Articles - Page 198

The Top 10 AI Tools for Small Business: From Automation to a Coordinated Team of AI Agents

matt-garrepy

A new version of MODX Revolution has been released. MODX Revolution 2.2.11 includes a number of security fixes and aims to prevent change loss for those running the popular open source CMS.
This release includes two security fixes including one affecting the phpThumb library that ships with Revolution. In addition, it eliminates a bug that appeared in Google Chrome 32 and adds an alert notifying users to confirm navigation to prevent losing unsaved changes.
Here are the highlights of changes in the 2.2.11 release:
<ul>
<li>Update phpThumb to 1.7.11-beta to close security vulnerability</li>
<li>Prevent XSS on actionVar in header.tpl in the Manager</li>
<li>Eliminate unwanted “confirm navigation” alerts in Chrome 32+</li>
<li>Added intentional “confirm navigation” to prevent loss of unsaved changes</li>
<li>Fix caching of manager menus. Until now, they may not have been ever cached</li>
</ul>
<div>For more details, read the complete <a href="https://raw.github.com/modxcms/revolution/v2.2.11-pl/core/docs/changelog.txt">changelog</a></div>

MODX Revolution 2.2.11 Released

mike-johnston

For those of you who are fans of or who are considering using <a href="/products/dnn-evoq-content/">Evoq Content</a> from <a href="http://www.dnnsoftware.com">DNN Software</a>, I just finished this video walkthrough of the product for your enjoyment.
Evoq Content is also the winner of our <a href="/cms-critic-awards/">People's Choice Award for Best Small to Midsize Business CMS</a>.
In the video, I will show you how easy it is to set up a free 14 day trial of Evoq Content and some of the functionality of the CMS.
http://youtu.be/JMt_wX2s0HI
To learn more about Evoq Content, visit <a href="/products/dnn-evoq-content/">their listing in our CMS directory</a>.

A video walkthrough of Evoq Content by DNN Software

For those running Drupal as their CMS of choice, you should be aware that two new security releases have been made available this week. Drupal 6.30 and 7.26 are now available for download.
These releases are security updates only and do not contain any bug fixes. Details can be found in the official security advisory:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://drupal.org/SA-CORE-2014-001" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SA-CORE-2014-001</a></li>
</ul>
To fix the security problem, please upgrade to either Drupal 7.26 or Drupal 6.30.
You can do so by downloading the latest updates from <a href="http://Drupal.org">Drupal.org</a>

Drupal 7.26 and 6.30 released

Some exciting news for Sitecore customers and Microsoft Dynamics users, Sitecore has just announced that they are partnering with Microsoft to integrate their platform with Microsoft Dynamics.
Sitecore, the winner of both our Critic's Choice and People's Choice awards for <a href="/cms-critic-awards/">Best Enterprise CMS</a> this year, is really showing a strong push forward to ensure their platform maintains it's solid footing in the industry.
<blockquote>“In the increasingly competitive e-commerce landscape, retailers need to make customer experiences seamless across every channel where they interact, and personally relevant whether they are in the store, or online anywhere,” said Darren Guarnaccia, Chief Strategy Officer, Sitecore. “This joint solution will bridge the gap between in-store and digital experiences. Sitecore’s experience platform harnesses the power of real-time data insights to deliver a deep understanding of customers’ preferences, wants and needs. When combined with Microsoft Dynamics’ end-to-end omni-channel retail platform, retailers will now truly have the power to offer the right product, at the right time, in the right context – driving sales and delighting customers.”</blockquote>
This combined solution will enhance and extend Sitecore’s end-to-end customer experience management capabilities and deliver true end-to-end e-commerce.
<a href="/products/sitecore/">Learn more about Sitcore.</a>

