Articles - Page 55

Agentic AI for Agencies in 2026

bmckeiver

The sad truth of the matter is that there are plenty of ways for intruders (and those with bad intentions) to cause website owners a ton of grief. This can range from attacking your website for the purpose of simply taking it down to attempting to hack it to spread malware. To combat this, it's important to be prepared. In this article, we'll share with you how to secure a website in 5 steps.
In fact, a <a href="http://www.wpwhitesecurity.com/wordpress-news/statistics-70-percent-wordpress-installations-vulnerable/">study conducted by WP White Security</a> found that 73% of all WordPress installations contained known vulnerabilities that would have quickly and easily been found through the utilization of automated tools.
It’s these types of security holes that have resulted in cyber criminals hacking into over 170,000 back in 2012 alone – a number that is probably even higher by now.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/how-to-secure-your-cms.jpeg" alt="how-to-secure-your-cms" />
<h2>What makes websites vulnerable to hacking?</h2>
Websites are appealing targets to hackers for a wide variety of reasons, mainly the number of weak entry points – such as the numerous plugins available for CMS like WordPress.
Many people assume that, because CMS like WordPress and Drupal are highly popular and recognized names, there must be some form of protection. They can’t just leave all of their users vulnerable, right?
Think again.
CMS are inherently open to attack because of the fact their foundation is an open source framework. These types of shared development environments have myriad benefits, but they also come with just as many issues.
Because of the popularity of the top CMS available out there, the security holes within these systems are actively being identified and targeted, both by the good guys (security research teams) and the bad guys (cyber criminals).
Once these holes have been found, they turn that particular CMS into treasure troves of data for cyber criminals, even to the point of creating an entry point for automated attacks on a massive scale.
To add salt to the wound, there are users who use the same passwords for all of their accounts, or even just use weak passwords. These leave their admin accounts open to attacks, even if they aren’t aware of it. This can result in their websites being injected with all sorts of malware and escalating the issue beyond the point of control.
These issues can even result in the websites becoming blacklisted by Google and other search engines, which adversely affects their business or brand as a whole.
<h2>How to get started securing a website</h2>
There are numerous things users can do to secure a website against vulnerabilities and fortify their systems from attack.
These include:
<h3>Using a strong password</h3>
To begin with, if your website is powered by a popular CMS such as WordPress, you want to makes sure that you secure it with a very strong password. Hackers and anyone using a WordPress website themselves are very familiar with how to access the administration interface and begin attempting to login.
Even if you are not using WordPress, it doesn't take much effort to scan a website for a login / admin interface so be sure that if someone DOES find this interface, they have no chance of logging in and taking over your website.
<h4>How to set up a strong password to secure a website</h4>
Always secure with a strong password to make this process harder for hackers and other cyber criminals. Additionally, you’re going to want to hash the password(s) you use by implementing a <a href="https://auth0.com/blog/hashing-passwords-one-way-road-to-security/">slow hashing algorithm</a>.
BONUS: Block the IP for at least one minute after x amount of password authentication failures. Three is the recommended amount of attempts before IP blocking.
Use a secure password generator to create something that is next to impossible to guess: <a href="https://www.lastpass.com/password-generator">LastPass Secure Password Generator</a>
<h3>Having a firewall in place is another important way to secure a website</h3>
Setting up a firewall will not only further secure your website / CMS, but it will also help you keep an eye on suspicious activity and track them by providing a related IP address for the source of that activity.
Once you’ve detected and found suspicious activity, you can then blacklist the IP the firewall provided.
Having said that, if you are not the type who wants to have to do these things manually, then it's a good idea to put in place a security service to do so for you. Most of the offerings out there are relatively reasonable in price and will save you a lot of headaches.
<h4>Our recommended website security company:</h4>
SiteGuarding.com
I recommend putting in place a website security service such as <a href="http://bit.ly/cc-siteguarding">SiteGuarding.com</a> to keep your website safe from hacking attempts. SiteGuarding is a security service that protects your website against malware and hacker exploits.
<h3>3 . ALWAYS Backup your CMS</h3>
This is one of the most essential aspects of CMS and website security and is actually just an overall good habit to have.
Have a backup system in place that will make it possible to recover your website in the event something happens. Always make sure your backups are updated as much as possible to avoid any security vulnerabilities or further problems down the road.
BONUS: Make sure your CMS and any extensions it may have are updated. These upgrades should be double-checked to ensure they are fully compatible with your system before you allow or make them. Of course, you’re always going to want to backup your CMS before conducting these updates.
If you currently don't have a means of backing up your website, we recommend going with a solid hosting company that offers this service for free.
Here are a few we recommend that have daily backups:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-7040701-10833186">GoDaddy</a></li>
<li><a href="https://kinsta.com?kaid=QQMMZOGRMCQE">Kinsta – If you run WordPress</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.bluehost.com/">BlueHost</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>4 . Protect against SQL-injections</h3>
An SQL-injection is a cyber attack that embeds malicious code within your CMS and its backend database. Once it’s in there, that malicious code then creates database query results and / or actions that you definitely do not want executed.
There are several types of SQL-injections and they enable the cyber criminal to do a whole variety of things. These include:
<ul>
<li>Editing, deleting, reading, or adding to the content of your CMS</li>
<li>Accessing and reading source code from the files on the CMS server</li>
<li>Write files to the server</li>
</ul>
While it is true that any one of those things relies heavily upon the capabilities of the cyber criminal, any SQL-injection can still lead to you losing control of your database and web server.
In order to prevent this from happening, <a href="https://www.netsparker.com/blog/web-security/understanding-sql-injection-protection/">use prepared statements</a>, as these separate the structure and data. This allows the SQL server to interpret them without being open and vulnerable to a hacker that is trying to alter the structure of the SQL query for their own malicious purposes.
The best way to protect against these is to implement a website security service that will keep your site protected against attacks. Here's an example of an excellent one: <a href="http://bit.ly/cc-siteguarding">Site Guarding</a>
<h3>5 . Get an SSL Certificate</h3>
An SSL certificate (secure sockets layer) is the standard security technology that is used to produce an encrypted link that goes between the web server and the browser. It is this link that will ensure that the data that goes between the server and the browser will stay private and secure.
Adding an SSL certificate to your domain will not only add an additional layer of security to your CMS, but will also help with SEO because it tends to get your website ranked higher in search engines.
If you don't yet have an SSL certificate, <a href="https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=1188781&amp;u=407830&amp;m=46483&amp;urllink=&amp;afftrack=">get one here</a>.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/how-to-secure-your-cms-1.jpeg" alt="how-to-secure-your-cms-1" />
<h2>Final Thoughts</h2>
Website security is one of those things that can truly be considered a “Catch-22” type of situation.
The more cyber criminals are out there trying to gain access into people’s CMS, the more security researchers crack down on it and come with new methods of protection. The greater the security becomes, the harder the cyber criminals will work to gain access – and they do like challenges.
It’s really an ongoing battle that is seemingly without end.
But, where does that leave you and your CMS?
It’s hard to say for sure where your CMS lies within the cyber criminal-infested waters, but there are things you can do to ensure your CMS is as secure as you can possibly make it. These five methods of security will help reduce threats to your CMS and help keep your data out of jeopardy.

