Articles - Page 151

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

janus-boye

In an unfortunate turn of events, Adobe, makers of the popular Business Catalyst and Photoshop products, have had their systems compromised by hackers.
According to a blog post by Adobe's Chief Security Officer, Brad Arkin, several million accounts are believed to have been compromised.
<blockquote>
Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders. At this time, we do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers from our systems. We deeply regret that this incident occurred. We’re working diligently internally, as well as with external partners and law enforcement, to address the incident.
</blockquote>
Some of the information believed to have been compromised include customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders. An approximate estimate by Adobe is that 2.9 million accounts have been affected by this hack.
As a reaction to this, Adobe has announced the following courses of action are being taken:
<ul>
<li>As a precaution, they are resetting relevant customer passwords to help prevent unauthorized access to Adobe ID accounts. If your user ID and password were involved, you will receive an email notification from Adobe with information on how to change your password. They are also recommending that you change your passwords on any website where you may have used the same user ID and password.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>They are in the process of notifying customers whose credit or debit card information they believe to be involved in the incident. If your information was involved, you will receive a notification letter from Adobe with additional information on steps you can take to help protect yourself against potential misuse of personal information about you. Adobe is also offering customers, whose credit or debit card information was involved, the option of enrolling in a one-year complimentary credit monitoring membership where available.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>They have notified the banks processing customer payments for Adobe, so that they can work with the payment card companies and card-issuing banks to help protect customers’ accounts.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Theye have contacted federal law enforcement and are assisting in their investigation.</li>
</ul>
In addition to this particular compromise, they are also investigating the illegal access to source code of numerous Adobe products. For more information, please see the blog post <a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2013/10/illegal-access-to-adobe-source-code.html">here</a>. If you are concerned or believe your account to be affected, read the <a href="http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2013/10/important-customer-security-announcement.html">post here</a> and take the appropriate actions.

Adobe Hacked - User Accounts believed to have been Compromised

mike-johnston

When it comes to social networking software, PHPFox has always been one of the market leaders, and with the updates brought about by their newly released platform version 3.7.0, they will be hoping to make further steps in the right direction.
The latest PHPFox update introduces a four core features, all of which administrators will directly benefit from and make use of.
With the popular community building CMS is in contention for this year's <a href="/announcing-the-people-s-choice-for-best-social-networking-solution-nominees/" target="_blank">People's Choice for Best Social Networking Solution</a>, it's fair to say that these updates will be transforming the way quite a few social networking websites manage and present their content. So, let's have a look at what's new.
<h2>Hashtags &amp; Improved Registration Forms</h2>
The first change PHPFox users will notice, is the implementation of hashtags. Users can add hashtags to images, threads, blogs and so forth, in order to help categorize content, making it easier for others to find whilst searching or browsing.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-3.png" alt="PHPFox v3.7.0" />
Also, PHPFox 3.7.0 also brings about a slightly updated user registration form, which now gives the option for users to enter their City along with the rest of their profile credentials.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-1.png" alt="PHPFox v3.7.0" />
<h2>MultiAds &amp; HTML5 Photo Uploading</h2>
Additionally, a brand new MultiAd feature means that you can display ads throughout your online community in a highly professional fashion. Using the MultiAd feature allows you to display multiple ads in a vertical block beside your content. PHPFox have also stated that custom ads from the AdminCP can be be created in line with the new MultiAd function.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-2.png" alt="PHPFox v3.7.0" />
Last, but not least, is the improved photo uploading function, which makes use of a HTML5 mass uploader. According to PHPFox, they aim to use the HTML5 mass uploader to replace the flash-based Massuploader currently provided for their user base.
PHPFox users can try out a live demo of version 3.7.0, and also read up on the new features via the <a href="https://www.phpfox.com/" target="_blank">official release notes</a>. Additionally, you can find out more about the fundamentals of <a href="/products/phpfox/" target="_blank">PHPFox via our CMS directory</a>.

