Articles - Page 214

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

matt-garrepy

<a href="http://www.elcomcms.com">Elcom</a>, a leading provider of enterprise web content management solutions is pleased to announce that version 7.6 of their flagship product, elcomCMS will be available towards the end of February.
elcomCMS is a modular .NET enterprise web content management system. It has been designed from the ground up to provide mid-market organizations with the ability to meet their objectives around their corporate website, intranet, extranet, learning management, mobile web, social, eCommerce and online marketing. The modular, interoperable, scalable, flexible and powerfully simple design makes elcomCMS a true end-to-end, 360 degree business tool for web.
Building on elcomCMS’s existing success, v7.6 is focused around key feature enhancements in particular: Code Blocks, Real-Time Personalization and developments in its Social layer which was introduced in version 7.5.
Code Blocks Code Blocks, is an excellent new feature for the front-end developer and implementation community. It provides the ability to write and use custom front-end scripting code i.e. c# or VB and embed these Code Blocks into articles. This gives developers the flexibility and power to create dynamically generated structured content, such as custom menus and lists.
Real Time Personalization Real Time Personalization has been expanded in version 7.6 to include the ability to target individual articles based on what keyword(s) your audience types into a search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing. This is a powerful and exciting tool for the marketing community as it will help increase conversion rates and reduce bounce rates.
Social elcomCMS’s Social capability continues to grow in 7.6 with ‘Social Stream’ a major feature update. Social Stream provides pre-defined user groups with the ability to connect exclusively to discuss a topic, project or idea. This is a great way to facilitate collaboration and communications between team members.
Commenting on the new release, Anthony Milner, Elcom’s Product Director said “In every release we endeavour to make it even easier for developers to write their own apps for the elcomCMS and Code Blocks provide another mechanism to achieve this. It’s an exciting development and we look forward to working with the dev community to build awesome apps.”
The latest version is available now as a beta release, and we expect the final release to be available to the market towards the end of February 2012. If you have any questions regarding elcomCMS please contact info@elcomCMS.com

elcomCMS kicks off 2012 with version 7.6

mike-johnston

Web content management has changed. The explosive growth of content consumption from mobile and social interfaces, the pending expansion of the “internet of things” and consumer expectation of content availability is driving WCMS providers to shift their value proposition. Web Content Management is no longer simply solved by making it easier to publish content online.
Analyst firm Gartner has been releasing research and thought leadership about Context Aware Computing for a few years, and they estimate that “by 2012, the typical Global 2000 company will be managing between two and 10 business relationships with context providers.”Further Gartner predicts that “ by 2015, context will be as influential in mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.”
This idea of context is at the core of what is shifting Web Content Management and consumer expectations. Today WCM solutions must go beyond delivering solutions that help a manager DELIVER a web experience — but also deliver one that helps both managers and their audiences CREATE and CONSUME content in an experience of their own making. This is context aware content management.
<blockquote>
“For WCM solution providers, ‘context aware’ goes well beyond managing web experiences and personalization,” said Jeroen Verberg, CEO of Hippo. “It digs deep into how we will enable our clients to open their repositories so that things like location, environmental data, history, social attributes and even real-time online behavior can be utilized to deliver a more relevant, contextual experience. At Hippo we believe that this philosophy applies to both the managers of the content and the audiences the managers are empowering to consume their content through whatever method they choose.”
</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.onehippo.com/"> Hippo CMS</a> 7.7 is the first true step toward an Open Source content management solution delivering context aware content management. It enables users to easily manage content across multiple channels and delivery platforms – and delivers personalized, device-aware, location-aware and even interface-aware content.
<ul>
<li>Global Brand Content Management – Using Hippo’s Multi-Channel manager organizations now have an extraordinarily easy way to add, edit and manage new content channels and sub-channels for managing context. This includes channels for language, device, marketing campaigns, or any other strategy the organizations wants to create.</li>
<li>Content &amp; Marketing Insight – Hippo’s new extensible reporting dashboard provides marketers with the insight they need to deliver continued Web experience management success.</li>
<li>Contextual Content Delivery – Hippo continues to lead the way in delivering content appropriate for the channel. Hippo CMS 7.7 can automatically deliver optimized interfaces across multiple content channels – whether that be iPhone, iPad, Android, Web or even social channels.</li>
<li>Content As An Open Service – Hippo CMS 7.7 continues to be focused on Open Standards and Open Source models. Customers can utilize the standards based content storage within Hippo CMS and utilize both contextual delivery models and contextual content management models – meaning that the same content repository can be accessed by multiple ways to both deliver AND manage the content.</li>
</ul>
Examples of the power and benefits of Hippo CMS to organizations range from government organizations to global brands. For example The Dutch National government was able to reduce the complexity and expense of their CMS footprint from 13 websites and multiple CMS systems to one, enterprise implementation of Hippo CMS. Global publisher Incisive Media was able to easily migrate 260,000 existing articles from multiple online magazines, integrate with Autonomy Search and Quark DMS to provide a central online content management and delivery system. And the Dutch Libraries were able to deploy a completely open “content service” (perfect for a library) that allows video, social media interaction and even storage for User Generated content. This means that each library can not only deliver the full range of content to their audiences contextually across mobile, social and web platforms – but they can also manage the content from just about any type of input mechanism channel they choose.
Arje Cahn, CTO of Hippo, said “Hippo CMS 7.7 is designed to drive the best of both worlds. In the past, CMS editing interfaces and the target site were almost two disconnected worlds. In Hippo CMS 7.7 they live together in a single, unified interface. So, the architectural separation between presentation and content is still there – but its now visually integrated. This makes the system much easier to comprehend and use for end-users.”s.