How to Secure a Website in 5 Steps

mike-johnston

If blogging is your profession, you need to build yourself a personal blog. A blog which you update on topics which are important to you, or perhaps on topics which you wish to write about for clients. However, not only does your blog need to look good, but it also needs to work well for you when you’re typing up content and it needs to work well for your visitors when they eventually read through it.
This then begs the following question, “Which content management system (CMS) is best for blogging?”
Here are my top picks.
<h2><a href="https://wordpress.org/" target="_blank">WordPress (Self Hosted)</a></h2>
Most bloggers do so from a WordPress-powered website.. There’s a good reason for that.
WordPress is quick to set up (especially when using <a href="http://bit.ly/cc-godaddy" target="_blank">GoDaddy</a>), allows you to manage content and digital assets easily, and has a pretty simple admin panel to boot. The learning curve is there, but it’s relatively minimal.
However, the main benefits of WordPress lie in its flexibility. Because it is the most popular CMS in the world, you will find thousands upon thousands of templates and plugins to make your blog look and feel unique. Many WordPress plugins can also be used to extend WordPress' functionality, allowing you to create online stores, communities, and so forth. There's almost nothing it can't do.
Does this mean it's the best blogging platform? Not at all. Some blogs end up overloaded with plugins, bloat and unnecessary addons that are unnecessary and one thing WordPress has started doing is trying too hard to be a full scale CMS. As such, it's virtually impossible to use it without any plugins (none of which are vetted by WordPress themselves) therefore, for those wanting a simple blogging platform that works well and doesn't require tons of plugins to get things done, it's not the best choice. (<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wordpress-joomla-and-drupal-are-not-the-best-cms/">learn more about these issues here</a>)
<h2><a href="https://ghost.org/" target="_blank">Ghost</a></h2>
Launched in in late 2013, Ghost is designed with one purpose in mind; to be the best blogging platform out there and it does this well. So well in fact, that I've switch this very website over to it entirely this year so now CMS Critic is entirely powered by Ghost.
Dedicated to being a platform for bloggers specifically, Ghost has been built around the needs of a wordsmith. The admin panel is nothing less than beautiful. Ghost maintains a deep focus on content creation above anything else. It really is built for blogging.
There are already a fair number of sleek (and free) <a href="http://bit.ly/ghost-templates">Ghost templates</a> on offer and new platform features are released regularly. With time, I can see Ghost becoming a serious player in the blogging world – if it isn't so already. You can opt to either self host Ghost, or make use of their cloud-hosted solution, Ghost Pro.
<h2><a href="http://www.medium.com/">Medium</a></h2>
Medium is a very interesting and unique alternative. What's nice about it is that it is designed to help you find an audience and to help you write better content. With a very simple and easy to use interface, Medium is a pleasure to use and gets rid of distractions such as sidebars, widgets and plugins while focusing on allowing you to share your stories and quips with the world.
Rather than overwhelm you with formatting, Medium offers you just enough to do what you need to do and nothing more. This makes the writing process painless and so distraction free that you'll likely want to write more just so you can use the editor. It truly is a beautiful setup. Furthermore, you don't need to worry about whether your website on Medium is responsive. Everything scales to all devices so you will never need to worry about how it's going to look on your phone or tablet again.
It's also a collaborative tool that lets you share your drafts with others and collaborate with them to produce better content. You can even thank those who helped you proof read or add ideas to your content.
<h2>Weebly</h2>
For those looking for a simple and easy way to launch a blog quickly, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/weebly">Weebly</a> is a great choice given how easy it is to choose a theme and get something up with little to no technical knowledge.
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/weebly">Weebly</a> offers the ability to expand your blog in the future and incorporates a lot of necessary elements such as analytics, stock photography and a whole lot more. If you need a quick website, Weebly is definitely something to consider.
<h2><a href="https://withknown.com/" target="_blank">Known</a></h2>
Known is a relative newcomer to the blogging sphere. It allows any number of users to post to a shared site with blog posts, status updates, photographs, and more.
Its robust open source framework can be used to build fully-fledged community sites, or a blog for a single user. It's up to you. It's fully responsive and works on any device with ease and is generally quite nice to work with. If you haven't given it a shot, you should (at least to try it out).
<h2><a href="https://write.as/" target="_blank">Write.as</a></h2>
Write.as is an interesting beast. The intent here is not to help you build some elaborate blog but rather to give you a way to quickly get your thoughts down and share them with the world. It offers a very minimalistic writing interface thats sole purpose is to get your content online fast and easily.
Your writing automatically saves as you type. It'll always be waiting, even if you don't “save” before leaving. You can choose to write without a blog or put all of your thoughts together in one place. It's rather cool and worth a look.
<h2><a href="https://postach.io/">Postach.io</a></h2>
Postach.io lets you store your content in either Dropbox or Evernote or both. This lets you choose whichever interface suits you the most (Dropbox files obviously needing to be edited in a text editor and uploaded whereas Evernote has a built in text editor) and work on your content within.
Publishing a post with Evernote is as simple as connecting your account to Postach.io, telling it which notebook in Evernote will contain your posts and then simply writing in that notebook and using the tag “published” when you are done. This tells Postach.io to put the post up on your blog and that's all there is to it. To add images, simply attach them to the note and it will be inserted in your blog post instantly.
The nice part to using the Evernote connection for Postach.io is you can take advantage of the many awesome Evernote apps for mobile devices and tablets that already exist which makes blogging with it a true pleasure.
<h2><a href="http://www.typepad.com/" target="_blank">TypePad</a></h2>
Typepad has been around for a while, and it's a reliable option more than anything else. It's known to be a very secure platform, one that hackers tend to avoid.
It is a hosted solution, comes with integrated analytics, easy design customization features and a relatively small but highly dedicated community. Joining Typepad kind of feels like you joined a writers club, especially since all Typepad blogs have the chance to be featured on the Typepad website. It feels very inclusive and homely.
The downside here is that for its limited functionality, it comes with some fairly heaving pricing. TypePad isn't exactly much of a looker compared to other platforms either
<h2>“But What About MY Favourite CMS?”</h2>
Many of you will now be wondering why I didn’t include the likes of Blogger, Tumblr, Joomla and Drupal somewhere on this list. I can already hear the screeches of, “How are they not even honourably mentioned?!”
The fact is, Blogger and Tumblr aren’t considered robust enough to be worthy of competing with WordPress, Ghost and the rest on a professional scale. If you want to blog about how much you love your kittens, they may be viable options. But I’d never recommend them to serious bloggers.
As for Joomla and Drupal, The former is clunky and not exactly optimized for blogging, whilst the latter is far better suited to large-scale websites. Neither belong on this list, despite having their own uses and strengths.
So, with that being said, I’d recommend sticking to the names listed above. Each one is respected, easy to use, feature rich and optimized for being your blogging playground.

