Articles - Page 246

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

janus-boye

Impress CMS is a popular open source CMS that spawned not too long ago from the Xoops project. It has since gained increasing recognition and proven itself to be here to stay.
Today, they have released a new beta of what will be their upcoming 1.2 release. A list of the improvements and changes one can expect to find in this release are as follows:
User Improvements
* JQuery Redirect * Profile module with extended field + social network capabilities * TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor updates and additon of FCKeditor * Advanced search capabilities * Content manager now a full module
Administrator Improvements
* Updated Installer * Themeable Admininstration area * Blocks, Block Positions, User Ranks use new administration pages * Image manager with online-editing * Auto-Task (create Cron-Jobs with PHP in ImpressCMS) * Enhanced groups management capabilities and start page configurable for each group
Developer Improvements
* Removed dependency on Prototype * Extension of the IcmsPersistableOject Framework for creating and managing objects for the core and modules * Updates of all 3rd party libraries
Security Improvements
* Enhanced security provided with integrated Protector module * Admin configurable HTML Purifier * PHP OpenID updates * Smarty updates
For a full list of changes, you can refer to the changelog in the download, or <a href="http://wiki.impresscms.org/index.php?title=Change_Log">view it in the wiki</a>
You can learn more about the project or download it for yourself on the <a href="http://www.impresscms.org">ImpressCMS</a> website.

Impress CMS announces new beta of upcoming 1.2 release

mike-johnston

<a href="http://www.pligg.com">Pligg</a> CMS began a template design competition today that offers cash prizes to the top Pligg templates.
The purpose of the competition is to foster new Pligg templates and to give Pligg designers an opportunity to earn both prominence and money for their efforts.
Pligg's recent Design Gallery addition to Pligg.com has been a great resource for Pligg designers. It showcases the best Pligg templates and lets users comment and vote on Pligg sites.
This contest will bring some fresh styles to Pligg CMS for others to work from and hopefully make it easier for designers to find a template closer to their specifications without having to alter much.
All templates entered into the contest must select an open source license so that others will be able to re-use the template on their own projects.
Every qualified entrant will receive a $20 Pligg Pro gift certificate to spend on Pligg modules or templates.
Winners will be announced shortly after the October 11 deadline. See the contest announcement page for more details and official contest rules. <a href="http://www.pligg.com/blog/610/design-a-template-win-cash-prizes/">http://www.pligg.com/blog/610/design-a-template-win-cash-prizes/</a>

Pligg CMS offers up a template contest to entice designers. Win cash and prizes!

The following is a request for proposal for the Baltimore City Public Schools. If you are interested in bidding on this RFP. Please download the attachment and submit as indicated within.
CMS Critic does not have any affiliation with this group, we are simply providing a service by offering up the RFP on our site to fulfill what our primary mission is, which is to help people and companies find the right products.
Please find the RFP at:  <a href="http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/News/PDF/cityschoolsrfp.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/News/PDF/cityschoolsrfp.pdf</a>

RFP for Bidding - Baltimore City Public School

The Edentity team has been hard at work this summer preparing for an onslaught of new features and bug fixes for their flagship product, <a href="https://agilitycms.com">Agility CMS</a>.
With the August update, they are providing a whopping 31 new features and 189 bug fixes. Some of the primary improvements are:
Per page template editing which means you can quickly alter each individual page's display with a few clicks.
Improved workflow has also been added to this release which makes it much quicker and more efficient to approve/deny and publish content.
And most importantly, they have made a number of tweaks to improve Agility's already speedy interface.
More detail can be found on the <a href="https://www.agilitycms.com/landing/septemberrelease.aspx">blog post</a> on Agility's website.

Agility CMS update for August has been released

<a href="http://www.acquia.com">Acquia</a> has announced the immediate availability of their Acquia Hosting platform which provides optimized cloud-based hosting that is specifically tailored to Drupal.
From the Acquia website:
Single vendor for complete Drupal infrastructure support Acquia is your one-stop shop for maintenance and support for your entire Drupal infrastructure. We’ll keep your Drupal and LAMP stack secure, up-to-date and performing to meet your business requirements. Best of all, there’s only one number to call when you need support.
Highly available, high performance architecture Eliminate unexpected site downtime with our clustered, multi-tier cloud-based architecture. Our servers with load balancing and built-in redundancy ensure your Drupal site will meet your scalability and performance requirements.
Integrated with your development workflow Integrate your development and deployment processes to Acquia Hosting with hosted SVN repositories for code management, on-demand staging environments for testing and automated deployment to production instances.
You can learn more about this product at <a href="http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-hosting">Acquia's product page</a>.

