Articles - Page 80

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

matt-garrepy

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/janrain.png" alt="Janrain" />
Janrain, the social web management solution, announced today new partnerships with Automattic, the creators of WordPress, Disqus, and Umbel. These organizations can now better leverage the power of social by using the Janrain User Management Platform (JUMP). Janrain provides sites with an easy way to engage their site visitors by allowing them to login or join using virtually any social platform — Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo!, etc. Site owners can then use this data to deliver targeted content, for a streamlined and effective marketing approach.

<h2>Big News for WordPress.com VIP</h2>
Janrain’s integration with WordPress.com VIP is the biggest partnership. <a href="http://automattic.com/" target="_blank">Automattic</a>, the creators of <a href="http://vip.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">WordPress.com VIP</a>, has chosen Janrain as their preferred technology partner for user management. The organizations that run the WordPress VIP CMS include such big-name brands as CNN, New York Times, CBS, Forbes, and others. Instead of cumbersome login processes, these networks can gain more members by allowing them to login via their preferred social media account, specifically market to site visitors, and serve up specific content for a better user experience.
<h2>More Partners. More Power.</h2>
<a href="http://disqus.com/" target="_blank">Disqus</a>, a hugely popular comment system, is another major partner for Janrain. Disqus has been called the “community of communities” for good reason — it transcends social media to comprise a vast discussion platform, rich with features and easy to use. Aided by the power of Janrain, Disqus will enhance their value by collecting user profile information for publisher who want to maximize the use of registered audience development. “Janrain integration is really compelling,” explained Ro Gupta, Disqus’s VP of Development. Compelling indeed, since sites can now socially connect with “the largest population of commenters on the web.”
Janrain’s contribution to the ever-expanding social population is personalizing online consumer experience more than ever before. Automattic, Disqus, and Umbel join more than 30 other partners who are reaping the benefits of better audience engagement. Tore Steen, VP of Business Development for Janrain, said, “JUMP [the user management platform] was designed to easily integrate with other industry leaders to support an entire ecosystem of technology choices and engagement strategies for our clients.”
<h2>The Social Solution</h2>
According to Janrain, more than 86% of site visitors will give up and leave if confronted with a tedious login process on a site. 77% of users prefer social login. Adding such social login gives companies far more members than they would otherwise have.
It’s apparent how easy the registration process is, when powered by JUMP. Compare the screenshots below with a conventional sign-up process, which often involves seven times as many questions, and takes three times as much time.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/vega1-620x314.png" alt="Janrain User Management Platform 1" />
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/vega2-620x312.png" alt="Janrain User Management Platform 2" />
Janrain gives people precisely what they want, but it does something more. Janrain’s biggest advantage is to the partners, now including WordPress and Disqus. Partners possess social profile data, customer audience insights, and a huge collection of other information that enables them to better serve their customers. Janrain is more than just ease of use and social integration. It’s a powerful way to improve online marketing.
Check out this video to see how Janrain can totally transform a site.
http://vimeo.com/janrain/overview
<h2>About Janrain</h2>
The Janrain User Management Platform (JUMP) helps organizations succeed on the social web by providing leading technology to leverage the popularity of social networks and identities for user acquisition, engagement, and enhanced customer intelligence. Our solutions, including social login, social sharing, social profile data collection and storage, access to the social graph, and digital strategy services, improve the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives for leading brands like Fox, Universal Music Group, Whole Foods, Purina, Samsung and Dr Pepper. Founded in 2005, Janrain is based in Portland, Oregon. For more information, please call 1-888-563-3082 or visit <a href="http://www.janrain.com/">www.janrain.com</a> and follow @janrain.