ProtonMail Review - Secure Email on All Platforms

<a href="https://www.nintex.com/">Nintex</a> today announced a strategic partnership with Adobe to bring new native electronic signature capabilities, called Nintex Sign™ powered by Adobe Sign, to Nintex partners and customers.
Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, the leading e-signature solution used by over half the Fortune 100, meets the growing worldwide demand of Nintex customers and partners for affordably priced, trusted and fully integrated e-signatures within the Nintex Process Platform to securely complete transactions. Thousands of partners, public, private, and government organizations leverage the powerful, easy-to-use Nintex platform daily to quickly build process apps, automate their most sophisticated workflows, and generate all kinds of documents from disclosures, to orders, to closing contracts leveraging responsive Nintex digital forms and templates.
<blockquote>
“The new offering produced by this partnership powerfully extends the native capabilities of our Nintex Platform, trusted as the global standard for process and document automation, to now include industry-leading Adobe-backed eSignatures,” said Nintex CEO Eric Johnson. “Nintex Sign, powered by our strategic partnership with Adobe, will bring tremendous value to our thriving Nintex process management and automation community.”
</blockquote>
Ashley Still, vice president and general manager, Adobe Document Cloud, added, “We believe great experiences for customers and employees start where the document does. With Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, we’re excited to bring these two best-in-class solutions together, making it easier for Nintex’s global partner network and customers to transform digital document workflows.”
Aragon Research CEO Jim Lundy, the leading analyst covering the fast-growing, multi-billion dollar Digital Transaction Management and Workflow and Content Automation markets commented, “This strategic partnership brings together two of the leading providers in Documents, eSignatures, Process Management, Workflow and Content Automation.”
Nintex is offering current customers who sign up for Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign with a special introductory offer. Nintex customers should contact their Nintex account manager for details.
To learn more about Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign visit <a href="http://www.nintex.com/workflow-automation/e-signature">www.nintex.com/workflow-automation/e-signature</a>/.

