Articles - Page 242

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

janus-boye

The <a href="http://news.typo3.org/news/article/typo3-version-43-released/">Typo3</a> team have announced the 4.3 release of their popular enterprise content management system. Typo3 has been downloaded 4.1 million times to date which makes it an incredibly popular choice for those looking for a reputable and highly adaptable content management system for the enterprise.
A brief look at the features:
<ul>
<li>Using “drag &amp; drop”, content elements can be moved or deleted, lightbox-based editing takes place directly on the page, and the entire page no longer needs to be reloaded when you use AJaX-technology to save changes.</li>
<li>The two extensions “Extbase” and “Fluid” smooth the way for a carefree migration to TYPO3 version 5.</li>
<li>“Salted MD5 Hashes” for password storage makes unauthorised decryption nearly impossible. At the same time this function can be used transparently in custom extensions. Sensitive data can be transferred over a secure channel using RSA authentication even if the website does not support HTTPS. Furthermore, authentication of frontend and backend users is now optionally possible over OpenID.</li>
<li>A Flash uploader allows simultaneous uploading of multiple files.</li>
<li>Automatic code completion and an integrated documentation with intelligent as-you-type suggestions have been added to the TypoScript Editor, t3editor.</li>
<li> Backend developers can now also use conditions in TSconfig.</li>
<li>plus many more.</li>
</ul>
Full details can be found on the <a href="http://news.typo3.org/news/article/typo3-version-43-released/">Typo3 website.</a>

Typo3 CMS sees new release

mike-johnston

VYRE Ltd, an award winning content management provider, today announced the release of VYRE Unify: version 4.5.
VYRE Unify 4.5 is a new major version release of VYRE’s content management platform. This release delivers the latest Portlet Standards 2.0, WebDAV support, a drag and drop Adobe Air upload tool and a wide range of performance improvements, including additional caching and improved LDAP support.
What is new in version 4.5
Portlet 2.0 
VYRE Unify 4.5 now implements the Java Portlet 2.0 specification (JSR-286). This allows users to run portlets built to the Portlet 2.0 specification.
The JSR 286 standard brings to the Java portlets all the key inter-portlet communication capabilities introduced by Web Services for Remote Portlets 2.0 (WSRP 2.0.)
Example inter-portlet communication includes:
<ul>
<li> Events — Enable portlets to communicate with each other through sending and receiving events.</li>
<li> Shared render parameters — Enable portlets to specify which render parameters they can share with other portlets.</li>
<li> Resource serving — Enables portlets to serve resources within the portlet context.</li>
</ul>
In addition, JSR 286 defines the portlet filters, with which portlets can, on the fly, transform the content of portlet requests and responses.
Performance enhancements
Version 4.5 includes a wide range of performance improvements, achieved through the addition of a number of caching layers at various points in the product.
The creation and use of a new custom XML generation engine in place of templates, as well as the caching of sections of generated XML has improved the overall speed of generating XML. This in turn results in faster page load times.
VYRE Unify 4.5 introduces the concept of “Script bundles” and “CSS bundles”, which also improve performance, allowing a number of files of the same type to be deployed as a combined file. This will result in fewer requests to the server per page loaded.
Adobe Air uploader
VYRE Unify version 4.5 includes a new Adobe Air upload application. The uploader allows users to bulk upload files from a local machine to a file repository managed by a VYRE Unify instance. The uploader includes support for drag and drop, file selection, and assigning metadata to each file before upload.
This improves the turnaround time for users uploading large numbers of files to a VYRE Unify file store, providing a simple an intuitive desktop user interface.
Resource comparison
Version 4.5 provides a feature for comparing files with previous versions of themselves; these include CSS, scripts, XSL, and template files. This allows website managers to see at a glance what changes have been made to the site.
WebDAV support
VYRE Unify 4.5 introduces WebDAV support. This allows users to manipulate files stored in the system from a desktop computer that also supports WebDAV.
Improved LDAP support
VYRE’s latest version release provides improved LDAP support for large user databases, allowing system administrators to more easily manage synchronisation between LDAP stores and VYRE Unify user accounts.
Third party library updates
VYRE Unify 4.5 includes several third party library updates improving support for third party developers, who wish to write Portlets or other applications that interact with VYRE Unify.
More Portlets available “out of the box”
VYRE Unify 4.5 contains a number of Portlets, which are now available “out of the box”.
Learn more about Vyre on their website: <a href="http://www.vyre.com">www.vyre.com</a>