Janrain Improves Online Marketing for WordPress, Disqus, and Others

daniel-threlfall

At this point, you’ve certainly heard what content marketing can do for your business. Heck, since you’re here, you’ve most definitely heard the acronyms CMS (Content Management System), and MAS (Marketing Automation Software).
You might not know exactly how each one can benefit your business, but what you’ve probably heard is that using them can boost the impact and return on investment of your content marketing efforts.
All too often, these tools are recommended separately from each other. A content management system like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla allows you to power-charge your website, and makes managing it a piece of cake. Marketing automation software helps you to increase productivity by making it easier than ever to create and automate campaigns, evaluate data, and more.
By themselves, they each offer outstanding benefits in particular areas of content marketing. When integrated properly, though, they have the potential to become the powerful tool that your business needs to truly turbocharge your content marketing efforts.
Now that we’ve piqued your curiosity about using both marketing automation software and a content management system, here are 5 ways that integrating the two of them can benefit your business.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/marketing_automation700x0-is.jpg" />

<h3>#1. They complement each other.</h3>
Using a content management system like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal simplifies content creation and management. It adds consistency to your website, enables you to track changes to your content, and makes it easier than ever to manage workflow.
Marketing automation software, on the other hand, is great at marketing your content – getting eyeballs on the content you’ve created, gathering data about your readers, and then using that data to create prospect or customer profiles.
Yes, a CMS can help you market, and MAS can help you with the creation of content, but at their core, they’re designed to do different things. To get the most out of each, you’re better off using them in tandem with each other.
<h3>#2. They allow you to serve your existing customer base while also reaching out to new prospects.</h3>
This goes hand-in-hand with the first reason. A CMS makes it easier for you to create and manage content designed to reach out to and inform your existing constituency.
While most content management systems offer some level of SEO optimization for your content, they are specifically designed to significantly boost targeted traffic. With the available plugins and themes, a CMS makes it easy to boost the eye-appeal of your website while presenting easy-to-read content to your existing customer base.
Chances are, you want more than to just service your existing customer base – you want to grow it. That’s really where marketing automation software shines. It allows you to automate the processes of driving new targeted traffic, capturing leads, and getting your message out to the public.
Simply going with one or the other, a content management system or automated marketing software, might offer you some benefits, but for most business owners, they’ll fall short at maximizing return on investment. Together, however, they’ll turn your content marketing efforts into a well-oiled machine.
<h3>#3. Your MAS can guide your content strategy.</h3>
An MAS can help you speed up your marketing, and when you have it working at full speed, it will give you lots of feedback about your content. You can learn what information was searched for when bringing users to your site, which of your posts are getting the most traction, and what kind of content leaves people cold and ready to turn away.
All of this is useful for shaping your content moving forward. By identifying what your audience wants and developing target customer profiles, automated marketing software enables you to personalize your content and give your users something they’ll want to share. Finally, It also lets you know when a content strategy has run its course, and it’s time to switch gears.
A CMS working on its own can give you rudimentary data, but it struggles to compete with the enhanced insights that a high-quality MAS can offer.
<h3>#4. Your MAS can learn from your CMS, and vice versa, giving your audience a personalized experience.</h3>
If you hook your contact database up to your site, your MAS can give each visitor contextual content – meaning the actual experience changes to be super-targeted to their habits and needs.
This is what Amazon does, for example. It recommends content to you based on what you’ve browsed or bought previously.
Some MAS options allow you to do the same. This way, if a committed customer is coming to your website, they can skip any marketing and go straight to the content that meets their needs. Likewise, a prospect will have marketing targeted to them, and they’ll be shown content based on what they’ve already identified as being of interest to them.
#5. Using them together allows you to decrease the sales cycle.
Because MAS and CMS give you incredibly accurate data on your customers and prospects, you can use this information to dramatically reduce the sales cycle. In fact, you can keep a close eye on your leads, so that you know exactly when to use a given message.
For example, as a prospect enters your sales funnel by visiting your website, you can monitor his activity and see what content he’s accessing. You can continue marketing to him and sending him targeted content, until he gets deeper into the funnel – say, to a sales page.
Then, your MAS can re-classify his “temperature” and transfer his info from the marketing department to the sales team. This gives your salesmen hyper-targeted and red-hot leads to work with, as well as increasing the efficiency of your marketing.
Without a strong CMS to back up your marketing automation, however, many of your leads would fall through the cracks before they ever got this far.
<h3>For Best Results, Combine Your CMS with a Proven MAS </h3>
As strong as your content marketing efforts may be, they could always use a little boost. Getting the extra “oomph” that a marketing automation software can provide could make the difference in turning a visitor into a customer.
If you’re looking to take your business’s content marketing to the next level, try integrating your CMS with a strong, proven MAS. As powerful as both types of software can be on their own, they’re exponentially more effective when used together.