New Hippo CMS 7.7 Empowers Both Managers And Audiences To Create Contextualized Online Experiences

Head-turning ecommerce web design is pivotal for the success of your online store as attention-grabbing pages publicise your brand. Just like any other creative sphere, web design is a fickle industry that constantly undergoes changes. With the development of new tools like HTML5 and CSS3, new design trends start to take off. Below there are six popular trends in creative web design that can be incorporated into your own web page.
Go big
As ecommerce is growing big, it is high time to use big images and fonts for big impressions. Tiny thumbnails are out as oversized headers, logos, fonts and images are the latest trend in ecommerce web design today. Don’t make your visitors think that you are hiding some details in small fonts and go for a 60 pt title at the top of your page. Power web designers use bold and imposing calls for action as they demand users to note and remember your brand.
Print design and typography
Creative layouts resembling print newspapers and posters with multi-column text, supporting imagery and footnotes are in style. Sites with carefully crafted ecommerce web design are often called ‘art-directed’ and are fuelled by the determination of creators. Such designs are usually found at freelance sites and are rarely used by corporations as they require quite a lot of time and effort to create and maintain. If you decide to take advantage of art-directed design, don’t overload it with details as good design is about effective communication, not decorations. Remember that your layout should support the content of your site without dominating it.
Clean and minimal
Annoying oversaturated websites with dark colours have seen better days as minimalistic ecommerce web design has come into play today. Web sites featuring lots of refreshing pallets and plain textures spice up your page without distracting the attention from the content. If you are working with nature textures like wood or water, opt for the right chromatic palette in order to make sure that your design looks great.
Pixel-perfect design
Contemporary designers give a lot of attention to pixel-perfect elements like toolbars, menus and buttons that look great on both high resolution laptop monitors and iPods. Make sure that your page doesn’t feature any blurry areas by zooming all the page elements while designing. With the help of powerful software like Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop crisp ecommerce web design has never been easier to create.
Retro
Vintage has made a great come back in the ecommerce web design industry, still retro-looking sites are quite hard to create. Creased paper structure, retro-inspired imagery and beautiful retro aesthetic often attract a lot of viewers. Still, this style is sometimes hard to embrace without proper artistic taste and advanced skills, so if you are a big fan of the retro style, hire qualified designers who are glad to help you out.
Horizontalism
With the development of multi-touch devices, horizontal scrolling has come into play winning a lot of fans and followers. Elaborate web design allows users to avoid slowly-loading galleries and provides a pleasing reading experience. In order to make your website easy-to-navigate, opt for horizontal navigation with a speed control at the top of your site.
With the development of advanced web tools, new ecommerce web design trends appear every year. When designing a website you can take advantage of one of the trends listed above or incorporate a few ideas, creating your own trend.