VYRE Unify: Version 4.5 supports latest Portlet Standard 2.0

ImpressPages team is happy to announce and present new generation and open-source content management system ImpressPages CMS.
It’s already beta and stable version is soon to come.
Content widgets are the new way to manage the content. Now it is available in open source, ready to download, simple to install and free for everyone. No more. Yes, no more hard way to develop your website.
We, ImpressPages team, believe that WYSIWYG is more than appreciated by web administrators. It means that administrator should browse and manage the same styled content (text, images, etc.) as every website user. “What You See” while editing MUST BE “What You Get”. Moreover, most of the tasks must be performed by system automatically (picking up the fonts and text size, positioning and resizing images and others).
ImpressPages CMS is a new generation content management system. It is rich for developer, friendly for user and free for everyone. It's time to change the way we manage the content. Now content management is:
<ul>
<li>simpler,</li>
<li>less time-consuming (does the same tasks 2-4 times faster),</li>
<li>more efficient (system limits the ability to mess up the style, photo size, etc.),</li>
<li>less stressful (now it's nice and easy).</li>
</ul>
<h3>KEY FEATURES</h3>
<ul>
<li>Most functions are performed automatically (image resize, image placement, applying fonts, working with white-spaces, form construction, video streaming, etc.);</li>
<li>User friendly (administrator browses the webpage in the same way users do; content is managed in place: every block, every note, every text);</li>
<li>SEO friendly (options available per page or per group manner);</li>
<li>Multilingual (every user can add/delete any language);</li>
<li>Easy to develop (documentation, examples, nice and clean object-oriented PHP code, out-of-the-box system core and default template);</li>
<li>Open source (that means it's free for everyone).</li>
</ul>
Demo page, download, forum, newsletter, and documentation in our homepage – <a href="http://www.impresspages.org">www.impresspages.org</a>.

ImpressPages CMS 1.0.2 beta

SEO Samba, the premier organic search &amp; web marketing platform, will introduce SEO Toaster, its new free and open-source integrated Web marketing software application that no “do it yourself” entrepreneur should be without at this year’s annual PubCon.
SEO Toaster represents a serious alternative to Yahoo Stores for small e-commerce websites or WordPress when used as a corporate or affiliate CMS.  SEO Samba will showcase SEO Toaster at its exhibitor booth # 201 on November 11 and 12, and introduce it officially tonight as a sponsor of the Kick Off Networking Blast between 5.30 PM and 7.30 PM (PST).
SEO Toaster is a content management system (CMS) with an unique architecture that grows with your business, and makes piloting SEO execution and marketing for multiple websites from a central automated web marketing location possible. SEO Toaster makes it easier than ever for the small business owner to do the following:
<ul>
<li> Set-up their Web presence fast with an SEO CMS “right out of the box” solution:  no plug-in or complex set-up required</li>
<li> Embed all latest SEO techniques automatically right into their website from the get-go to achieve high rankings with Google and other search engines: No blog to read, or SEO expert fees to pay</li>
<li> Access a library of ready-to-use themes to jump-start your presence online</li>
<li> Have your regular <a href="http://www.design2work.net/">web designer</a> build, customize themes for your new or existing website is inexpensive thanks to the use of standard technologies and just 4 HTML and 2 CSS required templates</li>
<li> Add and edit their web pages without ever leaving their website thanks to front-end inline editing and pre-configured widgets such as featured areas, related pages, image gallery, comment system and more Sell products online with pre-built payment buttons for Paypal, 2checkout</li>
<li> Customize and integrate open source shopping cart and other applications</li>
<li> Build one, two, three and more money-making websites with SEO Toaster for free, then with a subscription to SEO Samba just a click away, centralize management of all your websites marketing and compound its effectiveness with access to powerful link building, Google News submission, email marketing, landing page optimization, Google Webmaster Tool and Web analytics modules, all of which are there to easily assist you in obtaining first-page rankings cost-effectively for multiple websites.</li>
</ul>
“We designed and introduced SEO Samba in December 2008 with the express purpose of automating many of the time consuming and manual search optimization processes,” said SEO Samba CEO, Michel Leconte. “Early adopters, such as B2B, franchises, affiliates, services and small e-commerce websites, have already seen the benefits of using SEO Samba, including building a Web presence that is cost-effective and producing thousands of top rankings in Google and other leading search engines. Case studies with actual live clients’ website rankings featured on our website at <a href="http://www.seosamba.com/" target="_blank">http://www.seosamba.com</a> undeniably back our claims up.”
Leconte added: “We created SEO Toaster, for the millions of small business owners, affiliate marketers, and e-tailers who suffer from the lack of search engines rankings visibility, cost, expertise and time investment necessary to bring WordPress and the plug-in “can fix it all ” (albeit late and often not reliably) patchwork mentality, or Yahoo store and their very limited proprietary web marketing and SEO functionalities”
In comparison, SEO Toaster enables the entrepreneur, e-tailer, or local small business owner or marketer to quickly establish their Web marketing presence with a single overarching objective:
Acquire top websites rankings, generate leads and sales.
David Culot is SEO Samba CTO and the leading force behind the easy-to-use, and easy-to-design CMS software. Culot comments; “SEO Toaster use an easy, front-end CMS, where you log-in and simply surf your live website and edit content right onto the page itself, and building, importing or customizing a website theme takes as little as 30 minutes for a web designer.”  Unique features include automated re-directs; onsite optimized linking, and link sculpting using Java script, and everything is ready and easy-to-use out of the box.
SEO Toaster is also the first cloud CMS and offers a foundation to scale successful web businesses with a one-click subscription to SEO Samba. Leconte explains:
“When you reach the point where you want to take your website to the next level of visibility, can’t afford the time to pilot each of your websites individually, or have already standardized your network of franchise or affiliate websites on SEO Toaster, push one button, and all your websites come together under an unified interface. Your entire portfolio of websites is now ready to receive and execute your orders such as modifying all pages URL’s, creating optimized links across your websites, landing page experiments, Google news ready articles and press releases…” These are advanced unseen functionalities that no CMS, whether open source such as Joomla, or Drupal, nor proprietary CMS and web marketing software provides.
Learn more at <a href="http://www.seotoaster.com">SEO Toaster</a>