5 Ways Integrating CMS and Marketing Automation Software Can Benefit Your Business

mike-johnston

Content marketing is about more than SEO and it’s also about more than expert blogging. It’s about people. It’s always been about people.
It’s about defining your audience, reaching out to them and holding on to them. It’s also about making money, and spending less money to do so, by using quality content to generate traffic to your site.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/samsung-793043_1280616x0-is.jpg" /> 
And yet somehow we’ve reduced it to a process that revolves around tiny Google spiders and their elusive algorithms. SEO is important, it’s extremely important, but it’s just one part of the equation when it comes to content strategy, and it should never be prioritised over producing top-notch content for your target audience.
Sure, a blog post with a keyword in every second sentence will be easily found – but what’s the point if no-one actually wants to read it? Striking the balance between dropping knowledge bombs and dropping keywords is essential to the success of every business blog, and it’s something that you can get right from the get-go, once you have a proper content strategy in place.
According to the latest Content Marketing Trends Study by Ascend2, 89% of businesses have been successful with their content marketing endeavours in the past 12 months. So how do you get a successful content strategy in place?
<h2>1. Define Your Objectives</h2>
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/wD37-nXSCXRVGnIznNx90vTFSGD3rgaGss8D9MO2zhpSZ2lLodj_Z9nndZZAp5BxPWihU4J2iJUtXIXRtcQMYe39tsMTRe9vqHzMC51vGmWNKY85OCJDONRLv8sSbwCWb4EHPic" alt="Screen Shot 2015-07-20 at 13.10.37.png" />
Your content objectives should be very much in line with your business objectives, and they should be just as measurable. Too many businesses put the cart before the horse and start milling out content before they have any kind of strategy in place, which only ever leads to chaos.
You need to know why you’re doing what you’re doing, before you do it, and the same applies to any situation in life. Can’t think of any objectives? Never fear, here’s a few examples to inspire you!
<ul>
<li>Increase brand awareness and loyalty</li>
<li>Increase newsletter signups</li>
<li>Generate leads, e.g. by driving readers to a specific landing page</li>
<li>Increase referral traffic to your site</li>
<li>Improve SEO rankings</li>
<li>Increase organic traffic to your site</li>
</ul>
<h2>2. Research, Research &amp; More Research</h2>
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/3G83ZeGGlTt3cJZLdWFQ0b_a_yEyb1se2GOD-AiBt1ywBfuiSWiy8UAHz6gutN4oDJbTRx3HMoxjYoi4vS3j6-8vzDjh9u12AqES3t46XktNuudUcwXTkTJPE_js4rNF0nvrDg0" alt="Screen Shot 2015-07-20 at 13.12.13.png" />
The very first thing you need to do is to research your target audience and figure out who they are!
You can do this by creating an audience profile, or buyer personas if your marketing is sales focused. It’s important to get as much information as possible about your target audience and it’s easy to collect this information with social listening tools such as <a href="https://www.socialmention.com/">Social Mention</a>.
Some important questions to ask yourself are:
<ul>
<li>Who do you want to buy your product? </li>
<li>Who do you want to read your content? </li>
<li>What industry are they in? </li>
<li>Where do they live? </li>
<li>What types of content do they share online? </li>
<li>Where do they hang out online? </li>
<li>What are their pain points? </li>
<li>How can your content address those pain points? </li>
</ul>
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can tailor your content specifically to that audience with far more efficiency.
<h2>3. Create Relevant, Innovative &amp; Original Content</h2>
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/i05gM5hheV60wTr_A9sSf3a-UT4ptS9OvRCLEwYoNxqn9AGfQ5qOtUBoO-5nJetqhZ050dOdC1xhCqsSKWxervZXO6BGlbzQJ8Fkn8efrYRCdrhs9mHCfMnpyQmQZCjZ4zj3IWw" alt="Screen Shot 2015-07-20 at 11.58.04.png" />
It’s important to keep your content objectives in mind 24/7 and to ensure that every piece of content you create is designed to help you to meet those objectives. Your content doesn’t have to be specifically about your industry, but it should be designed to appeal to your target audience as a whole.