Nintex and Adobe take on Docusign

<a href="https://www.usertesting.com/">UserTesting</a>, the leading on-demand Human Insight Platform, today announced it has entered an agreement to acquire UserMuse, a market research service designed for businesses that target corporate customers and institutions. The acquisition creates the largest and highest quality global testing panels for Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies and further strengthens UserTesting’s position in customer experience management.
Creating a strong customer experience is a competitive business requirement. Leading brands continue to raise the bar on expectations, making winning and retaining customers more challenging for the companies that don’t have a good pulse on customer empathy and user experience. With this acquisition, UserTesting customers now have more options to engage with their key audiences, from consumers and industry experts to custom panels, all through a single Human Insight Platform.
<blockquote>
“In today’s digital economy there is a correlation between the experience customers have with a brand and the company’s financial performance – it is paramount for companies to put themselves in the shoes of their customers to empathize and understand what delights and challenges them,” said Andy MacMillan, CEO of UserTesting. “This acquisition allows us to help more companies connect with more people across specialties, expertise and background to ensure they get the most valuable feedback to build products and services that customers want and love.”
</blockquote>
“We started UserMuse to connect people with businesses that recognized the value of their thoughts and perspectives,” said Christian Bonilla, CEO of UserMuse. “We are excited to join forces with UserTesting who shares that vision and can extend the reach of our panel of B2B industry experts to more companies looking to deliver unified product, brand and customer experiences.”
To create great customer experiences that meet today’s ever increasing expectations, brands must incorporate human insights into all stages of the product and experience lifecycle. This can be addressed by adopting UserTesting to implement a continuous customer feedback loop that streamlines how an organization can learn, understand and share user sentiment and preference.
The acquisition of UserMuse further underscores UserTesting’s commitment to helping companies of all sizes and across all industry verticals empathize with their customers to deliver more meaningful experiences.
<h3 id="about-usertesting">About UserTesting</h3>
UserTesting enables every organization to deliver the best customer experience powered by human insight. With UserTesting’s on-demand <a href="https://www.usertesting.com/platform/capabilities">Human Insight Platform</a>, companies across industries make accurate customer-first decisions at every level, at the speed business demands. With UserTesting, product teams, marketers, digital and customer experience executives confidently and quickly create the right experiences for all target audiences, increasing brand loyalty and revenue. UserTesting has over 1,200 subscription customers, including 48 of the top 100 brands in the world, and has delivered human insights to over 35,000 companies to-date. Backed by Accel and OpenView, UserTesting is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. To learn more, visit <a href="https://www.usertesting.com/">www.usertesting.com</a>.

UserTesting Acquires Market Research Company UserMuse

A new version of mooSocial, the popular social networking software, has been released to the public. This new release brings with it a host of new features and bug fixes. See below for a partial list.
Bug fixes and improvements:
<ul>
<li>All of paid plugins are compatible with 3.1.0 version. For GIF comment plugin and Business plugin, please download latest version to upgrade them after upgrading to 3.1 version.</li>
<li>Mobile apps: this version requires app 1.2+ version. If you upgraded web to 3.1.0 version the apps will work well but some new improvements like reply to comment, pin post, close comment …will be not available on apps. We’re updating our apps now and will keep you posted.</li>
<li>If you’re using custom theme or paid theme or site has been customized. You should test it with new version at development site first before upgrading. The reply to comment feature option does not work well with paid theme. We will upgrade all themes and will keep you guy posted.</li>
<li>DO NOT upgrade your live site until you have a full backup of your site’s files, database and have successfully performed a test upgrade on your development (test) site first.</li>
</ul>
For a full and complete list of all of the changes in this release, see <a href="https://community.moosocial.com/topics/view/1877">their forum post.</a>

mooSocial 3.1.0 Released

Tangem, the producer of blockchain smart card wallets, raises US$15M from SBI Crypto Investment Ltd. for a breakthrough in mass adoption of blockchain technology.
Tangem pioneered in making crypto currencies look like cash and easy to use as cash, and now attracts additional investment to accelerate the deployment of its technology in other industries where the secure storage and circulation of blockchain assets has the highest potential:
<ul>
<li>Cryptocurrencies and stable coins</li>
<li>ICO / TAO token distribution</li>
<li>Ticketing</li>
<li>Anti-counterfeit</li>
<li>Digital identity</li>
<li>Retail loyalty and promotions</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
“We take the next big step on our mission to bring blockchain to people's everyday life,” says Andrey Kurennykh, co-founder of Tangem. “In 2018, our technology was proven by the markets after we launched the mass production of Tangem cards for crypto currencies and tokens. With this additional investment in 2019, we will be able to extend our product offering in other industries and provide better support to companies which embrace the idea of physical distribution of blockchain assets”.
</blockquote>
SBI Crypto Investment Ltd. is a digital asset venture investment company wholly owned by SBI Holdings Inc. ( “SBI”, HQ in Tokyo, Japan, Representative Director, President &amp; CEO Mr. Yoshitaka Kitao), SBI has built an internet-based financial ecosystem and is expanding their existing partnerships and investments to digital asset-related venture companies to strengthen their technological supremacy.
“The Tangem hardware wallet, which is highly secure and affordable, is an important tool to promote mass adoption of digital assets and blockchain. We believe utilizing Tangem will help stipulate the demand for other blockchain services provided by SBI,” said Yoshitaka Kitao, Representative Director, President &amp; CEO of SBI Holdings Inc.

Tangem raises $15M from SBI for the industrial adoption of blockchain-enabled smart cards

Power your CMS on AWS

Manage your websites & apps in the most trusted cloud.

#ffffff

Dragonchain Inc. is announcing its partnership with Hurify Digital Markets to revolutionize global, decentralized IoT and blockchain development.Dragonchain will provide Hurify with the flexibility and security necessary to build and sustain its dynamic global ecosystem. Using Dragonchain Smart Contracts, Hurify can provide a secure, blockchain-enabled global community of IoT developers to connect and collaborate on projects.“We're looking forward to working with Hurify on our Dragonchain platform,” said Filip Hantson, Vice President of Business Development at Dragonchain. “Like blockchain, IoT is a young technology that has a massive potential to take the market by storm.”The launch of the Hurify blockchain platform represents a first-of-its-kind IoT services marketplace, built on Dragonchain. The team believes that the Hurify blockchain-enabled platform will disrupt existing service models currently blocking the real scalability of IoT.“Dragonchain will enable Hurify to take advanced, multi-level private and public blockchains to the IoT community,” said Mouli Srini, CEO and President of Hurify Digital Markets. “We now have a versatile solution for a range of IoT operational challenges, such as access control, securing data, and scalability; which Dragonchain overcomes with remarkable ease of use for developers.”About DragonchainDragonchain is a technology leader in the blockchain space with operations in four business segments: enterprise services, entertainment, education, and project incubation/acceleration. A US company, Dragonchain’s goal is to empower businesses with an enterprise-grade blockchain solution. Learn more at www.dragonchain.com.About HurifyThe Hurify Digital Markets IoT project development platform uses smart contracts to support the IoT project development and deployment supply chain. By bringing together into one place access to talent, hardware and services, the platform directly addresses the skill gap and project management challenges that create barriers to IoT project implementations for SMEs. Hurify is a global ecosystem for developer communities, entrepreneurs, and IoT solution vendors with members from across the globe. Learn more at https://hurify.co/.