PHPFox v3.7.0 Launched

This year, the battle to win Best Small to Midsize Business CMS was a hard-fought one with a ton of amazing contenders vying for the top spot. Today, we're going to announce who came out on top in this year's awards.
A CMS that is geared towards Small to Midsize Businesses must be able to cover a wide range of functionality and, ideally, integrate more than one component. Why? It's simple. Businesses already have a ton of overhead on average and any product that can integrate multiple layers of functionality while reducing the reliance on additional products is going to get a leg up on the competition. Businesses don't want to have to manage licensing and fees for Marketing Suites, CRM platforms, Ecommerce Solutions, Hosting, etc, etc. They want a solution that can offer as much functionality as possible with as little a learning curve as possible.
This year, more than last, we can see this choice reflected in the nominees that were part of the award run.
The nominees, as a refresher, were:
<ul>
<li><a href="/products/adobe-business-catalyst/">Adobe Business Catalyst</a></li>
<li><a href="/products/ingeniux/"> Ingeniux </a></li>
<li><a href="/products/dnn-evoq-content/"> DNN Evoq Content </a></li>
<li><a href="/products/percussion/"> Percussion </a></li>
<li><a href="/products/sitefinity/"> Sitefinity </a></li>
</ul>
While it certainly was a hard fought battle but only one can be named the winner and the People's Choice for Best Small to Midsize Business CMS this year is…
<h3><img style="max-width:150px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/best-small-to-midsize-business-cms150x0.png" /></h3>
<h3>DNN Evoq Content!</h3>
DNN Evoq™ Content, formerly known as DotNetNuke® Professional Edition, is a business solution that helps bring your website to life with captivating content and engaging interactions. Users can add and edit content through a standard browser with no IT support.
Whether you’re in Marketing, Editorial or the C-Suite, Evoq™ Content provides a simple CMS and workflow tools suited to non-technical users.
Learn more about <a href="/products/dnn-evoq-content/">DNN Evoq Content</a>
Congratulations to the DNN Evoq Content team on their win! Stay tuned to find out who walks away with the Critics Choice Award (selected by our panel of judges) coming soon.

2013 People's Choice Winner for Best Small to Midsize Business CMS

This year, for the Critic's Choice portion of our annual CMS Awards, we've decided to make the selections using a panel of three judges. The judges we've selected are well respected throughout the community and are valued for their opinions.
To start the process of introduction, we'd like to introduce judge number one, John Coonen!
If you don't know who John is, you are either not on Twitter (he's almost impossible to avoid and his tweets are very entertaining) or you've never attended his CMS Expo (which in itself is a total shame).
<img style="max-width:100px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/john-coonen-gp-bw100x0.jpg" alt="John Coonen" />
John Coonen is the President of the CMS Association. Its mission: “Shine the spotlight on the world's leading CMSs and the people who use them.”  He is the founder and co-host of the <a href="http://www.cmsexpo.net/">CMS Expo Learning &amp; Business Conference</a>, and publisher of The CMS Connection.
John's background is in campaign management and creative direction for major brands, non-profits political campaigns, and causes, where he made extensive use (and custom development of) CMSs since the 1990s. You can find him on <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/coonen">Linkedin</a>.
John was quick to accept the judging position for this year's awards and we're very excited to have him on board. Watch for future collaborations between CMS Critic and CMS Expo in 2014 and be sure to check back throughout this month to hear the winners of the Peoples Choice awards. For a full schedule of the awards, visit the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/cms-critic-awards/">CMS Awards</a> page.