For example, if you want to get organic traffic from your content marketing then you need to provide content that your audience is searching for, i.e. there’s no point in writing a post about the new KFC Snackbox on a Vegan website. Once you know what they’re searching for, you can make sure that the content is ready and waiting on your blog…and ching ching, instant traffic to your site.
<a href="https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner">Google’s keyword planner</a> is your best friend when it comes to keyword research and once you’ve identified your keywords, you can use them to come up with content themes and get your content calendar up and running.
Another excellent tool is <a href="https://whattowrite.org/">What to write</a>. It's effectively an online muse when it comes to writers block and it will come up with awesome content ideas for you based on the themes you provide.
Alternatively, why stick to only written content? Articles came out top on the Ascend2 Content Study, but there are tons of content formats out there to choose from, including infographics and video content.
<h2>4. Stick to a Content Calendar</h2>
<img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/BLIJwzBd5ZvSE5MFTDmNmbQauOzYncb7yFoIHek09PB4EKMVVJFWG1AKHYn7NNrSqSwJtn-_Ao8XlZVxwbINF1ex8kELb6juZMfpKp9EX_nf1u-ZD_JNb8YlsESdFFItxsbHtEI" alt="Screen Shot 2015-07-20 at 12.29.31.png" />
This is simply about getting a process in place for the creation and promotion of your content, and it’s super handy for tracking your results. This calendar should be shared with everyone involved with the content, from ideation to publishing – as it keeps everyone on the right track and working towards the same goals.
Your calendar template can be customized, designed from scratch, or simply downloaded if you just don’t have the time to get creative! Some of the usual suspects found in content calendar categories are:
<ul>
<li>Content Theme</li>
<li>Blog Post Title</li>
<li>Blog Post Overview</li>
<li>Social Media Link Copy</li>
<li>Target Audience</li>
<li>Author</li>
<li>Editor</li>
<li>Keywords and Categories</li>
<li>Supporting Images</li>
<li>Due Date</li>
<li>Publish Date</li>
</ul>
Feeling overwhelmed? Here are a few great FREE templates from head honchos in the industry to get you started!
<ul>
<li><a href="https://coschedule.com/editorial-calendar-template">Co-schedule</a></li>
<li><a href="https://themarketingnutz.com/2014/01/content-marketing-editorial-calendar-template-2014-contentmarketing/">Content Marketing Institute</a></li>
<li><a href="https://offers.hubspot.com/blog-editorial-calendar">Hubspot</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.inboundmarketingagents.com/download-your-free-content-calendar/#.VazdHbc5TGs">Inbound Marketing Agents</a></li>
<li>Convince and Convert</li>
</ul>
<h2>5. Track Performance</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/computer-767776_1280614x0-is.jpg" /> 
There is very little point in having objectives if you’re not going to work towards them, which is why it’s imperative that you track and monitor everything.
How are you measuring your business objectives? Are you meeting them? What counts as a success to you? All of these questions have to be answered if you’re going to see any tangible results.
When it comes to measuring content performance, <a href="https://www.hootsuite.com">Hootsuite</a> and <a href="https://www.bufferapp.com">Buffer App</a> are excellent social monitoring and analytical tools. And you can then revert to Google Analytics or <a href="/lucky-orange-an-excellent-alternative-to-google-analytics/" target="_blank">Lucky Orange</a> to measure your website traffic. The frequency at which you track your content is up to you, but generally I recommend daily social media tracking and weekly analytic reports.
<h2>Over To You</h2>
So, now that you’re clued up on what to do, it’s time to get cracking and actually do it! Those blog posts won’t start writing themselves.
Do you have any of your own content strategies? Let us know in the comments below, or start up your a discussion with us on the <a href="https://www.forum.www.cmscritic.com/" target="_blank">CMS Forums</a>.