Ecommerce Web Design: Six Hot Trends

<a href="http://drupal.org/drupal-7.12">Drupal</a> today released a total of four versions of the popular open source CMS. Yes, I said four. Drupal 6.23, 6.24, 7.11 and 7.12 releases were put on the servers today.
On the release announcement, they are stating that they want to release version that include only security updates and versions that include security + bug fixes. While I can appreciate that they are trying to follow the “try to make everyone happy” model, they are, in my opinion, just adding to the general consensus that Drupal is a complicated and highly technical CMS.
While this may very well be the target market that Drupal is aiming towards, one would think it would be more sensible to attempt to follow suit with the whole customer experience movement that is occurring right now and try to make things as transparent and easy as possible for the end users.  Unfortunately, it seems that the Drupal team is not heading down this path.
In my opinion, Drupal should offer separate release announcements. One for the 6.x series with a countdown as to when this series will stop being supported so that those on the platform, know when it will be grandfathered and will be better able to plan a transition to 7.x.
For those on the 7.x version, I would personally just offer a single version. However, if it's absolutely necessary to have two types of installs, why not simply offer one version and within the upgrade process have a prompt for the user asking them if they'd like to do a complete upgrade (with security + bug fixes) or a partial just to address security issues and have the system do what's needed. Single file, single download, no confusion.
For release announcements, I think that Drupal needs to spruce things up a bit and write-up announcements that give more detail and less technical terminology akin to the way that the Joomla! and WordPress teams do their write ups. It's a fairly easy change to make and is more likely to get picked up by people and get them excited about the new release. If  the customer wants more technical information, link to a more technical document. Otherwise, follow the keep it simple methodology.
I am aware that the Drupal teams have a ton of work and do the best they can with all of the tasks at hand and I don' t want to come across as someone who doesn't appreciate their efforts. I do, however, believe that there is always room for improvement and it is my hope that they take this writeup as feedback and not as an attack.

The Drupal Release Model and Why it Needs to be Revamped

concrete5 today announced that it has redesigned the company’s admin dashboard to leverage Twitter Bootstrap.
An early pioneer of in-context editing, concrete5 gained popularity due to its ease of use for managing the content of websites. With this in mind, the company has leveraged the Twitter Bootstrap toolkit to offer a completely redesigned, centralized dashboard for backend administrative tasks with the release of concrete5.5.1.
While concrete5 is frequently used by webshops to deliver sites to clients who want to make edits on their own, many people who use concrete5 are DIY websites on budget webhosts where concrete5 is acting as a self-publishing platform. Over two-thirds of the traffic hitting concrete5 servers isn’t coming to its public facing community concrete5.org at all. The company knew it needed to improve the learning experience from within the concrete5 application itself.
“We started just wanting to make it easier to get around the Dashboard and browse our marketplace from within your own site, but we quickly realized we were going to have to touch every part of the interface to do it right,” said concrete5 designer Robert Huston. “Twitter Bootstrap gave us an amazing style guide, and much of the infrastructure we needed right out the box. With some addition icon work and thoughtful application of the rules the Twitter team devised, we were able to accomplish months of work in just weeks.”
<blockquote>
“A lot of time has gone into tuning things under the hood with this release,” added Andrew Embler, CTO of concrete5. “Performance on a default install of concrete5 has improved dramatically in this version, and new features like Stacks and Global Block Areas provide best-practice solutions to problems that had been solved organically in the past.”
</blockquote>
New installs now include a wizard explaining how people can get started, and a daily news feed laid out like a magazine helping people learn more over time. The browse marketplace functionality has been dramatically improved, and users can now even purchase add-ons and themes without ever leaving their own sites.
About concrete5  Concrete CMS Inc. is a leading developer of next- generation open source solutions for web sites. The company's flagship product, concrete5, combines the ease-of-use of a blogging platform with the flexibility and power of a web development platform. To date, hundreds of thousands of advertising and creative agencies and web developers around the world have downloaded concrete5 for free and used the technology to quickly and inexpensively build enterprise-quality web sites that can be updated by end users. concrete CMS is a privately held company based in Portland, Oregon, and manages the concrete5.org project. For more information, please visit <a href="http://www.concrete5.org/">http://www.concrete5.org</a>.