Introduction to the Judges - John Coonen

b2evolution, the open-source blogging software, has a new update available. Version 5.0.6 has been released and includes some bug fixes over the previous release as well as some additional feature enhancements.
If you aren't familiar with b2evolution, check out their page in our <a href="/products/b2evolution/">CMS directory</a>.
A list of some of the changes in this version over the previous:
<ul>
<li>In 5.0.5 we had turned off detailed error messages. This has turned into a support nightmare in the forums where people were unable to report proper error messages when asking for help. Therefore error messages are turned back on by default. But we strongly recommend you learn to turn them off and back on when you need them: <a href="http://b2evolution.net/man/advanced-topics/security/exposing-errors-to-visitors">Exposing Errors to Visitors</a></li>
<li>Fixed AJAX moderation</li>
<li>Post filtering in back-office:</li>
<li>If more than 20 members, do not list all possible authors or assignees. Show a suggest box instead.</li>
<li>Only display list of assignees if Workflow is enabled in advanced options.</li>
<li>Fixed tool which removes per-user email sender settings</li>
<li>Better MySQL database backups (compatible for reload on servers, even if they have strict mode enabled)</li>
<li>i18n/l10n</li>
<li>Strings update</li>
<li>Removed “de_DE” and “es_ES” locales from the standard distribution until we have new maintainers for them</li>
<li>Bundled “fr_FR” (and other “fr_*”) locales now use UTF-8 (“ru_RU” was already using UTF-8)</li>
<li>Enhanced email Return-Path handling default setting</li>
<li>Enhanced Code Highlight plugin</li>
<li>Security enhancements (noncritical)</li>
<li>Quite a few more bug fixes</li>
</ul>
For more info, check out <a href="http://b2evolution.net/">b2evolution</a>.

Blog Software Update: B2evolution 5.0.6 Released

The widespread use of mobile devices including smart phone and tablets, has served as a catalyst for companies and website owners everywhere to increase their focus on mobile optimized versions of their sites.
More Internet traffic is being funnelled through mobile devices than ever before, and such traffic is only rising across the world as time goes on. So, opting for a responsive design should keep everybody covered, right?
Not exactly. In reality, responsive design is what the name implies – design. It will ensure that your website is navigable, and that text and images can be seen without too much hassle.
Yet, there is so much more to optimizing your website for mobile devices than just making the desisn responsive. Thankfully, the capable enterprise management system, <a href="http://www.jahia.com/">Jahia xCM</a>, does a good job of recognizing that, as I will soon discuss.
<h2>Being More Than Just Responsive</h2>
Responsive design is great. In fact, in today's fast moving world of mobile evolution, responsive design is a must.
However, website owners and organizations looking to optimize their content for mobiles need to look deeper than simply the looks of their website. Focusing on the quality of the user's experience, overall functionality and how easily the design can be tweaked, are all vital.
For example, many companies opt for code-laden mobile responsive websites, which are often just as difficult to edit and add to as they were to build in the first place. This is especially the case when attempting to customize the design of a website for each mobile device on the market, which for many will seem like a mammoth task.
In light of these extra factors surrounding responsiveness, Jahia xCM – a powerful content management system built to enhance the online presence of businesses, has some pretty interesting solutions and features, some of which turn such mammoth tasks into manageable ones.
<h2>Going The Extra Mile With Jahia xCM</h2>
When it comes to optimizing the user experience for a wide range of mobile devices, few content management systems can do it as comprehensively as Jahia xCM, especially in lieu of their latest <a href="/jahia-announces-the-availability-of-jahia-xcm-6.6.2-and-jahia-wise-1.8/">Jahia xCM 6.6.2 update</a>.
For example, Jahia xCM enables you to tailor your website experience for each visitor, based on profile, the device they're using, and based off a variety of other factors.
Also, both non-technical and highly experienced website builders can comfortably utilize Jahia xCM to achieve optimum results. The admin control panel is extremely easy to use, allowing you to selectively include, exclude and modify elements on your pages with just a few clicks.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-2700x0.png" alt="Jahia xCM" />
Jahia xCM also provides high definition device  emulators, showing you your website on the screen of a range of devices, allowing you to preview, modify and personalise the experience that each user will get, depending on the device they use to access your content.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-3700x0.png" alt="Jahia xCM" />
With these highly detailed customization and management options, it's easy to see how Jahia have trancended the level of simple responsive design, and have even managed to make the entire procedure moreuser friendly in the process. So, if you're interested in taking your responsive website to the next level, without the need for custom code which is difficult to maintain, check out <a href="http://www.jahia.com/">Jahia xCM</a>.
For more information, you can also find <a href="/products/jahia/">Jahia xCM on our CMS Directory</a>.

