional extras are completely optional.
What’s more is, Squarespace’s trademark content blocks make adding elements like videos and social buttons to blog posts a breeze.
If you’re on the hunt for a sophisticated blogging platform, Squarespace’s lack of HTML and post previewing action may hold you back. However, when it comes to straightforward blogging, there isn’t much Squarespace can’t do.
You can also get started with your Squarespace website today, thanks to the <a href="https://www.squarespace.com/templates">Squarespace 14-day free trial</a>.

How Effective is Squarespace as a Blogging Platform?

LightCMS have announced a major security update that relates to connecting with your LightCMS website via FTP.
Used by more than 175,000 people around the world, LightCMS makes us of standardized code and a vast array of tools to make up a powerful suite capable of building corporate websites, eCommerce websites, Blogs, and more.
With this FTP Secure protocol update, which is due to roll out on June 2nd, 2014, LightCMS users will experience a far safer connection. Connecting to websites via FTP is a popular method of making changes to web property, and so many LightCMS users will likely be affected by this change.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/ftp-secure700x0.jpg" alt="LightCMS FTPS" /> 
Once the upgrade is in place, all LightCMS FTP connections will need to be made via FTPS. This will change a few of the settings you use with your FTP clients when connecting to your LightCMS website.
To guide you through that short process, the LightCMS team have thrown together an easy-to-follow guide to connecting with LightCMS via FTPS. The guide covered popular FTP clients such as FileZilla, WinSCP and Transmit.
To find out more about LightCMS, check out their website. Full details of this scheduled FTPS update can be found via the LightCMS Blog.
Also, be sure to explore more of LightCMS via our CMS Directory.

LightCMS Prepares Website Security Update Through FTPS

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