Acquia introduces new hosting capabilities with Acquia Hosting

In this interview, we'll speak with Scott Barnett, co-founder of the enterprise content management portal solution, <a href="http://www.bluenog.com">Bluenog</a>. We'll discuss how Bluenog came to be and where they plan to go in the future.
CC: Can you tell us a bit about your background?
SB: I've been in the Enterprise Software industry for 20 years – I started in the late 80's right out of school as a programmer for AT&amp;T Bell Labs.  I had the privilege of working with some really talented people who built some software that is actually still in use today.  Somehow, I caught the entrepreneurial bug while at AT&amp;T and I wound up leaving after 7 years to go to a startup. I haven't looked back since!  I gradually made the move from Product Management to Sales &amp; Marketing, as I found that I really enjoyed spending time with customers and prospects helping them solve their business and technical problems.  After the dot-com crash I felt the need for some stability and went back to a “big” company – BEA Systems.  BEA had a very unique corporate culture. It remained dynamic even when it grew fairly large, and extremely talented people worked there.  It was at BEA that I met my future Bluenog partners, Suresh Kuppusamy and Sastry Taruvai and I decided to get entrepreneurial once again with Bluenog.
CC: How did Bluenog come about?
SB: While we were at BEA, a lot of our customers were looking to augment their BEA software with open source technologies to keep costs under control.  We recognized an opportunity to start a company that helped customers blend both open source and commercial technologies.  We’ve continued to shape IT over the last four years and one of the key themes that remains is the fact that integration plays a major part of enterprise software acquisition and use, so focusing on making integration easier and support/maintenance more cost effective continues to be a driving force.
CC: Where did the name come from?
SB: We actually have an explanation of this on our website, because so many people ask!  Suresh, Sastry and I were working on names over our favorite beer (which happened to be Blue Moon at the time) and Suresh mentioned that a “nog” is a wooden peg that holds infrastructure together.  It also happens to be an alcoholic beverage – and both seemed to fit.  Then we started to think about what “type” of nog we would be, and after throwing around a bunch of ideas we settled on Bluenog.  It didn't hurt that the domain was available and a Google search brought up only 2 results!
CC: What is your vision for the CMS market?
SB: Our vision is much broader than just CMS.  We believe that content is key in any enterprise application – and these days, most enterprise applications are web-based.  So, CMS alone is not enough.  Access to different kinds of content is key. A good system must include legacy content, reporting content as well as structured and unstructured content.  This means having a dynamic presentation framework to work with, a robust reporting engine that can easily generate, store and categorize reports, collaboration tools (which by the way are also all about content) and a robust and scalable infrastructure framework providing security, persistence, load balancing and most importantly – integration to serve as the underpinnings of the entire system.
CC: What has been your biggest achievement to date?
SB: In the past 2 years we have raised $4M in Venture Funding, brought 2 new versions of ICE to the market and received market and industry validation from numerous press and analysts.  To this end, we have several publicly referenceable customers, we were listed in the InformationWeek Startup 50 and Red Herring 100 for 2009. We also have over 100 customers with a great track record of success.
CC: Your biggest regret?
SB: It's hard to call them regrets – more appropriate perhaps would be lessons learned.  We are learning how to build and grow a company from its infancy – and there are many steps along a company’s growth path. We've gone through several successfully so far, but there will be more challenges to navigate.  I would invite you to ask this question again once we've gotten through some of the next few stages!
CC: What sets Bluenog apart?
SB: Two main things – from a product perspective, it's all about integration – the pre-integration of individual components such as CMS, Portal, BI and Collaboration into a single product, and the ease-of-integration we provide with third party legacy systems – this saves companies significant time and money On the implementation of enterprise applications.  The second item is our delivery capabilities – Bluenog Solutions Group has significant experience putting together enterprise applications in a timely and efficient manner – we all know the software is important, but implementation is critical.  Having both under one roof (or, one throat to choke) allows us to leverage a predominantly open source software stack and provide seamless support for our customers' infrastructure. This is tremendously valuable to our customers.
CC: Who uses Bluenog?
SB: We have customers in many different industries, including Banking, Healthcare and Higher Education.  We recently announced a specific Higher Ed initiative to integrate more tightly with popular products and systems unique to Higher Ed, such as Sakai, Moodle, Banner and others.  We tend to be used by middle market companies (between $200M – $2B revenue) that have an IT staff, but no time to tinker and integrate open source by themselves, and no budget for the larger vendors.  These companies tend to want the enterprise functionality and framework capabilities that the larger vendors provide at a fraction of the price.  That Is Bluenog's sweet spot.
CC: Where do you see the company in 5 yrs time?
SB: That is really hard to say with the economy in such turbulence.  There does seem to be a movement towards consolidation in the open source space, so I would expect there will be fewer vendors five years from now, and we are working hard to make sure Bluenog is one of them.
CC: What can we expect for new and upcoming changes?
SB: You will see the continued evolution of our product – social computing in the enterprise has gained a lot of traction and we think we can provide some interesting capabilities in that space.  We are also working on enhancements around Workflow and Process.  At the end of the day, we are extremely customer-driven, so our current customers set a lot of the agenda in terms of next steps in product development.
CC: How has the current global financial condition impacted you?
SB: The same as I would assume it has impacted everybody – there is less IT budget to go around, companies are very selective with what they spend money on, and reuse of existing infrastructure is a mandate.  We are hopeful that our business model will be effective – we allow customers to use our product at no charge to evaluate functionality and build the customizations they need, and they don’t have to pay until they put it into production.  We see this more and more as companies are evaluating open source alternatives.  There are still companies that buy software the “old fashioned” way – by purchasing the software and consulting up front based on a capital budget allocation.  But in this market, we aree starting to see this less often.
CC: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today, Scott. We wish you all the best.
SB: Thanks for letting me tell Bluenog’s story!  We are confident that the CMS market will continue to converge and we will see Search, Reporting, Portal and Collaboration become essential components in every customers’ content strategy.  Of course, we will get to claim that we were one of the first to get there with a truly integrated product that combines these elements and provides the foundation for building truly scalable and enterprise-quality web based systems.
CC: You can learn more about Bluenog from their website, <a href="http://www.bluenog.com">http://www.bluenog.com</a>