Jahia xCM: Above & Beyond Responsive Design

Weglot - The easiest way to translate a website

The easiest way to translate a website

#18164c

Whether you’re searching for your first CMS or you’re planning to upgrade soon, there are a handful of things that are available with the top tier of content management systems on the market today that you simply shouldn’t do without. Make sure you get the most bang for your buck by investing in a CMS that has the following top 5 benefits:
<h2>1. Supports COPE</h2>
If you haven’t heard of the content publishing strategy made famous by NPR, “Create Once. Publish Everywhere.” is all the rage, and your CMS should provide all the tools you need to accomplish it. At its core, COPE is a strategy for getting the most out of your costly content by reusing it and repurposing it across multiple channels, pages and sites.
In order to support a COPE strategy, your new CMS should go beyond just allowing content to be used across sites. It should make this extremely easy by offering easy-to-use indexing, RSS feeds, central image and content repositories, and managed links, to start. It should also allow you to output your content in multiple formats for multiple sites and pages, publishing to multiple servers, for optimized use across multiple devices.
<h2>2. Provides a Superior Editing Experience</h2>
One of the defining features of content management systems is the ability of non-technical end users to create, upload, edit and publish content to the web. However, not all user experiences are created equal. Think about how many people will be editing your website—not just today, but in a year or two as well—and consider their level of technical ability. Having a beautiful interface is nice, but there are many other important parts of the experience to think about. Here are some questions to consider regarding your users:
<ul>
<li>Is there a maximum number of contributors?</li>
<li>Does the application offer true in-context editing and quick edit links to make editing the correct pages and regions as easy as possible?</li>
<li>What type of organizational structure does the CMS use, and is it something your users will easily adopt?</li>
<li>Does the CMS have drop and drop functionality for moving assets, such as pages and folders and for uploading images and other files?</li>
<li>Can you customize the roles and abilities for your content contributors, or are the user types rigid, out-of-the-box profiles?</li>
</ul>
It’s important to look beyond your impressions in the first two minutes and actually practice accomplishing some tasks and testing the software with your end users for at least 30 minutes to an hour.
<h2>3. Improves Your SEO</h2>
There are a number of things your CMS can do or provide in order to support your search engine goals. Some basic things to consider are the URL naming convention, custom and standard metadata fields, keyword tagging, spell-checking and broken link checking, as these can all affect your search engine results placement. Some advanced features are integration with social applications for easy promotion and sharing, Google Analytics connectors to provide analytics information inside the CMS where you edit your pages, page load time calculators, and notifications and automatic archiving when pages expire.
While all these things will impact your SEO, they don’t necessarily help your SEO. More precisely, they just won’t hurt you. With the increased emphasis on fresh content, you need a CMS that goes beyond the “SEO Checkbox” items. Some features that your CMS can provide that will actually help with your SEO are content freshness reports to tell you when stale content needs to be refreshed or unpublished, incredibly easy user interfaces to help you get more contributors creating content (see #2 above), and integrated content marketing tools to help you further optimize, promote and measure your content.
Check out my post from last week on <a href="/why-it-s-not-enough-to-just-manage-your-content-anymore/">why it’s not enough to just manage your content anymore</a>.
<h2>4. Enforces Brand Consistency</h2>
Depending on the size of your organization, you may have several pages on a single site, several interlinked sites and microsites, or literally thousands of sites with millions of pages. Likewise, you may be the only editor, have a handful of content contributors and editors, or manage a very decentralized team of authors, editors, designers, approvers, and managers using the system. Whatever your size and structure, though, you likely have a brand to maintain. Any CMS should help you maintain that brand consistency, but some do it better than others.
For example, you should be able to define a look and feel for a site by creating CSS files and templates for each page type on your site. You should look for a CMS that provides a central repository (see #1 above) for your logos and managed links, footer information, CSS files and formats and templates. That way, if you change something in one place, that change will flow through to all pages and sites where it is being used. A superior CMS will also make it easy to stamp out new sites by copying entire sites (link re-writing included), so you can maintain the same look across all your micro-sites, department sites, landing pages or product sites.
<h2>5. Provides Actionable Reports</h2>
Let’s be honest, reporting isn’t the sexiest component of a CMS, but it is a necessary part of business and can be very powerful when used correctly. Instead of choosing a CMS that provides a laundry list of useless reports, look for a system that provides powerful, actionable reports that you can really use.
Reports like broken links, misspellings and accessibility issues for both pre- and post-publishing are incredibly helpful for SEO and to create a positive experience for your web visitors. Additionally, stale content reports, publishing notifications, and login and usage reports can be especially useful to both administrators and content contributors. Other reports that may come with the content marketing tools to complement your CMS include keywords, search terms, visitors, page load times, inbound and referral links.
<a href="http://goo.gl/tybTuY"><img style="margin-right:auto;margin-left:auto;display:block" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cascade.png" /></a>
When you search for a first or replacement CMS for your company, there will be a number of different features and benefits to evaluate. In addition to looking for these top 5 CMS features, you’ll also need to evaluate many other options. Ultimately, the most important part of the process is planning and understanding your particular needs based on your organization’s size, resources, technical skill level and marketing needs. Once you figure our your needs, it will be much easier to evaluate potential solutions.
For more information about Cascade Server Enterprise CMS, contact us to <a href="http://goo.gl/tybTuY">schedule a demo and set up a free testing sandbox</a>.