Concrete5 Gets a Facelift With Twitter Bootstrap

<a href="http://www.liferay.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Liferay, Inc.</a>, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, announced today the availability of Liferay Sync, a powerful document-sharing add-on to the Community Edition (CE) of Liferay Portal 6.1. Liferay Sync transforms the Liferay platform into a central, easy-to-use document sharing service.
With Liferay Sync, users now have the ability to access documents stored within a Liferay instance from their mobile devices and desktops. Documents can be dragged and dropped into a synchronized folder and then be edited, moved, or deleted. Sync automatically takes care of revision management.
A key benefit for Liferay users is access to documents offline; the documents synchronize when users are back online. A single user can make a change to a document on their desktop, which is then synchronized with the central server and updated for all other users who share that folder.  In these ways, Liferay Portal becomes a central repository for documents, opening up new avenues of collaboration for a distributed group of users.&gt;
<blockquote>
“Liferay Sync was designed to combine the benefits of a web application with the user interaction benefits of a desktop or mobile application,” said <a href="http://www.liferay.com/about-us/leadership/business-units" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Edwin Chung</a>, Liferay's VP of Product Management. “The web allows centralized data and group access, and the desktop provides a rich way to search, access and manipulate documents.  But while Office Web Apps and Google Docs require you to store a copy on the server and edit documents in a browser, Liferay Sync allows users to leverage any desktop or mobile office package, such as MS Office, OpenOffice, iWork, or Photoshop, to edit and save documents locally while either online or offline.”
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
“The launch of Liferay Sync is an exciting and significant product release for our company,” said Brian Chan, Liferay’s founder and Chief Software Architect. “The ability to combine desktop and mobile interfaces with a web service takes the Liferay experience to new heights of simplicity and enrichment for our end users.”
</blockquote>
Starting today with the beta form of Liferay Sync, Liferay Portal CE users can synchronize their documents within one Liferay Site. A coming edition of Liferay Sync for Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE) will allow users to share documents across an unlimited number of Liferay Sites on one installation. Liferay Sync is compatible withWindows, Mac OS, and iOS.
For more about Liferay Sync, visit <a href="http://liferay.com/products/liferay-sync" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">www.liferay.com/products/liferay-sync</a>.

Liferay Introduces Liferay Sync with Powerful Document-Sharing Abilities

CMS Summit 26

Find out at Open Source CMS 26, October 20-21 in Utrecht, Netherlands

What's ahead for Open Source CMS?

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<a href="http://expressionengine.com">ExpressionEngine</a> 2.4.0 is now available for download.  This release provides a broad array of changes, including stability and security improvements, a faster control panel, the addition of popular feature requests and new libraries and hooks for third party developers.
This release offers improved stability and performance with over 80 bug fixes, including an obscure but theoretically possible MySQL injection exploit.  The control panel is noticeably faster in most environments, with much snappier rendering of filterable tables.  And an expanded approach to ‘Remember me’ functionality that’s optimized for multiple sites and/or devices results in a nicer frontend user experience.  In addition to improvements to general functionality, both users and developers will find lots of goodies as we continue to develop existing features and set the groundwork for upcoming additions.
File management continues to improve in this release, with a number of nice additions.  The browser has been beefed up to allow sorting and filtering by keywords, greatly improving the ease with which you can find a particular file.  The browser has also been added to the category editor, for use when populating the category image field.  File access via the browser has also been seen increased security checks, limiting access through the browser to the CP.
File ‘credit’ and ‘location’ metadata can now be added through the file modal, and file fields can display all data associated with a given file through frontend tags.  It’s now easy to show any of your image options with native tags.  The ability to watermark an image without requiring resizing has also been added.
Improvements designed to make updating and/or moving ExpressionEngine sites were also a focus of this release.  File upload paths can now be overridden via a hidden configuration variable, making updates after a move or syncing a developer site and a production site easier.  A third_party_path configuration variable was also added, allowing you to keep your third party add-ons folder outside of the system folder.
A number of smaller feature requests were also addressed in this release, including the addition of an ‘active’ status indicator to the Channel Categories tag; the ability of the Channel Categories and Category Archive tags to accept multiple channels in the channel parameter; the addition of a url_title parameter to the Channel Next and Previous tags; the expansion of improved control over pagination output to search pagination; the ability to choose a specific channel from the main control panel dropdown menu when editing and a lot more.  Check the Changelog for a full list of what’s new!
Developers will also find a number of significant additions in this release.  Two new constants, URL_THEMES_THIRD and PATH_THEMES_THIRD, have been added with the goal of allowing users to fully customize the location of third party folders. These two constants point to the URL and the path of the themes/third_party/ directory. We’d like you to start using these right away and have your add-ons using them by our next major release because we’ll be introducing two new config variables that allow users to override these settings.  In conjunction with the new third_party_path config variable, users will then be able to keep third_party folders completely out of the system/ and themes/ directory, making upgrading easier.
It’s also not too soon to start paying attention to our new Developer Log.  This feature records deprecated functions that are called during normal operation of a site.  This allows ExpressionEngine to send a warning that functions or behaviors currently in use on a site will be removed at some point in the future, thus giving third party developers time to future proof their code.
A new File field library should also be of particular interest to third party developers.  The library makes it easy for developers to use the native browser for their own needs.  For a look at the library in action, just take a peek at how it was used to enable file browsing for the Category Image field in the control panel.
EE’s Pagination library has also seen significant improvement, reducing the amount of code needed to implement pagination parsing and providing a method for handling pagination_links as a tag pair.  All developers are encouraged to make use of the library for parsing of pagination tags.  Hooks also received their share of love in this release, with new hooks available when deleting members, modifying template data, defining template types, and pulling in rows for the content edit page.