SEO Toaster, the new free and open-source integrated Web marketing software application

<a href="http://www.bluenog.com">Bluenog</a>, an enterprise software and solutions company, has announced the appointment of Joe Valley as chief executive officer. He succeeds Suresh Kuppusamy, Bluenog’s co-founder, who will resume his post as chief technology officer.
Prior to his current post, Mr. Valley served as chairman and CEO of NCT, Inc., a networking connectivity services provider, which he sold to Black Box Corporation (BBOX:NASDAQ) in 2008.
Mr. Valley also served as CEO of Seranin Software Corporation, a privately held company based in Dallas; president and COO for QueryObject Systems Corporation, an Amex-traded global business intelligence software company; CEO of MIS USA, the first company to introduce collaborative analytical processing and one of the most successful IPOs on the German market; and CEO of Momentum Software Corporation, a middleware company, which he successfully sold to Level 8 Systems.
Joe’s deep experience in the enterprise software market, outstanding leadership qualities and focus on building profitable companies will enable us to expand and extend our Bluenog ICE™ product suite,” said Sastry Taruvai, co-founder and chief information officer. “We are excited to have Joe leading the Bluenog team towards its next phase of growth and success.”
The co-founders have built a great product and a great team,” said Mr. Valley. “Now with the tremendous acceptance Bluenog ICE has received in the higher education market, we are poised to take the company into the burgeoning healthcare market as well.”
Bluenog ICE 4.5, the latest version of Bluenog’s Integrated Collaborative Environment, was launched at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in June, 2009. ICE pre-integrates open source software, combining BI, portal, CMS and collaboration. Clients include New York University Langone Medical Center, Columbia University and MultiPlan.

Bluenog Appoints Joe Valley Chief Executive Officer

<a href="http://www.wordpress.org">WordPress</a> has won the top prize in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards that are put on every year by Packt Publishing from the UK.
This year, it has been granted the title “Best Overall Open Source CMS”
WordPress now has some additional credibility in the CMS market instead of just being considered a blog platfom.
From the announcement:
<blockquote>
We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of  Fame category for the Award next year.
</blockquote>
More info at <a href="http://www.Packtpub.com/award">packtpub.com/award</a>

WordPress wins top prize in 2009 Open Source CMS Awards

<a href="http://www.drupal.org">Drupal</a> has won the Hall of Fame award in the 2009 Packt Pub CMS Awards.
From the announcement:
We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the inaugural Hall of Fame Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. With this award, Drupal has won two categories this year, the other one being Best Open Source PHP CMS.
Here's the distribution of the prize fund for this category:
Drupal: $4,000
Joomla!: $2,000
More details at <a href="http://www.Packtpub.com/award">Packtpub.com/award</a>