Dragonchain and Hurify Partner to Accelerate IoT and Blockchain Adoption

Ethereum’s price will “continue to soar” throughout 2019 – and a main driver of the continued rally will be this week’s hard fork.
The comments from influential tech expert Ian McLeod of Thomas Crown Art, the world’s leading art-tech agency, come as the second largest cryptocurrency has secured an impressive rally over the last month.
Mr McLeod observes: “Ethereum has made a bullish move and broke the $125.00 resistance – giving the crypto naysayers and doom-mongers a robust signal that this digital currency is on the upward trajectory once again.
“Ethereum’s rally is part of a wider cryptocurrency rally since the beginning of the year, with other major coins, including Bitcoin and XRP, also securing important gains.
“The bulls are back in town.”
He continues: “Whilst we can expect 2019 to be dominated by a considerably more bullish sentiment than in 2018 across the major digital assets, I think it is likely that Ethereum will be the standout winner this year for three key reasons.
“First, the hard fork set to take place on 16 January.  The hard fork will mean Ethereum miner rewards fall from three ether to two and decrease the block time, resulting in a faster network. This is a key part of a major Ethereum upgrade and the markets are excited.
“There’s a possibility the date of the hard fork might be pushed back a little, but traders are managing this into expectations.”
“Second, oracles. Oracles – data feeds that deliver information into the smart contract from third parties – will inevitably drive adoption of Ethereum smart contracts.
“This is because smart contracts using decision-making on real-world metrics can be expected to find relevant use cases among consumers, firms, and organizations, amongst others. And, of course, as adoption and utility of Ethereum smart contracts increase, so will Ethereum’s price.”
Thomas Crown Art is already a global pioneer in using Ethereum smart contracts.
Ian McLeod comments: “We’ve created a groundbreaking solution for artists and art collectors and galleries by giving the capability to use new works of art as a literal ‘store of value’ and serve as a cryptocurrency wallet for owners whilst providing an independent method to conclusively prove the provenance of artwork quickly and easily, and to view an immutable chain of ownership.
“Using an Ethereum blockchain to authenticate artwork is an ideal use-case for distributed ledger technology. It provides the ability to store a permanent, immutable record of artwork at the point of creation which can be used to authenticate registered works by any third party independently.”
Thomas Crown Art’s tech expert concludes: “The sentiment data and technical analysis suggests that Ethereum’s rally, to be fuelled further by the hard fork, will continue in the short to medium term.
“It is likely that this will positively impact on the rest of the cryptocurrency sector.”