ExpressionEngine 2.4.0 Released

Joomla, one of the world’s most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5.
Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases.
<blockquote>“Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”</blockquote>
Other key features in Joomla 2.5 includes:
<ul>
<li>Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.</li>
<li>A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.</li>
</ul>
“We literally received thousands of pieces of input at ideas.joomla.org into what functionality should be added to Joomla 2.5, and overwhelmingly enhanced notifications and more elegant search topped the list,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “In fact, the automatic notification for core and extension updates received the most votes for a feature that people wanted in 2.5. But we didn't stop with just those two. Joomla 2.5 is a major overhaul with more than 24 new features that we have highlighted at joom.la/25features.”
Joomla 2.5 adheres to Joomla’s newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.
Joomla 2.5 is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.5 million Joomla forum posts, 540,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 8,800 Joomla extensions. To download Joomla 2.5, go to <a href="http://www.joomla.org/download.html">http://www.joomla.org/download.html</a>.

New Joomla! 2.5 Released; Open Source Content Management System Now More Scalable Than Ever

<a href="http://www.smartlogic.com">Smartlogic</a> has released the latest version of its pioneering Content Intelligence Platform, Semaphore, offering more features to enhance enterprise search, drive business workflow and organize enterprise metadata, as well as providing capability for much closer integration with SharePoint 2010, the widely used corporate information management system from Microsoft.
The new features available with Semaphore 3.3 include:
<ul>
<li>multi-lingual information management capability that enables users to switch between languages, allowing documents to be classified and labeled in different languages using the same authority model</li>
<li>a ‘semantic visualization’ tool for contextual navigation, which enables users to navigate the structure of information, rather than the information itself, boosting the enterprise search user experience and improving information discovery</li>
<li>an ‘ontology review’ tool that allows clients to feedback on the terminology being used by an organization to label its information assets</li>
<li>a ‘publisher’ function that ensures that all aspects of an organization’s many information navigation and classification systems are synchronized</li>
</ul>
At its core, Smartlogic’s Semaphore Content Intelligence Platform enables enterprises to turn unstructured content into actionable information by enhancing the capabilities of existing information management systems such as SharePoint and OpenText. As a Content Intelligence Platform, Semaphore assists organizations in identifying, classifying, extracting, analyzing and utilizing hard-to-find information assets such as research papers, plans, proposals, presentations, meeting notes, strategy documents, reports, memos, web copy and emails.
<blockquote>
Jeremy Bentley, Smartlogic’s chief executive, commented: “This newest version of Semaphore enables us to provide the most complete Content Intelligence solution available out of the box. At a time when most organizations are struggling with information overload, information governance issues, the limits of existing information management systems, and an increasing need to monetize and repurpose information, what clients are asking for is a Content Intelligence solution they can easily implement alongside their existing information management systems without the need for a costly ‘Rip and Replace’ program.
“At Smartlogic, we have been doing this since the first release of Semaphore in 2006 and have listened to our customers as we have fine-tuned it. With Semaphore 3.3, we’ve further innovated our solution and added many new features, making it more straightforward to implement and operate than ever – and giving the market what they’ve asked for.”
</blockquote>
The launch of the newest version of Semaphore comes just two months after the application received the 2011 European Frost &amp; Sullivan Technology Innovation Award. Charanya Balasubramanian, research analyst at Frost &amp; Sullivan, said of Semaphore: “This technological innovation endows existing enterprise systems with capabilities to find, organize, process, monetize, control and govern unstructured content in an efficient manner. Encompassing four modules, Semaphore radically changes the search, navigation and content intelligence capabilities.”
The release of Semaphore 3.3 also follows the recent acquisition of one of Smartlogic’s chief competitors, Seattle-based SchemaLogic – giving it clear market leadership. Smartlogic, which was founded in 2006, has more than 300 customers worldwide and offices in San Jose and London.