Interview with Bluenog co-founder Scott Barnett

There is a new Injader CMS release available on the <a href="http://www.injader.com/release-news/injader-24-released/">Injader website</a>. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Injader, Injader is a content management system written by <a href="http://www.bbarden.com/">Ben Barden</a>.
It was created in May 2005 and up until 2008, it was called Majestic.
This new version contains a number of new improvements such as the ability for theme authors to include individual settings for their themes, moderated content and improved caching.
A full list of changes and improvements can be found on the <a href="http://www.injader.com/release-news/injader-24-released/">announcement page.</a>

Injader CMS 2.4 released

A security exploit within the FCKEditor's php connector has prompted a new release of Geeklog to address this issue.
Apparently this flaw allows for malware to end up being hosted on some Geeklog powered sites by using this exploit. As a result, this new version is available to resolve.
“<a href="http://www.geeklog.net/filemgmt/index.php?id=979">Geeklog 1.6.0sr2</a> is now available for download and ships with a much more restrictive configuration for uploads through FCKeditor. There's also an archive to <a href="http://www.geeklog.net/filemgmt/index.php?id=978">upgrade from 1.6.0sr1</a> and an updated version of the <a href="http://www.geeklog.net/filemgmt/index.php?id=971">drop-in FCKeditor replacement</a> for older Geeklog versions.”

Geeklog CMS 1.6.0sr2 released to address security exploit

Shopify - The global commerce platform

Build your business with Shopify to sell online, offline, and everywhere in between.

The global commerce platform

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Minutes after posting our previous entry entitled “<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/its-official-textpattern-cms-4-20-is-available/">Textpattern 4.20 released?</a>” the announcement is up on the Textpattern website.
The new Textpattern features a very nice new admin theme called Remora. It's not active by default, but it is an option from the back-end and for those who are looking for a dropdown menu-based admin theme, it's a nice choice.
The official announcement from Textpattern.com reads as follows:
<blockquote>Textpattern CMS 4.2.0 is immediately available for download.
We’ve added new features like admin-side themes, timezone support with automatic DST adjustment on capable servers, and core support for unlimited custom fields, readied Textpattern for compatibility with PHP 5.3, and fixed a number of  small bugs. Upgrades from previous 4.x versions are expected to work seamless under usual reserve of plugin compatibility.</blockquote>
More info and downloads are available at the <a href="http://www.textpattern.com">Textpattern</a> website.