The Top 5 Things to Look for in Your Next CMS

Adobe Business Catalyst, for those of you who are unaware, is a website builder with a ton of built-in functionality and the product is also in the running for one of our CMS Awards this year.
To help introduce the product, I put together a video walkthrough which you can watch below that guides you through the various features of Business Catalyst. Don't mind the Canadian accent! It's pretty obvious apparently!
In a nutshell, it's a powerful website builder with integrated CRM, Ecommerce, Mailing List Management, and tons more that is easy to use for the newbie yet powerful enough for an advanced user. While this isn't a full blown review (that will be coming soon) it does serve as a good introduction to what you can expect.
Check out the video below to learn more:
http://youtu.be/o6G8_ey52jg
Would you like to learn more? Check out Adobe Business Catalyst in our CMS Directory.

Adobe Business Catalyst - Video Walkthrough

Nuxeo have officially launched their latest update in the form of Nuxeo Platform 5.7.3, bringing with it a host of new improvements for administrators, general users and also developers.
The open-source platform is primed for building content-centric business applications, with an aim to integrate and align with existing IT infrastructures which many organizations may already have in place.
The 5.7.3 update offers features that can help users and administrators get work done quicker as they use the platform's interface, whilst also offering some more technical improvements.
<h2>Enhanced User Interface &amp; Workflow Features</h2>
One of the ways in which Nuxeo have improved the user interface, is through some simple, yet effective ways. A “Form Submit Shield” for example deters errors and unhappy users who wish to crazily click the “Submit” buttons more times than necessary. Now, the interface will simply present the user with a message telling them that their request is being processed.
Another handy feature comes in the form of an inactivity screen, which alerts users to the fat that their session has expired, and that they need to log back in to continue.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-1.png" alt="Nuxeo Platform 5.7.3" />
Additionally, some interesting Workflow improvements have been added. Workflow tasks can now be specifically assigned to other users, and a clever multitasking feature creates a different task per assignee.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/sshot-2.png" alt="Nuxeo Platform 5.7.3" />
Nuxeo also further enhanced Workflow by implementing a visual graph, allowing users to visualize the tasks at hand, their context, relevance and structure. All of these useful improvements will almost certainly streamline tasks and make life easier for all Nuxeo users.
<h2>Automation, Widgets and Much More</h2>
As well as all the new interface and Workflow enhancements detailed above, Nuxeo have piled on quite a few more updates which may pique the interest of developers and technically minded Nuxeo users.
The Nuxeo REST API provides several new endpoints for documents, users, groups and more. Additionally, users can now enable tracing of Content Automation call using the Automation trace feature.
What's more is, UI/UX frameworks have been re-worked, Select2 widgets have been integrated, and much more has been done behind the scenes, to help the entire platform run smoother than ever before.
To find out more about Nuxeo Platform 5.7.3, or to get a better understanding of the new enhancements discussed above, check out <a href="http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/news/nuxeo-releases-a-new-fast-track-version-of-the-content-management-platform" target="_blank">Nuxeo's official release notes regarding the update</a>. You can also utilize our <a href="/products/nuxeo/" target="_blank">CMS Directory to explore Nuxeo further</a>.