Ethereum’s upcoming hard fork to further fuel wider cryptocurrency rally

<a target="_blank" href="https://kinsta.com/?kaid=QQMMZOGRMCQE">Kinsta</a> is a popular hosting provider that provides managed WordPress hosting to the public. Today, I'm going to review their system and hosting setup to see whether it's a good option for those of you looking for a solid, trustworthy provider with a good set of tools for your WordPress website.What makes Kinsta a unique beast is that their entire infrastructure uses <a target="_blank" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Platform">Google Cloud Platform</a> which differs from the traditional shared, VPS, or dedicated infrastructures you see with most providers.Kinsta was kind enough to provide me with a test account for the purposes of this review so I'll be using that for the screenshots and to take a look through everything.<h2>The Dashboard</h2>Once you've <a target="_blank" href="https://kinsta.com/?kaid=QQMMZOGRMCQE">signed up for an account with Kinsta</a>, you'll be given access to your Kinsta Dashboard which is where you'll manage your sites, migrations and a whole lot more.Your dashboard, once you get access and sign-up, will look like this:<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/kinsta-wordpress-hosting-review-1_ws7yhd.png" />Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting DashboardThere are numerous graphs on the Dashboard for you to review such as Resource Usage, Data Transfer and Unique Visits. You can also see a full list of your sites from one location (if you have multiple).<h2>Sites</h2>To add new sites and manage existing ones, you'll use the Sites tab. When you move a site over to Kinsta, you are given the option to choose from one of their <a target="_blank" href="https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/google-cloud-data-center-locations/?kaid=QQMMZOGRMCQE">18 data centers</a> for your site. Each of your sites can have a different data center as Kinsta uses multi-regional deployments.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/kinsta-wordpress-hosting-review-2_qmmhyx.png" />The Sites TabIn the Info section, you can see everything you need to know about your site from your IP information to your Data Center location, sFTP and SSH details and more.Most of the other sections are pretty self explanatory and I won't go through all of them because that would likely bore you to tears but what I will tell you is that there is plenty of information and functionality here. One of the sections I especially found useful is the Tools section. Here you can clear site cache, restart PHP and do a database Search and Replace quickly and easily.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/kinsta-wordpress-hosting-review-9_v1tcl7.png" />The Tools Section<h2>Migrations</h2>The Migrations tab is where you'll initiate any migrations from your previous hosting provider to Kinsta. As you can see in the screenshot below, I've got 1 free migration that I haven't used yet so to kick off a site move, I'd do so here.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/kinsta-wordpress-hosting-review-4_lspgkw.png" />The Migration Tab<h2>Kinsta DNS</h2>Kinsta also offers a service called Kinsta DNS which allows you to manage your own zone records and use Amazon Route 53 to speed up DNS resolution for faster domain name resolving.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/kinsta-wordpress-hosting-review-5_fz2pm7.png" />Kinsta DNS<h2>Analytics</h2>The  tab is exactly what it claims to be, analytics for your site. While it does offer you a quick peek into how your site is performing, most of you should make sure you also have Google Analytics as that's what everyone uses and it provides far more in-depth detail. Having said that, this doesn't mean this section is useless as it does provide quick insight without having to leave the dashboard so I can appreciate that.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/kinsta-wordpress-hosting-review-6_ecfwrv.png" />Analytics<h2>Activity</h2>Skipping now to the Activity tab now, this is where you'll find a log of all activity that has happened within your Dashboard such as adding new sites, making changes and more.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/kinsta-wordpress-hosting-review-7_vbeols.png" />ActivityThat about does it for the Dashboard tour but does all of this mean Kinsta is the right managed WordPress hosting provider for you?<h2>My Thoughts</h2>Kinsta provides some pretty amazing features / services that go along with each and every plan so they are definitely good bang for your buck. One of the most interesting ones is the Free hack fix meaning that if your website gets hacked (which is always a fear for every website owner) they will fix it with immediate priority.Additional features include:<ul><li>Free CDN, free Letsencrypt SSL, staging environments, automatic daily backups and the option to create manual backup points anytime.</li><li>Full page caching at the server-level to deliver content almost instantaneously to visitors. We also pair that with our Kinsta MU plugin, developed in-house, to provide even more granular control over caching.</li><li>PHP 7, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3.</li><li>Server-level rules and optimizations for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Download sites to ensure a smoother checkout experience for customers.</li><li>Multi-user access with fine-grained permissions. Add any number of users to your team. Give them access to all your sites, just billing or add them as developers or administrators to a subset of your sites.</li><li>SSH access, Git, and WP-CLI.</li><li>At least one free migration, completed by our expert support team. There are a certain number of migrations included depending on which plan you choose.</li></ul>There's another good reason I'd consider Kinsta that most people aren't aware of. AdThrive, one of the largest ad networks in the world for bloggers, recently recommended Kinsta in an email sent out to their publishers (I know this because my wife's site is with them). This nod from a company that takes things into deep consideration before making recommendations is a good sign for those thinking of choosing Kinsta for their own websites.<a target="_blank" href="https://kinsta.com?kaid=QQMMZOGRMCQE">You can learn more or sign up with Kinsta here.</a>

Kinsta Managed WordPress Hosting Review

<a href="https://www.elasticpath.com/">Elastic Path</a>, the pioneer of enterprise API-first commerce solutions, today announced the launch of Commerce Cloud, the company’s future-looking, flexible cloud subscription product. Commerce Cloud empowers companies to leverage the scalability, reliability and performance of the cloud with the flexibility and performance they’ve come to expect from Elastic Path’s API-oriented commerce architecture.
“Elastic Path Commerce Cloud powers the business needs of today and tomorrow. Our customers are innovators who are looking for solutions to quickly launch new brands or stores to solve current needs while at the same time powering their commerce aspirations into the future. Commerce Cloud allows you to keep up and exceed customers’ expectations,” said Senior Vice President of Products Peter Lukomskyj.
Elastic Path Commerce Cloud empowers unmatched flexibility for digital commerce, be it products or services:
<ul>
<li>Support for multiple business models: Commerce Clouddelivers B2B, B2C, B2B2C, and B2B2B capabilities on a single platform.</li>
<li>Support for multiple touchpoints:This tool can handle today’s commerce use cases such as website and progressive web apps as well as the emerging customer touchpoints, e.g. voice technology and IoT devices — and it’s ready for the next buying channel that has not yet been invented.</li>
<li>Seamless migration capability:Commerce Cloud lets companies switch from legacy commerce platforms over time by leveraging an API-first architecture. Start with a shopping cart and migrate as needed with no need to rip and replace.</li>
<li>Business-friendly deployment:Commerce Cloud offers brands the opportunity to switch to a managed hosted or on-premise deployment without losing any functionality or customizations. It also allows them to switch between models as business needs change over time. Commerce Cloud can also be implemented and customized internally by an enterprise’s IT team or by an Elastic Path partner depending on the brand’s preference.</li>
<li>Unified selling engine:Commerce Cloud enables a single view of the customer and how they interact with the brand across touchpoints.  It provides the omnichannel shopping cart brands have sought for years and empowers them to understand and delight the customer at every point in the buying journey.</li>
</ul>
In addition to traditional use cases, Commerce Cloud allows brands to power buying experiences through IoT, Facebook chatbots, Alexa skills, and other opportunities beyond traditional touchpoints. Building on the success of the core Elastic Path offering, Commerce Cloud delivers hosting, maintenance, system and database administration, and compliance — allowing brands to focus on taking care of their customers and growing their businesses while driving innovation and growth for their business.
“Elastic Path Commerce Cloud is for innovators and dreamers who want to push the boundaries of commerce,” said Harry Chemko, CEO of Elastic Path. “This new offering builds on Elastic Path’s legacy of supercharging the world’s premier brands to deliver unified commerce experiences across brands, lines of business, geographies, and channels. Commerce Cloud adds another level of flexibility to our battle-tested, proven Elastic Path Commerce platform — now with a SaaS option.”
Commerce Cloud is already in use by established brands, including long-term Elastic Path customers who are leveraging the brand’s innovative commerce platform while also gaining the scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness of the cloud. Elastic Path announces Commerce Cloud during the first day of the National Retail Federation Big Show &amp; Expo in New York City. Attendees can visit Booth #1817 in Hall 1A for a demo of Commerce Cloud and more information.