Drupal wins Hall of Fame award in 2009 CMS Awards

Semrush - Be an SEO hero

Be an SEO hero with Semrush

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Congratulations are in order for the <a href="http://www.impresscms.org">ImpressCMS</a> team as they are the winners of this years <a href="http://www.packtpub.com/award">Most Promising Open Source CMS Award</a>.
From the announcement:
We are pleased to announce that ImpressCMS has won the Most Promising Open Source CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award.
While ImpressCMS took first place in this category, Pixie and Pligg weren’t far behind and settled for a tie in the first runner up spot.
ImpressCMS has featured in the top three in this category for the second time in a row, and has lived up to its reputation this year by winning the top spot.
Pixie and Pligg, on the other hand, featured in this category for the first time and managed to impress a lot of judges with their quality and support.
ImpressCMS has been awarded a prize of $2000 with runners up <a href="http://www.getpixie.co.uk">Pixie</a> and <a href="http://www.pligg.com">Pligg</a> getting $1000 each. Congratulations to all of the winners!

ImpressCMS wins Most Promising Open Source CMS Award!

<a href="http://www.drupal.org">Drupal</a> has won the Packt Publishing 2009 Open Source CMS Award and been granted a prize of $2000.
From the announcement:
We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.
While Drupal and Joomla! have always consistently featured among the top three in this category, WordPress made its way into the top five for the first time. The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.
Runners up this year were WordPress and Joomla! who each were granted $500 prizes.
Congratulations to Drupal and it's developers.

Drupal wins 2009 Open Source PHP CMS Award

<a href="http://www.plone.org">Plone</a> has won Packt Publishing's Best Other Open Source CMS Award and been granted a prize of $2000.
Second place went to <a href="http://www.dotcms.org">dotCMS</a> and third to <a href="http://www.mojoportal.com">mojoPortal</a> who walked away with $500 each.
We are pleased to announce that Plone has won the Best Other Open Source CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. Plone retains the Award it won in 2008 and takes away $2,000 in the prize money.
Since the introduction of this category in 2007, Plone has consistently featured among the top three, having won it in 2008. In another close contest, dotCMS had to settle for the first runner up position, finishing ahead of mojoPortal in the second runner spot.
Congratulations to <a href="http://www.plone.org">Plone</a>.

Plone wins Best Other Open Source CMS Award

So far, November has been a slow month for news but looks like <a href="http://www.joomla.org">Joomla</a> has seen a new security release with 1.5.15.
Full release notes can be found here: <a href="http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5249-joomla-1515-released.html">Joomla 1.5.15 release notes</a> but to summarize, some of the changes are:
Two security issues were fixed in this release:
<ul>
<li>Moderate Priority – Core – Front-End Editing. <a href="http://developer.joomla.org/security/news/305-20091103-core-front-end-editor-issue-.html">More information »</a></li>
<li>Low Priority – Core – XML File View. <a href="http://developer.joomla.org/security/news/306-20091103-core-xml-file-read-issue.html">More information »</a></li>
</ul>
Download from <a href="http://www.joomla.org">Joomla.org</a>

Joomla 1.5.15 has been released

Further polishing Tiki3, the TikiWiki developers have released version 3.3.
This release includes wiki syntax and plugin fixes, strengthened security, and improvements in language translations and visual display, among many others.
For the list of major enhancements since Tiki2, please see: <a href="http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki3">http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki3</a>
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware is a full-featured, tightly integrated, open source, multilingual, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, written in PHP and actively developed by a very large international community. Major features include articles, forums, newsletters, blogs, a file/image gallery, a wiki, bug &amp; issue tracker (form generator), a calendar, RSS feeds, a category system, tags, an advanced user, group and permission system and more.
About Tiki: <a href="http://tikiwiki.org/%20">http://tikiwiki.org/ </a>