Nuxeo Platform 5.7.3 Released

This is the final day of voting for the People's Choice portion of the CMS awards. We've had an incredible response this year and we're incredibly excited to begin announcing the winners, which we will be doing throughout the month of October as deliberations begin for the second stage of the awards, The Critics Choice portion.
If you haven't cast your vote as of yet, be sure to use the form below to get it in before the end of the day. Voting closes at 9PM MST today!
Updated 9pm MST – Polls have officially closed. Thanks for voting!

Last day of voting for the Critics Choice CMS Awards!

The development team at CMS Made Simple have churned out another release to address some issues with the September 9th release of CMS Made Simple 1.11.8. This newly minted edition aims to address those issues and a few others within the popular open-source CMS.
According to the release announcement:
<blockquote> …the 1.11.8 release introduced a new event (TemplatePreFetch) that would make modules like CmsTouch and TemplateExternalizer more powerful. Unfortunately, the schema version did not change properly, so only users who did a fresh install would get this event. Additionally, we should not have distributed the 1.11.8 diff packages. These were subsequently removed (if you installed the 1.11.8 diff, don't worry—you can still upgrade to 1.11.9).</blockquote>
Some of the additional changes and improvements include:
<ul>
<li>Users with ‘Modify Any Page' and ‘Remove Content' permissions can now delete almost any content page.</li>
<li>Fixed error handling so that error pages won't be indexed by search engines</li>
<li>Some minor security improvements</li>
</ul>
Grab your latest copy from the <a href="http://www.cmsmadesimple.org">CMS Made Simple website</a> or learn more about the product by visiting their page in our CMS Directory.