Elastic Path Announces the Launch of Commerce Cloud

With a new year comes a fresh look at what’s working for your content management system and what’s not. For enterprise businesses, any changes to a digital infrastructure can impact the entire company, especially changing their Content Management System (CMS).
Last year, companies witnessed a distinctive shift in the role Enterprise CMS platforms play. Rather than being a one-stop shop for all features a company would need, effective CMS platforms became the glue holding enterprise martech stacks together.
In 2019, any successful Enterprise CMS platform should give more than an updated look. It has to be a future-proofed investment in a company’s marketing strategy. Here are 9 forward-thinking essentials your Enterprise CMS should deliver this year:
1.Cloud-first integration
If 2018 was the year of the cloud, then 2019 is the year the cloud infiltrates every part of an organization’s digital presence. The Cloud helps organizations trade CAPEX for OPEX, breaking the 3-5 year cycle of hardware replacement and eliminating the responsibility over managing infrastructure. There are fewer limits, and enterprises pay as they go only for what they need.
How a CMS would interact with a Cloud hosting solution is the foundation of the rest of a
website’s success. A CMS should ideally work hand-in-hand with any Cloud hosting solution. That intimate connection gives a team more control over server performance and scaling.
Cloud resources within the CMS gives companies the power to grow capacity for their websites instantly, quickly react to spikes in traffic, or autoscale whenever needed. A Cloud system baked into a CMS lets your team manage these capabilities in a variety of areas, with fewer pieces to juggle.
What does the future look like? In a word: choice. Some CMS platforms are now being deployed with containers – allowing you to launch a CMS in minutes and start building your website or application with continuous deployment and no long-term contracts.
2. Solid security 
Last year saw some of the biggest online presences get slammed with several massive security breaches. From Marriott to Twitter, major enterprise names struggled to keep user information secure. It resulted in damaged brand trust, PR nightmares, and (many times) a drop in profit.
No one can afford to have security compromised, but especially not enterprise organizations.
More information online means more data for hackers to crack. Popular open source platforms like WordPress are notorious for having the most frequently compromised websites of any CMS. They often need extra third-party plugins to stave off attacks, and it’s only a matter of time before those are cracked. An enterprise CMS should uphold the integrity of your data. While any website can be hacked, some platforms are more secure than others. Do your research to ensure the source code is sound, that testing and patching are part of the support plan. Consider platforms that warranty their code and services. And ask what protocols are in place in the event of a hack, from 24/7/365 critical care to SLAs.
3. <a href="https://www.solodev.com/resources/case-studies/miami-beach-visitor-and-convention-authority.stml">API integration</a> 
Your enterprise organization needs features native to the CMS. However, there’s also something critical about having a CMS that seamlessly connects your organization to
technologies your team is already using—Marketo, MailChimp, Tableau, analytics
tracking and more.
Today’s digital experience landscape includes thousands of technologies. Understanding which ones to pick is hard enough; but how do you get them to work together? The CMS is a cornerstone of your digital stack, and it should help orchestrate data across different channels. That means seamlessly integrating with the most advanced applications on the planet like Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics ERP, even exotic platforms like Humanetics to manage blood donation data. The possibilities are endless – and your CMS should be the hub for it all.
When considering the API capabilities of a CMS, find out if it has documented out-of-the-box integrations. Are they committing their APIs to libraries like Swagger UI? How easy is it to build your own integrations in the future?
4. <a href="https://www.solodev.com/blog/web-design/should-your-website-risk-not-being-ada-compliant.stml">Compliance </a>
The Internet might feel like the Wild West, but there are a bevy of regulations that every website should follow. From ADA Accessibility, WCAG 2.0 compliance, GDPR, HIPPA, and more, your new CMS should take important governance and compliance rules into consideration.
Arguably one of the most important regulatory requirements of any website is accessibility. Every web experience should deliver “digital equality” to its visitors, regardless of their disability. Unfortunately, the realm of ADA compliance remains largely misunderstood. Accessibility isn't a “set it and forget it” endeavor; it requires both achieving and vigilantly maintaining the standards.
As the Department of Justice issues more legal suits against public and private institutions, it's critical for all organizations to monitor their ADA posture and develop the best practices for managing compliance. Even <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/blind-woman-sues-beyonces-entertainment-company-discrimination/story?id=60188354">Beyonce</a> recently fell victim to an ADA compliance publicity nightmare.
A good CMS should leverage a structured data foundation, enabling pages to be easily scanned by screen readers. Additionally, it should integrate seamlessly with best-of-breed platforms like SiteImprove to scan for violations on a regular basis.
5. <a href="https://www.solodev.com/blog/tags/mobile.stml">Mobile-first readiness</a> 
It's no longer enough to be “mobile responsive.” With increasingly more users browsing
websites on their smartphones and tablets, you must adopt a true “mobile first” strategy –
where the mobile experience is thoughtfully designed from day one. Likewise, you need a
CMS that understands this shift, and provides a foundation for building, testing and
launching world-class mobile experiences.
6. 
For enterprise organizations, permissioning remains a critical requirement for any CMS platform. Only a handful of people within such large organizations should have access to an enterprise website’s content. Granular permissions give CIOs and CTOs the peace of mind they need when it comes to internal content. User permissions help make sure those with editorial capabilities are approved by administrators. However, effective enterprise CMS platforms still provides the common workflows that enable sharing and teamwork.
7. Native Multisite
Enterprise companies have hundreds or even thousands of pages under their care. It’s important to have a CMS capable of handling the needs of those sites rather than having multiple sites managed on multiple platforms.
Having all your websites on a single platform means your entire team can work from a single
interface to develop and manage content. This means more efficient training and better use
adoption. It leads to smarter hardware use and ultimately lower hosting fees.
A single CMS platform also makes it easy to spin up new sites by making clones of an existing site. Users can share the same piece of content or other assets across all your sites. This
promotes consistent template governance across your sites and ensures an enterprise brand is presented the way you want it to be no matter how many websites you have.
8. Headless capabilities
Organizations wanting to move information across different platforms might find consistency a struggle without some sort of headless solution. The promise of decoupled CMS is that the function isn’t limited to or defined by frameworks that represent the frontend of a website. A headless or decoupled CMS gives you the freedom to share data or access analytics across channels, and connect everything with the power of a RESTful API.
Imagine giving visitors the same experience online as you would a mobile app. This could include customers ordering your services through Alexa or voice-driven gadgets. Headless gives your website the ability to exist today while preparing for the devices of tomorrow – everything from wearable tech like smart watches to screen readers for the visually impaired. At the same time, you want to have the ability to host the templates and frameworks for your website right alongside your data-driven apps.
Hybrid CMS platforms put one foot in the freedom of headless and the other in the stability of the templates and frameworks your website needs. Many CMS solutions are either one or the other – traditional or truly headless—but why choose? If a goal is to be future proof, then select a cloud-based hybrid solution that gives an enterprise the best of both worlds.
9. Training and support
Know who will be there after a website goes live. Not all CMS platforms come with support options. For example, many open-source applications don’t offer direct access to support teams. Typically they develop security patches and software upgrades you have to download and install yourself. While plenty of enterprise organizations have an IT infrastructure to handle manual updates, there’s still a learning curve that comes with any new enterprise CMS.
And while you might go to sleep, your enterprise website won’t—particularly if it generates global traffic. Know any potential CMS’s support response time and the availability of those support options.
About Solodev
Solodev is a leading enterprise website Content Management System (CMS) that empowers organizations to create amazing websites and engaging digital experiences in the cloud – all with total design freedom and control. Built from the ground up for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Solodev provides unparalleled security, scalability, and redundancy with 24/7/365 U.S. based support. Solodev has been listed as one of Inc. 5000’s fastest growing companies for the last three years and recognized as a High Performing leader on the user-driven G2 Crowd Grid. Winners of the 2017 AWS “City on a Cloud” Innovation Challenge, Solodev is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner with competencies in Education, Government, and Marketing &amp; Commerce. Solodev’s self-service CMS can be purchased on demand in the <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=8e11c912-6253-41b8-b065-bf32bd27911b&amp;ref=_ptnr_solodev_cmscritic-content_9critical">AWS Marketplace</a> or through the GSA Contract. Learn more at <a href="http://www.solodev.com/">www.solodev.com</a>.