Smartlogic release Semaphore 3.3, a new version of their pioneering content intelligence platform

Kentico Software (http://www.kentico.com), the Web content management system vendor, announced the 2012 Kentico Most Valuable Professional Awards. The Kentico MVP Award is a one year industry recognition given to individuals based on their community participation and evangelistic activities in the CMS and .NET communities.
The Kentico MVP awards for 2012 were presented to:
• Brian McKeiver, Partner and Senior Developer at BizStream, a Kentico Gold Partner from Michigan; 
• Bryan Soltis, Director of Research&amp;Technology at Bit-Wizards a Kentico Gold Partner from Florida; 
• Jeroen Furst, Kentico Lead Developer at IBL-Software a Kentico Gold partner from the Netherlands.
Each received this prestigious honor for their passion about the tools and technologies of Kentico, .NET and the CMS community worldwide.
Brian McKeiver was honored with his first Kentico Most Valuable (MVP) Award, for his exceptional contributions to the Kentico community, represented by his blog about ASP.NET and Kentico technology. His blog can be found at: http://mcbeev.com.
“The Community is a vital part of Kentico CMS and .NET, and MVPs are the heart of this community”, said Thom Robbins, Kentico Chief Evangelist, “The consistent and valuable contributions of Bryan Soltis and Jeroen Furst this year are an example of this. Recognizing Brian McKeiver as a Kentico MVP is a natural extension for his outstanding contributions to help the worldwide community.”
Brian McKeiver has over 12 years experience in web development. Brian has been using Kentico CMS since version 3.1a. “It sure has come a long way since those days. I am still impressed with how quickly you can build blocks of content, create custom forms on the fly, and integrate with existing databases all with the same product.” says Brian McKeiver, newest Kentico MVP.
“I am extremely excited about being selected as a Kentico MVP. I feel honored and proud to receive this award, and hope that my contributions to the community have helped other developers overcome their hurdles. It’s easy to be passionate about Kentico CMS because it is such a great piece of technology with a great group of people behind it. I will do my best to keep contributing to the community and growing the use of Kentico CMS,” adds Brian McKeiver, Senior Developer at BizStream.
Kentico MVPs are selected from hundreds of Kentico CMS experts located within any of the 87 countries where Kentico CMS is used. To receive the Kentico MVP Award status, individuals can submit their application at the Kentico web site. These submissions are then reviewed by a board of Kentico executives. More information about the MVP Award can be found at: <a href="http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Thomas-Robbins/January-2010/Announcing-the-Kentico-MVP-Award.aspx">http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Thomas-Robbins/January-2010/Announcing-the-Kentico-MVP-Award.aspx</a>

Kentico CMS Announces the 2012 Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Awards

<a href="http://www.endplay.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">EndPlay, Inc.</a>, a leading SaaS provider of Web Content Management (WCM) solutions, announced today a partnership with The Banyan Solutions Consulting Group (TBSCG), marking EndPlay's international expansion into the European, Middle Eastern and African (EMEA) market. TBSCG builds and maintains online-centric solutions for some of the largest brands in the UK, France, Belgium, Poland and Switzerland, including Electrabel, Shell, LEGO, Felco SA and Bucks CC. Through the partnership, TBSCG will become the preferred hosting provider and official reseller of the EndPlay platform — meeting EMEA customer demand for cloud-based WCM solutions.
The strategic partnership will create new revenue and growth opportunities for both companies via solution licensing and support initiatives, with EndPlay leveraging TBSCG's regional expertise to expand internationally. The partnership further cements TBSCG's status as an innovative leader in content management, hosting, design and support services provided to some of the largest global brands.
<blockquote>
“We've seen the need for cloud-based Web Content Management solutions firsthand in the EMEA market,” says Mark Andrews, CEO of TBSCG. “EndPlay is one of the most visionary companies in this space, and we look forward to hosting and implementing the EndPlay platform for our clients requesting a SaaS solution.”
</blockquote>
EndPlay's cloud-based WCM platform integrates, automates and intelligently delivers audio, video, text and rich media across brand websites and to virtually any end-user device for companies across media and entertainment/education spaces as well as retailers and CPG manufacturers. As an established reseller, TBSCG will support customers in migrating to or adopting the EndPlay platform. TBSCG will also work closely with EndPlay in building and maintaining localized hardware infrastructure.
“EMEA presents an incredible growth opportunity for EndPlay, and this partnership will enable us to establish an immediate and significant presence in the region,” said Dr. Christos M. Cotsakos, Founding Chairman, CEO and President of EndPlay. “We're bringing TBSCG to the cloud and, with more than a hundred established client relationships and a demonstrated understanding of content and Web presence, TBSCG is bringing EndPlay across the pond.”