CMS Made Simple 1.11.9 now available

We recently had an opportunity to have a chat with Brian Kim, COO and Cofounder of <a href="/products/liferay/">Liferay</a>, providers of one of the most popular open-source Enterprise Content Management Systems / Portals on the market. Here is the interview.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
I’m the Chief Operating Officer and one of the cofounders of Liferay. I was born and raised in Chicago. Growing up, I always had expressed interest in computers, but unfortunately never had the opportunity to get more exposure to it. In fact, I didn’t get my first PC until senior year of high school. It wasn’t really until I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago that I took the leap into programming. At Liferay, most of my time is now centered around the business and streamlining our internal operations, but I definitely still miss being a developer.
What is your opinion on the state of the CMS industry? How do you feel it has evolved over the past few years?
<img style="max-width:100px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/image_gallery100x0.png" alt="Brian Kim" />
The CMS industry is continuing to evolve in unique and exciting ways. I am particularly intrigued by the number of applications that are beginning to evolve toward focusing on mobile content ahead of traditional web content. As content is reused for multiple purposes and for multiple platforms, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure that the right content is delivered to the right person at the right time. CMS platforms need to be intelligent enough to dynamically display content based on factors such as a user's location, device and previous interactions with the system, while also taking into account the special behaviors of mobile users (i.e., the fact that users on their mobile devices have shorter attention spans).
What do you think is lacking in the industry at the moment? What needs to change?
The health of the CMS industry provides a multitude of choices for content managers, and with so many different CMS solutions available, application integration needs to be on the forefront of every vendor's mind. Enterprise customers may have ten different CMS's serving different user bases with different needs, but if these systems don't integrate well, then it becomes increasingly difficult for this content to be used and repurposed by different systems. CMIS-compliance is a step forward and provides many opportunities for cross-platform integration, but developers and vendors need to get out of the mindset that their solution is the single “best” solution for a customer — odds are, it is a piece of a very large puzzle, and they need to make integration a priority.
You are involved in the CMIS initiative. What led to that involvement and what do you hope to see come from it?
Perhaps the most attractive aspect of CMIS was its ability to interoperate regardless of the underlying technologies, unlike JCR which only works with Java-based repositories. To put it another way, it was like WSRP for the Java portlet spec. We hope that CMIS can be useful for enterprises looking to unify their various repositories under one, unified interface — the portal.
Can you explain the concept behind CMIS and when you see it being used?
CMIS is a protocol that enables interoperability with content and document repositories. Liferay, having a built-in document repository, can act as a client to mount one or many CMIS-compliant repositories similar to how one would mount a network drive on an operating system. Through the portal, the user is thereby provided with a unified view of all the third-party repositories he or she may have the credentials to access.
Liferay has long been a very versatile company that has been able to stay on top of changing trends easily, why do you think this is? How have you managed to maintain this ability throughout the company’s growth?
In contrast to other commercial open source companies out there, Liferay was born as an open-source project first. It wasn’t until years later that the company was created. What that means is that we have always taken our community very seriously, and as a result, they play a vital part in the growth and direction of our product. Furthermore, as a private company not having received funding, we have always had the liberty to focus on building great software, without having to worry about meeting quarterly targets. And of course, we have such avid lovers of technology all throughout our company who are always looking to find ways to incorporate them into our product.
For those who are confused about the concept of portals, can you explain in laymen’s terms what a portal is and how they fit in the market?
Portal software makes it easier to build a single website out of multiple sites or web-based services. Because portals bring together content and offer a single cohesive experience across departments or organizations within an enterprise, they “sit above” other products in the market, such as dedicated content management systems, records management, customer relationship management, HR, and other enterprise systems.
But more than just surfacing the same information from other applications into a central location, we are looking to help connect those different sources or different applications in such a way that would create more business value than using them independently. For instance, assume you had a CRM and a marketing automation tool that integrated into your portal. Being able to view data from each centrally within the portal is great, but what if the portal allowed you to make connections between the two that provided unique analytics otherwise unavailable by each independently? Then imagine that the business user could make those connections using a GUI tool without having to request someone to code that for them. This is where we envision the portal bringing even more value to an organization.
Technically, Liferay is a very adaptable solution that can be deployed into a large variety of environments. What is the ideal use case for Liferay and when do you think it should be the first tool to consider using?
We’re seeing Liferay become more and more strategic within organizations looking to standardize their development processes. For example, companies, sometimes as a the result of acquisitions, may have inherited many different technologies making reuse and integration difficult. The benefit is that by using Liferay as a base platform for development, applications built on Liferay, using standard SDKs and following specifications, can then be reused and even repurposed for other business units within the same organization. Likewise, information that may be spread across many different groups and applications can also be shared, tagged and categorized centrally within Liferay.
What type of creative and unique technical uses of Liferay have you seen? What are some of your favorites?
The Liferay community is doing so many amazing and innovative things that this could be a very long list, but I will keep it short. There has been a very large push by our customers to deliver specific content to specific roles based on different behaviors the user has exhibited on their system. By using Liferay's auditing tools, rules engine and CMS and integrating it with their own systems, they are able to deliver relevant content from across the enterprise to their users. Additionally, they are utilizing our device recognition capabilities to ensure this content delivery happens regardless of the medium they are using.
Another very interesting use case of Liferay is by a book publisher that is creating a cross-platform publishing application. Content is entered using any one of their disparate systems. Liferay’s workflow engine will then put it through the appropriate approval processes for publishing to the web, but may include pushing specially marked content to other publication channels (books, magazines, etc.).
What can we expect to see from Liferay in the next release? Any new and exciting upcoming features or changes?
First of all, we’re making big changes to its look and feel by making sure that it works with Twitter Bootstrap. Not only will users be able to choose from a huge library of Bootstrap themes, but it will make the creation of custom themes even easier. Another cool feature is the ability to preview how your site would look on a different device (i.e. mobile, tablet, etc.) but all in your browser – no more having to find a specific device to test on. And finally, we took the time to enhance the functionality of all our applications, but especially our CMS, making management of content and sites all that much easier and streamlined for the regular user. There’s plenty more to talk about, but I’ll save some for the actual release.
How mobile-capable is Liferay? What types of changes are coming down the pipeline to make it more mobile-friendly?
Liferay has been designed to support unified web and mobile applications for quite a while, and there are new features coming in Liferay Portal 6.2. Out of the box, developers have multiple options for how they wish to build their mobile sites. Developers can leverage responsive design and build their sites to look great no matter how large or small the user's device is. But in some scenarios, developers need much more flexibility and would like to have a much more customized experience for different types of devices. For instance, they may wish to have all tablets and smartphones go to a dedicated mobile site, or they may just wish to apply a different theme for different devices. That's where our feature of Mobile Device Rules comes in. Using Mobile Device Rules, site administrators can configure different actions (changing the theme, redirecting to another site, changing the layout, etc), depending on different device types.
In the future, we're building out tools to help developers and site administrators easily leverage Liferay to seamlessly connect users to their data, regardless of device. We're also more tightly integrating the administration apps into using responsive design so they can be used from as many devices as possible.
Do you have any parting remarks you'd like to share?
With over 700,000 deployments worldwide, Liferay has helped to satisfy the business needs of our customers while growing a vibrant Liferay ecosystem. Our company has always strived to innovate and develop the best open-source software with the participation from contributors worldwide. In recent years, we’re happy to say Liferay community members have had even more opportunities to contribute to the future of the project through our ideation engine, forum posts, blog articles, user groups, marketplace applications and special project teams. I hope I’ve given you a little more insight into our company as we aim to make a positive impact in the world through great software. Thanks for your interest in Liferay.
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Want to learn more about Liferay? Check them out in the CMS directory – <a href="/products/liferay/">Liferay</a>