Sitecore and Microsoft join forces to integrate platforms

Marketing and IT departments are always perfectly aligned, with systems in place that guarantee every goal of the organization is effortlessly met.
Does this sound like your company? If it does, you can stop reading here and return to your utopian existence. For those of us who live in the real world, let’s talk about the different pressures marketing and IT face and how a CMS bridges organizational gaps.
Let’s start with marketing. In most companies, marketing is tasked with: lead generation, product positioning, thought leadership and general communication. Of course, this is an oversimplification but, for the sake of this article, it suffices to illustrate that content creation and distribution comprise the root of marketing’s day to day activities. Without content being constantly pushed to market, it is impossible to accomplish any important marketing goals. Common tasks like updating the company website to announce new products, services, projects, news items, fundraising initiatives, and events need to be done regularly. Doing this work needs to be fast, easy, and controlled by the marketing department. 
A CMS empowers communication by putting control back into the marketers’ hands; giving them the tools they need to create and publish content instantly. A good CMS contains features specifically designed to help marketers manage company webpages, schedule webpage publication, and have content removed automatically when it’s no longer relevant. A CMS should also give the marketer complete control over workflow of projects, not merely acting as a publication tool. With this in mind, it makes sense for the marketing team to choose the right CMS for their needs and to utilize its functionality to accomplish more sophisticated marketing projects.
At this point, if you are your companies IT professional, I bet you’ve broken out in a cold sweat. With the responsibilities of keeping the company infrastructure running smoothly, your concerns surely include system security and ensuring that the website (along with all the other pieces of IT infrastructure) continues to work properly. Maintaining control over tools and keeping non-technical users (like the marketing team) out of your systems is the safest course of action. With this strategy there is no risk that a bumbling marketing team will make a mistake that you’ll have to clean up. 
As every IT professional knows, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Unfortunately, with control comes the burden of responsibility. If you don’t grant the marketers’ access to the CMS, they’ll be forced to rely on you to publish content. With marketing constantly creating and revising content, it means you have to have more resources to accommodate them or restrict how often content can be updated. This is place where the conflict lies, arguments rage, work doesn’t get done and everyone gets ulcers.
So here’s how the CMS rides in on a white horse and saves the day:
<a name="_GoBack"></a>A modern CMS enables the marketing team to create and publish content as well as launch campaigns. This means that the people tasked with marketing are not in the IT office complaining or loading your ticketing system with requests for website updates. The CMS vendor should provide technical support for the tool so that the IT department does not need software experts on staff to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. As a stakeholder in the selection of a CMS vendor, you’ll want to know that they provide the service and technical support your organization needs. 
If you want to learn more about the value a service-enriched CMS, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/confidence-and-support-why-a-cms-vendor-should-provide-more-than-just-software/">check out this article.</a> There are significant advantages to seeking out a SaaS based CMS. With a good cloud-based CMS, IT is no longer responsible for maintaining and patching the software or worrying if it will run your local hardware.
Imagine a world where there is no conflict between marketing and IT because they don’t rely on each other to be successful in their respective jobs. What a wonderful world it would be…

IT vs. Marketing: Stop the Bloodshed

A new version of Drupal has been released. This maintenance release, Drupal 7.25, includes bug fixes and small API/feature improvements only (no major new functionality).
There were no security fixes made in this release, likely because none were identified.  
Here are the major changes made in this release:
<ul>
<li>Added an optional feature to the Statistics module to allow node views to be tracked by Ajax requests rather than during the server-side generation of the page. This allows the node counter to work on sites that use external page caches (string change and new administrative option: <a href="https://drupal.org/node/2164069">https://drupal.org/node/2164069</a>).</li>
<li>Fixed a bug in node_save() which prevented the saved node from being updated in hook_node_insert() and other similar hooks.</li>
<li>Added a meta tag to install.php to prevent it from being indexed by search engines even when Drupal is installed in a subfolder (minor markup change).</li>
<li>Fixed a bug in the database API that caused frequent deadlock errors when running merge queries on some servers.</li>
<li>Performance improvement: Prevented block rehashing from writing blocks to the database on every cache clear and cron run when the blocks have not changed. This fix results in an extra ‘saved' key which is added and set to TRUE for each block returned by _block_rehash() that actually is saved to the database (data structure change).</li>
<li>Added an optional ‘skip on cron' parameter to hook_cron_queue_info() to allow queues to avoid being automatically processed on cron runs (API addition).</li>
<li>Fixed a bug which caused hook_block_view_MODULE_DELTA_alter() to never be invoked if the block delta had a hyphen in it. To implement the hook when the block delta has a hyphen, modules should now replace hyphens with underscores when constructing the function name for the hook implementation.</li>
<li>Fixed a bug which caused cached pages to sometimes be sent to the browser with incorrect compression. The fix adds a new ‘page_compressed' key to the $cache-&gt;data array returned by drupal_page_get_cache() (minor data structure change).</li>
<li>Fixed broken tests on PHP 5.5.</li>
<li>Made the File and Image modules more robust when saving entities that have deleted files attached. The code in file_field_presave() will now remove the record of the deleted file from the entity before saving (minor data structure change).</li>
<li>Standardized menu callback functions throughout Drupal core to return MENU_NOT_FOUND and MENU_ACCESS_DENIED rather than printing their own “page not found” or “access denied” pages (minor API change in the return value of these functions under some circumstances).</li>
<li>Fixed a bug in which caches were not properly cleared when a node was deleted via the administrative interface.</li>
<li>Changed the Bartik theme to render content contained in &lt;pre&gt;, &lt;code&gt; and similar tags in a larger font size, so it is easier to read.</li>
<li>Fixed a bug in the Search module that caused exceptions to be thrown during searches if the server was not configured to represent decimal points as a period.</li>
<li>Fixed a regression in the Image module that made image_style_url() not work when a relative path (rather than a complete file URI) was passed to it.</li>
<li>Added a link to the drupal.org documentation page for cron to the Cron settings page (string change).</li>
<li>Added a ‘drupal_anonymous_user_object' variable to allow the anonymous user object returned by drupal_anonymous_user() to be overridden with a classed object (API addition).</li>
<li>Changed the database API to allow inserts based on a SELECT * query to work correctly.</li>
<li>Changed the database schema of the {file_managed} table to allow Drupal to manage files larger than 4 GB.</li>
<li>Changed the File module's hook_field_load() implementation to prevent file entity properties which have the same name as file or image field properties from overwriting the field properties (minor API change).</li>
</ul>
For a full list of changes in this release, check out <a href="https://drupal.org/drupal-7.25-release-notes">these release notes</a>.