EndPlay Expands Internationally via Strategic Partnership With The Banyan Solutions Consulting Group

The latest release of MODX Revolution has been made available. Version 2.2 promises to be one of the biggest releases yet. According to the MODX development team, they've spent alot of time working to refine the manager and administration interface to make the system more aesthetically pleasing and easier to use.
A highlight of some of the new features:
<ul>
<li>Media Sources unlock the possibilities of where you can store your site files to include Amazon® S3 or potentially something like Dropbox® (development required)</li>
<li>Static Elements enables developers to store site elements on the filesystem</li>
<li>Custom Resource Types allow developers to move beyond one-size-fits-all documents and create custom types such as blog posts, events, biographies tailored to the content type.</li>
</ul>
Taking the publishing side of things even further is the introduction of a new blogging, news and publishing add-on called <a href="http://modx.com/extras/package/articles" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Articles</a>, something they claim will make you ditch your old stand-by blog tools. Complete with built in importers to enable you to import WordPress, Blogger and other MODX blogs with more importers coming soon, this certainly sounds like an impressive new set of functionality.
There are far too many changes to write about here and for that reason, I suggest you peruse the <a href="http://rtfm.modx.com/display/revolution20/Upgrading+to+2.2.x" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">upgrade notes</a> for more information.
A quick summary of the new features:
<ul>
<li>Media Sources: You're no longer restricted to your local server. Media Sources allow you to connect your File tree to anything – a separate directory, Amazon S3 bucket, and more</li>
<li>Static Elements: Store all Elements (Chunks/Snippets/Templates/etc) on the file system or elsewhere, allowing you to edit them wherever you please</li>
<li>Custom Dashboards: arrange and specify a custom welcome page in the manager, as well as create and get new dashboard widgets</li>
<li>Major User Interface (UI) Improvements including a much cleaner look and feel and much faster load times</li>
<li>Added Import/export of Access Policies and Policy Templates for site builders and administrators. This means you'll be able to set them up once and reuse policies on other sites and projects.</li>
<li>Script or command line based installation and upgrades for folks who really want to get their geek on.</li>
<li>Many under-the-hood improvements to manager making it easier and a better experience for developers to extend.</li>
<li>Added ability to develop Custom Resource Types-no longer just the default resource types you can have resources specifically based on purpose such as a blog post type, gallery type, forum type, events and more</li>
<li>Added search to enable you to quickly locate any documents by keyword—right from the top the Resources Tree, no more scanning and hunting for those old articles.</li>
<li>Improved parser efficiency and execution, added over 600 Unit Tests, other core optimizations</li>
<li>Over 160 issues resolved, tons more bugs fixed</li>
</ul>
Check it out here: <a href="http://modx.com/">MODX Revolution</a>

MODx Revolution 2.2 release brings a refined Manager, easier Blogs and News Posts

Ben Vallack, developer of SetSeed announced a new version of his CMS, SetSeed on Google+ today:
<blockquote>
Latest and greatest version of SetSeed (v. 6.1.4) is now available at <a href="http://setseed.com/">http://setseed.com</a> – new features include powerful batch copy/move/delete pages tools as well as bug fixes and improvements. Get it while it's hot!
</blockquote>
For those unfamiliar with SetSeed, we recently wrote the following article introducing it: <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/introducing-setseed-cms-a-unique-new-feature-packed-cms/">Introducing SetSeed CMS – A Unique New Feature Packed CMS</a>

SetSeed 6.1.4 now available

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