It's official. Textpattern CMS 4.20 is available.

Although not announced yet, download links on the <a href="http://www.textpattern.com">Textpattern</a> website now point to a 4.20 release.
We're not sure if this is an intentional change or an official release yet but in an attempt to download the 4.08 release we noticed that the links now point to what appears to be an official 4.20 release of this open source content management system.
Textpattern 4.20 introduces some very cool admin theming functionality which, while it has been present in the past, appears to be much easier to use and there are already a number of interesting themes cropping up on <a href="http://textgarden.org/layouts/?c=txp-admin">Textgarden.</a>
<a href="http://textgarden.org/layouts/?c=txp-admin"></a>We're testing out this version as we type this to see what has changed and if it is indeed official, we expect to see an announcement from the Textpattern team soon.

Textpattern 4.20 released?

A new milestone release of the enterprise wiki platform, XWiki is available for download. This new release introduces a new skin for easy theming of your wiki and a number of other features.
Easy modification of the new skin is available via a new color control panel shown below:

There are also a number of predefined styles that can be quickly and easily applied:

Other improvements to the Wiki include:
<ul>
<li>Improvements and bugfixes in the new network event distribution system</li>
<li>Improvements in the scheduler</li>
<li>Improvements in the watchlist</li>
<li>Introduce activity stream plugin</li>
<li>Add macros categories support</li>
<li>Add attachment support to mail created from template</li>
</ul>
More detail and downloads can be retrieved from the <a href="https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/">XWiki website</a>.

New XWiki enterprise 2.0 milestone release available

There are a lot of great looking CMS products on the market.. but usually ease of use is not part in parcel with their beauty. Such is not the case with Firerift. This is one heck of a nice system.
Firerift is the result of three years worth of reincarnations from a php based CMS called Cobalt to where it is today and we have to say, we like the end result!
Adding articles and blog entries is simple and done from a very functional and attractive interface:

This product is both a thing of beauty and a very functional product but don't take our word for it. Check out this <a href="http://firerift.com/screencasts/">screencast</a> and if that doesn't convince you..
Then you definitely need to take this puppy for a <a href="http://demo.firerift.com">test drive</a>.
This is a product that will have you reaching for your pocketbook in no time and is stunning, fast and functional. Right now, it's available for $49 which is an incredibly good deal and is making us think of how we can put this bad boy to use somewhere.
Feature wise, here's a breakdown:
<ul>
<li>photo and video galleries</li>
<li>powerful blogging engine</li>
<li>create your own lifestream</li>
<li>tagging and live filter searching</li>
<li>brandable interface</li>
<li>multiple users</li>
<li>page snips and much more.</li>
</ul>
Full feature set can be found here: <a href="http://www.firerift.com/features/">Firerift Features</a>.
Update: 8/27/09 – There is some interesting discussion going on about this product and it's SEO functionality being that the front end is java based. It makes for an interesting read and may be a factor when considering a purchase: <a href="http://www.firerift.com/blog/firerift-and-seo">http://www.firerift.com/blog/firerift-and-seo</a>

Firerift - An amazingly unique new CMS has arrived

<a href="http://www.striquent.com">Striquent</a> recently contacted us to let us know of their new content management system that they launched last week. This new product, entitled Webaptive is a but unique to the market.
What makes it unique?
Here is what they had to say: “Our offering is a bit different from the others in the market. Its targeted at custom ASP .Net applications and is unique in the sense that it doesn’t need an SDK, it’s based on a CMS as-a-service approach. This product took 3 years to build and was launched just last week.”
There is a <a href="http://www.striquent.com/download_center.aspx">30 day trial</a> available on their site and a <a href="http://www.striquent.com/quick_start_video.aspx">video</a> available that showcases the CMS and gives a good idea of what you can expect should you be interested in using it.

Striquent introduces Webaptive CMS

Call Tracking + AI 

Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads

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