Drupal 7.25 Released

In a move that isn't particularly a surprise given the lack of effort they put in the platform, it looks like Limelight Networks has given up trying to be a Content Management vendor and has sold off the rebranded Clickability they  <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/clickability-acquired-by-limelight-networks/"> acquired back in 2011 </a> to Upland Software.
We attempted to get in touch with Limelight a few times during the 2 years they had Clickability under their belt (rebranded as Limelight Orchestrate) but the responses we received back showed they were making no real effort to push the platform. As such, it's not a shock that they've sold off the platform to yet another company. Sadly, all they have managed to do is ruin the Clickability brand by wasting two years of time in the market, something that doesn't lend well to customer confidence when looking for a platform. Now, with Clickability being pushed to yet another company, I'd be surprised if any customers take the platform seriously.
<blockquote>
“As the Limelight Orchestrate Platform grows to support an ever-widening ecosystem of content, channels and devices, the sale of our web content management business enables us to concentrate our efforts on expanding Limelight's unique delivery optimization capabilities, where we see attractive market opportunities and enjoy a leadership position,” said Robert Lento, chief executive officer of Limelight.
</blockquote>
In a nutshell this translates to a “we couldn't hack it so we sold it” statement. Perhaps with Upland Software, we'll see Clickability treated properly and given the attention it needs to be competitive in this saturated market.
To learn more, read the announcement from <a href="http://www.uplandsoftware.com/press-release/upland-software-acquires-clickability-web-content-management-business/">Upland Software.</a>

Limelight Networks Decides Content Management is Not for Them and Sells off Clickability

Call Tracking + AI 

Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads

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If you’re in the market for a CMS, you are probably looking for a better way to organize your web content. Beyond managing the assets themselves, have you ever thought about using an editorial calendar?
 An editorial calendar is the perfect way to automatically manage your content schedule. Unlike spreadsheets, where you have to keep track of assignments manually, an editorial calendar allows you to automate several tasks at once. You can work simultaneously with other users, unlike in a manual spreadsheet where it’s difficult to keep track of changes made by other people. It’s imperative to stay informed when a change is made, or when something needs to be finished or published, and using an editorial calendar that is automated can help keep you ahead of your deadlines.
An editorial calendar may be in your best interest if you find it difficult to keep track of users’ changes, send reminders to contributors, visualize your content, or plan for the future.
Cascade Server, an innovative enterprise content management system, comes standard with an automated editorial calendar, which can help with planning, organizing, assigning, and analyzing content for your website, blog, whitepapers and other collateral. It allows for automated email notifications and reminders to be sent to you when something needs to be created or when content needs to be published. If an assignment is “In Progress”, the assigned contributor will receive reminder notifications to finish working on this assignment.
You can filter certain content to customize your view, such as looking at content that is only assigned to you or just a particular content type. Anyone with management access to the calendar can easily add an item to the calendar, including the title of the piece, the publish date, the due date, notes for the author, and an assigned author for the piece.
Let us show you how the calendar can save you and your team time:
<pre>[[hannonhill_form2]]</pre>
The editorial calendar tool makes it so that managers, editors, and contributors can easily and collectively add and manage content assignments and due dates for your site. It’s free for Cascade Server CMS clients, and you can try it for free for TWO weeks! Sign up to try it for free today! No credit card information required.
<pre>[[hannonhill_form3]]</pre>