Interview with Brian Kim, Liferay’s Chief Operating Officer

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Over the years, content management systems have evolved in a number of different ways. Depending on your needs, you can find a CMS that works just about any way you can imagine–push versus pull architecture, open source versus proprietary, hosted versus installed, out of the box versus fully customizable, unlimited pricing models versus those based on pages or users or sites, and any variety of coding languages supported by a CMS. As long as you do the research to figure out what your organizational needs are, there is a Content Management System out there for you.
The problem now is that there’s a whole lot more to having an effective web presence than just being able to create and publish content. There’s social media, there’s search engine optimization, there are analytics, there are visitor journeys and customer personas, there’s paid search, and there’s email marketing. There are a heckuva lot of other things that you need to do with your content other than just getting it on the web.
That’s where content marketing software comes in. There are a ton of fragmented applications out there than can help you optimize your content, promote it and see how well it’s performing. The key is to find one platform that pulls everything into one place and works with your CMS.
Whether you work at a large or small organization, there is no reason to piece together content marketing solutions when there are a number of platforms that bring them all together under one roof. The benefits of this go well beyond not having to remember a dozen passwords. Having social media, email marketing, landing pages and forms, pageviews, campaigns and visitor identification all in one single platform means that all these things can work together, sharing information with each other.
For example, when someone fills out a form on your site, you can automatically enter them into a campaign to receive your monthly newsletter without having to import their email address into your email marketing application. Additionally, when a lead comes to your site via a tweet you sent out that was retweeted by a member of your community, you can trace the exact source of this traffic back to that original tweet because your social analytics, visitor identification and forms are all talking to each other.
When you have a blog post that is generating a ton of leads for you, the only way you’ll be able to tell is if your pageview data is linked to individual visitors and leads, as opposed to just viewing the data in aggregate, like in Google Analytics. And when a page is under-performing, one way to assess the reason is to use a tool that integrates your page analytics with SEO metrics and keyword densities. Having everything is one place is the only way to get a comprehensive understanding of how your marketing efforts are working.
One of the biggest reasons that companies invest in content management systems is to allow their less technical users to manage content. The CMS alone is a big investment, a much bigger investment if you also factor in the human resources costs of hiring and training content contributors. It only makes sense, then, to equip these contributors with complementary tools to help them promote this content, optimize it, measure it, and perfect it. The best way to have an effective content strategy is to be thoughtful about it and provide the necessary tools to support your authors and editors.
So, the next time you seek out a new content management system for your organization, be sure to consider your content marketing needs as well. Cascade Server (2013 Best Enterprise CMS Nominee) is the only content management system that comes with a full content marketing platform, which not only integrates with the CMS but also integrates with SalesForce, the leading CRM on the market.
For more information about how Cascade Server’s content management and content marketing solutions can help you go beyond just managing your content, <a href="http://www3.hannonhill.com/content-lifecycle-cms-critic-hannon-hill-cascade-page">get in touch with us</a>, and one of our solutions consultants will be happy to discuss the full content lifecycle at your organization and how we can help. 
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Why It’s Not Enough to Just Manage Your Content Anymore

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