9 Essentials Your Enterprise CMS Should Deliver in 2019

A new minor release of PrestaShop is available. This new release, while minor, does bring a few new features that users have been waiting for. Let's take a look at what you can expect from this update.
With each release, the PrestaShop community is involved in providing feedback to further expand the product by adding features, fixing bugs and more. In this release, a package of optimizations that will allow merchants to make considerable time savings in their recurring store management tasks has been incorporated.
<ul>
<li>SEO optimizations have been made to the pages for categories, brands &amp; suppliers, content (CMS); this brings an added advantage in terms of SEO rankings for stores as they are better recognized by search engines;</li>
<li>A dynamic preview (on Google) of product meta tags is now featured, which is useful for ensuring that tags are completed and positioned correctly; <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/1_25_v88qxr.png" /></li>
<li>Editing of specific prices: no need to edit and then delete specific prices for each promotion! From now on, and with just a few clicks, merchants will be free to modify the specific prices created for their products (including dates, countries, combinations, etc.), which will make it easier to set up promotional activities throughout the year;</li>
<li>Physical stock management: it is possible to add a reference on customer order pages to indicate the physical location of the products in storage (shelf, aisle, warehouse, etc.). This storage location is specified on the product pages in the merchants' back office. An essential tool for facilitating order processing and preparation;</li>
<li>Now more intuitive, the new categorization for installed modules will make it easier to access these modules by using more precise terms and a sort by last use feature;</li>
<li>A different menu structure suited to Mobile browsing will add more user comfort and offer a more seamless experience;</li>
<li>Optimized page loading times (chiefly the homepage, categories, products, order history pages) will lend greater responsiveness and performance: loading time will be between 15% and ten times quicker depending on the pages and usage scenarios.</li>
</ul>
– Updates to receive notifications for the functions that need to be updated to their latest version.
– Alerts to receive notifications about any alerts requiring rapid response (e.g. if a module needs to be configured or, more rarely, if it is corrupt).
This purpose of this new configuration is to make this page more legible with a direct view of pending actions with varying degrees of urgency;
<ul>
<li>For new merchants, tips and advice on configuring SEO for the homepage is available on the SEO &amp; URLs page. This provides better guidance on SEO for on-line stores in line with the criteria set out by the various search engines;</li>
</ul>
For a full list of addons, features and fixes, visit the announcement: https://www.prestashop.com/en/blog/features-prestashop-1-7-5-0

PrestaShop 1.7.5.0 Now Available - Brings New Features to Users

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