Cascade Server Now Comes Standard with an Editorial Calendar Tool

Nonprofit organizations are a unique bunch. Just as in most industries, the world of nonprofits comes with its own unique set of needs and demands, and these are a critical part of the CMS evaluation process–especially if you want the implementation of a new system to be successful.
<h2>Nonprofit Challenges</h2>
Nonprofits are unique in their needs when it comes to implementing a content management system due to numerous reasons. Nonprofits serve the public, and as a result, are usually presenting and supplying large amounts of content through their websites to their audience. What type of information and whom the audience will be, can vary even within a single nonprofit institution. 
 Using the YMCA as an example, some programs at your local Y may be aimed at funding youth sports programs for kids who normally couldn’t afford to play whereas another program at the same Y may be serving senior citizens who are looking for ways to remain active to aid their health. There are two very groups being served needing two different types of content that will likely be changing throughout the calendar year based on what the Y is able to offer each month or season, for example.
This challenge goes hand in hand with the fact that many nonprofits are membership based. This presents the need for them to be able to present content and collect information in a way which is efficient in order to keep membership functioning and as result keep the nonprofit as a whole in business.
There is also a large degree of departmental disconnect in many nonprofits due to their structure. There may be one corporate office with branches located in a variety of areas geographically. Each of these may be communicating with the public and presenting content on their own. They may each have their own content contributors and subject matter experts at the physical locations who will be working within the CMS.
Lastly, financial restrictions are often a barrier within the world of nonprofits. Nonprofits live off funding and donations, which in turn, results in having small budgets when it comes to purchasing larger items. It’s a constant balancing act. This also means that content must be ever-changing and fresh to motivate those individuals and corporations to see the value in donating their money towards the institution's specific cause. The content strategy is critical here, and the best content management systems for a nonprofit will work to directly support this effort as well.
These challenges along with others specific to nonprofits and the functions a cms should provide to aid in overcoming them are broken down in our Hannon Hill White Paper: Content Management  for Non-Profit Organizations, available free for download by filling out this form:
<pre>[[hannonhill_form]]</pre>
The challenges nonprofits face can be and should be considered when these types of organizations are in the market for their next cms. The good news is that the correct cms can serve these needs and actually result in these nonprofits not only better managing their content but better serving the public and most importantly their cause.

The Challenges Non-profits Must Consider When Selecting a CMS

DNN today released the latest version of Evoq Social, an online community solution that fosters and enhances conversations with customers, employees, partners and prospects. The new version ships with responsive web design, which enables online communities powered by Evoq Social to automatically become mobile-ready. The elements of a page adapt and scale dynamically based on the dimensions of the viewing device, whether it is a smartphone, tablet or desktop.
Evoq Social incorporates a broad range of best-in-class social community capabilities including true extensibility and an intuitive and consistent management user interface. The platform gives users the ability to seamlessly integrate communities into corporate websites, instead of driving customers to a third-party social site – enabling organizations to monitor and shape the customer conversation. Thriving user communities have been proven to help reduce support costs, drive product innovation and increase sales and brand awareness.
<blockquote>
“With Evoq Social, we’re making it easier for our customers to create communities that span the range of devices their community members use,” said Will Morgenweck, vice president, product management, DNN. “By eliminating the need for extra steps to optimize a community across varied devices, we are able to save our customers both time and money. This capability gives community managers and site designers the ability to know that their communities’ look and feel will be consistent to their customers across all platforms instantly and effectively.”
</blockquote>
In addition, each module in Evoq Social now ships with responsive design. This ensures a mobile-ready experience across all areas of an Evoq Social online community.
Additional features in Evoq Social include:
<ul>
<li>New editing capabilities, which support HTML mark-up and image upload in Answers,</li>
<li>Discussions, Ideas and related features</li>
<li>Streamlined notifications area, which includes direct links to all content</li>
<li>Enhanced user experience in the Answers and Wiki features</li>
<li>Performance enhancements related to database query optimization and reduced page sizes</li>
</ul>
DNN has a strong expertise in communities. Membership in its own community comes from more than 30 countries around the world and nearly 63 percent are deemed very active. In addition, more than 8,000 new members sign up per month.
For more information on Evoq Social, please visit the DNN website: <a href="http://www.dnnsoftware.com/Solutions/Evoq-Social-Online-Community-Management">http://www.dnnsoftware.com/Solutions/Evoq-Social-Online-Community-Management</a>

Building and Managing Online Communities For Any Device Made  Fast and Simple with Evoq Social

It's giveaway time again and this time we're giving away a great package from the fine folks at MovableType! For those of you who aren't familiar with MovableType, check out the following video which will give you a rundown of the latest release:
http://vimeo.com/81410081
The package that MovableType has kindly provided us with to give away to one lucky reader consists of one MovableType Professional License that includes:
<ul>
<li>5 User License</li>
<li>Unlimited Number of Blogs and Sites</li>
<li>Custom Fields</li>
<li>Social Networking Features</li>
</ul>
The total value of this package is $595.00
To learn more about MovableType, visit them on the web at <a href="https://www.movabletype.com">https://www.movabletype.com</a>
To enter, simply leave a comment on this post telling me why you want to win. It's as simple as that. Winners will be selected next week. Good luck!