TikiWiki CMS/Groupware 3.3 has been released

By now, many of us are excited to see the finalists for this year's Packt Publishing Open Source CMS (Content Management System) Award competition, the annual contest in which dozens of companies compete to be highlighted as the year's finest Content Management System.
Entering its fourth year, this competition has grown nearly five-fold and is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the CMS industry. But as successful as the competition has become, it sadly suffers from inherent issues which prevent it from truly presenting today's gamut of CMS choices in a valuable way.
Here is the reason: to even be considered as a finalist in the competition, each CMS is judged on exactly one condition: community vote counts. Granted, this can be a valid measure of a CMS's success, however today's CMS environment is very polarized. We see large majorities of people using Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, often simply because those are the CMSs in the headlines.
As a result, these CMSs are naturally going to have far more votes in every competition – they are votes from people who already use these CMSs and who rarely branch out to explore alternatives. This self-fulfilling cycle ensures that these few CMSs continue to dominate our headlines, simply because they were the early winners and can rely on their present install-base for votes, rather than relying on the merits, features, and usability of their own systems in comparison with other CMSs.
Consider the reasons the 3 aforementioned CMS's became so well known, prior to the Packt competition: – Joomla grew because there was a lot of news coverage over several months when the developers of Mambo split to create Joomla. Since then Joomla cemented their position by encouraging commercial development of addons and now has a lot of companies incentivised to promote it and ready to come up under general Google searches.
– WordPress got a massive boost from the most vocal group of people you could hope for: bloggers, due to its blog-positive simplicity.
– Drupal has developed a massive ecosystem of web development agencies and regularly gets noticed as a side-effect of the business activity of these agencies- for example, there are countless conferences held each year.
Much of the above is good (it's good that WordPress is user-friendly, and that Drupal and Joomla have large support networks), but it should also clearly show how CMS popularity was based on headlines, the size of business networks, and incentivization, rather than a full range of factors such as usability or features. The problem we see is that the Packt competition now sustains this further.
In a way, the problems Packt creates are the problems of a two-party system in politics, and the reason why many people now promote the concept of having second-choice votes on ballots.
Put another way: The Packt Competition isn't really about finding the best CMS. The mechanics of it ensure the winners are simply those with the largest communities.
Case in point: everyone has acknowledged a need for easy theme creation but hardly anyone is doing anything about it. But the CMS I work with (which I won't mention here as I want this to stay neutral and not an advert) has had a feature to generate all-new theme stylesheets and image colors for years, and we are only now starting to see other CMSs add this.
Marketing is never free, and we understand this: we've made marketing efforts and wanted to compete in this year's competition, but realized we can't afford the high resources needed to compete on a per-vote count with the more established players. Specifically (assuming none of our users offers to do this for us) we'd need to spend a couple of weeks campaigning very hard, kind of like running a political campaign, which would be very distracting, diverting our resources. The established players, on the other hand, have to do very little to be nominated highly.
There are a lot of very good CMS's that won't do well in the Packt competition, that in many use-cases are probably better choices than those that will win.
The Solution ————
So how can we recognise the power of all CMSs in a more valuable way, and nurture more competition within the market?
The key is to rely on the best and most fair indicator we have: human experience. Imagine if the competition were to judge each entry on factors that really matter – which can't ever be measured by a machine. This would remove ‘majority rule' as the primary factor and replace it with votes based on real experience – producing far more valuable results.
We suggest the following: allow people to nominate any CMS as they currently do, but then present the top 30 nominees for public voting. Then, instead of just tallying unscreened and anonymous votes, expand the voting process by requiring each voter to have personally used at least five of the nominated CMSs. Allow them to vote for as many of those five as they like, by writing a few sentences to a paragraph describing why they believe that particular CMS is the “best” among its competition in that category or writing why they are not giving that particular CMS a vote.
This fresh approach solves the previous issue by bringing back a vital concept: accountability. Like a salesman who has never used anything except his own product, that old system discourages voters from doing any research, and to vote up “their” CMS based on what may be a very narrow viewpoint and doesn't take into account less-known CMSs, despite how well those would actually compete.
A panel of judges would compile the results and decide on the winners.
This way, the competition does not need to be a popularity contest for the masses – a few dozen voters are enough. This change embodies the belief that it's better to present 100 good votes than 10,000 bad ones.
The best part is that these changes are very do-able and, at least in my mind, would bring some much-needed competition back to this industry. In my opinion Packt can add a lot of value to the CMS community at large, truly presenting valuable new information.
If you agree, please take a moment to share your thoughts with the Packt Publishing Award team [<a href="mailto:cmsaward@packtpub.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cmsaward@packtpub.com</a>] or by continuing this discussion in the comments below or on your own websites. I'm sure there are a lot of ideas out there, and that if we truly intend to present an alternative we should share ideas.
Hopefully we can all see that a newer and fairer method of choosing the winners of the Packt Publishing CMS Award competition would lead to a more diverse and competitive CMS market – with more obvious choices for those looking to create a CMS-driven website. It would also increase competition within the industry, thus improving features and usability across the board.
And lastly, that all lesser-known CMSs should be given the fair chance to shine against their competition (if they're worthy), and not just languish in obscurity.
Disclosure: this article was written by Allen Ellis, Creative Director for a CMS (<a href="http://www.ocportal.com">ocPortal</a>) which did not compete in this year's competition.

Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It

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Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads

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