The Great #CMS Giveaway - Prize #2

Bitrix24 by <a href="http://www.bitrixsoft.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Bitrix Inc</a> is a high-end enterprise social network, mobile intranet portal, CRM and collaboration suite. This week, the digital giants announced a new version of their popular cloud service.
The service itself is available to organizations either onsite, or as a cloud-based service, and is considered to be the fastest growing enterprise social network created specifically for small to midsized businesses.
With 1 million users already making use of <a href="http://www.bitrix24.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Bitrix24</a>, it goes without saying that any new updates will impact the way many businesses around the world conduct themselves online. So, let's take a look at what's new.
<h2>Productivity &amp; Collaboration</h2>
The newly updated CRM now comes with its own activity streams and new reporting tools for leads, managers and invoices. Thanks to integrations with Zingaya's VoxImplant, web phone calls can now be made and recorded directly from Bitrix24 account without any IP-telephony equipment, server or complicated setup.
Improvements have also been made in Bitrix24’s productivity and collaboration tools. Bitrix24.Drive, which functions as a free Dropbox alternative for companies that want to have full control over their data, now supports company and group files in addition to personal files.
Data storage for companies that use the Professional plan has been increased tenfold from 100 GB to 1 TB without any change in pricing in order to accommodate increasing reliance of businesses and organizations on Bitrix24 as their primary file server and online document management system.
The Project Management module has been more tightly integrated with Time Management and now allows easy tracking of time spend by each employee on any particular task, making employee workload planning an easy and transparent process. The new Task counter has been introduced to alert managers about tasks and projects that are in danger of not being completed on time.
<h2>Mobile, MailChimp &amp; More</h2>
Regarding the latest updates to Bitrix24, Dmitry Valyanov – the president of Bitrix Inc, had this to say:
<blockquote>
“This is the forth major update of Bitrix24 this year, and this rapid pace of improvement is one of the reasons that we reached the milestones of both 100,000 company signups and 1 million total users this fall, growing even faster than Yammer before Microsoft’s acquisition. Small businesses like the fact that they can now replace Yammer, MS Office, Salesforce, Dropbox, Basecamp and Skype with a single out-of-the-box solution that does all that they do and costs only a hundred dollars per month. Not only is it much cheaper, it solve a lot of interoperability, deployment, administration and shadow IT issues,”
</blockquote>
Furthermore, the new Bitrix24 mobile app comes with an iOS7 friendly design, data caching and an offline mode that lets users access and work on their company intranet and CRM even when no reliable intranet connection is available.
Other improvements include Company Pulse engagement suggestions and integration with MailChimp available via the Bitrix24 marketplace. For the on-premise version of Bitrix24, there is now a new virtual environment that deploys more easily than ever.
To learn more about Bitrix24 and all its new features, <a href="http://www.bitrix24.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">check out their website</a>.

Bitrix24 Beefs up Telephony, CRM & Collaboration Features for Its 1 Million Users

For those who have been around the CMS industry for a while, you may recall the name Movable Type. Movable Type was once the strongest competition against WordPress but, through a series of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/six-apart-acquired-by-videoegg-movable-type-finally-bite-dust/">acquisitions</a>, began to lose ground quickly and faded from attention. Not completely mind you, but certainly we didn't hear as much about it for quite some time.
Well, development continued regardless of these changes in the structure of the company and Movable Type is back strong and powerful with version 6 of their perl based Content Management System and publishing platform. Movable Type runs some of the largest sites in the world such as The Huffington Post, for instance.
Here's a video re-introducing the platform, now in version 6:
http://youtu.be/ALQpd2kETCE
While there once was an open source branch of Movable Type, it has since been laid to rest, however, the system itself can be purchased through <a href="http://movabletype.com">MovableType.com</a>.
If you stay tuned, tomorrow, we will be giving away a very lucrative Movable Type license in our Great #CMS Giveaway. Be sure to check back and enter for your chance to win as this is a great package for those looking to get into blogging or publishing online.

Re-Introducing Movable Type

Best Video Experience

Give your audience the best video experience

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Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads

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