Content Strategy: 5 Simple Steps to Success

grainne-logue

A new version of SocialEngine, the social networking platform, has been released. Version 4.5 of SocialEngine PHP offers a new modern theme, a series of bug fixes and some performance improvements. Here is a list of what you can expect to gain from upgrading to this latest version.
Features &amp; improvements
<ul>
<li>New Modern theme</li>
<li>Added link support to poll options</li>
<li>Performance improvements (improved loading of comment likes in feed, optimized Zend locale data files)</li>
</ul>
Bug fixes 

<ul>
<li>Missing attach link icon in composer on mobile</li>
<li>Translation support for profile field privacy settings</li>
<li>Several missing phrases added to default language pack</li>
<li>Hiding the global header/footer using the layout editor now works correctly for mobile</li>
<li>Fixed duplicate results in message search</li>
<li>Fixed event privacy option “Group Members” not saving</li>
<li>Fixed error in Chrome on video view page</li>
<li>Forum widgets now respect forum privacy settings</li>
<li>Fixed placeholder/overtext positioning in the composer on mobile</li>
<li>Twitter OAuth now uses SSL</li>
</ul>
The new theme that is included with this release is a modern theme. Here's what it looks like:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/socialengine.png" alt="socialengine" />
For more info, read our <a href="/socialengine-review/">SocialEngine Review</a> of visit their website, <a href="/social-engine">SocialEngine.com</a>

SocialEngine 4.5 has been released

<a href="https://www.superdesk.org/" target="_blank">The Superdesk website</a> says that the company is “more interested in saving journalists from being used as robots than we are in the fantasy of robots becoming journalists.” That’s a bold goal given the demands placed on journalists, news agencies and media organizations in the current environment.
But Sourcefabric, the team behind Superdesk, are very close to making this happen with their headless CMS and news management system that purports to be a creation, production, curation, distribution and publishing platform built for journalists by journalists.
Will they make it? Read on to find out.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/superdesk-1_jprw1j.png" alt="Superdesk Review" />
<h2>Key Features</h2>
<h3>The Personal Tab</h3>
Confidentiality and private space management are essential for journalists. With a modular system like this, Superdesk knew that they had to provide this functionality to users and it’s the first thing that stood out to me.
The Personal Tab on the homepage allows journalists to store private audio, image, video, composites and text files, that are kept completely separate from any search function and the other “desks”. This desk element of Superdesk’s CMS is a key part of the product.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-100114_i9gufz.png" alt="Superdesk Review - 2" />
In a physical news organisation, journalists and other content creators work in specific areas of the newsroom. Sourcefabric have tried to recreate this collaborative nexus in a digital environment with the “desks” function, which allows for easy jumping between a sports desk, a politics desk, a features desk, etc.
If a story intersects between sports and politics, different news writers can collaborate in the same newsroom, regardless of their physical location; whether they’re in just across the hall or an ocean away. Using these desks, journalists can manage and control their work practice according to the needs of the story.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-100427_ytjr4f.png" alt="Superdesk Review - 3" />
<h3>Superdesk Search</h3>
An editor can also use the Superdesk Search function to capture a wide range of stories with a detailed, exhaustive query system that allows you to narrow in on as many specific stories as you need. Using this function, users can then reuse these stories. Essentially users can search stories and then repurpose them in production
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-112031_dwmiz6.png" alt="superdesk review 10" />
 
You can filter the search terms under a number of different criteria and clicking on each result brings up a well laid out tab with the full story easily visible.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-112312_mftvy8.png" alt="superdesk review 6" />
<h3>Dashboard</h3>
The first page you’re greeted with is the Workspace page, which is the area from which all other parts of the site are accessed. The design immediately strikes you as being clean, fuss-free, and easy on the eye for the most part – albeit a little monotone at times.
From this page, you can easily click into most of what you need – even if the Publishing and Setting pages are hidden behind a blind tab. Once you get to grips with the system, the home page becomes a nexus of information. You can access other workspaces, track stories and easily access your personal tabs, but getting to grips with that system is the thing. It’s easy to use once you know how, but getting to that point is the issue.
In my opinion, the Dashboard area of the platform could be improved with some tips for using the various tools or even just a visible help section to ease the user into the system. The detail of the Superdesk system means that busy journalists will need a little hand-holding initially, especially because the page is so cleanly laid out. Once you know what the Personal Tab does and how the Monitoring system works it’ll become second nature, but getting to that stage without a walkthrough takes a bit of time.
<h3>Monitoring</h3>
The Monitoring tab is where Superdesk really flexes its muscles from a journalist workspace perspective.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-103832_ka4w19.png" alt="superdesk review 7" />
In this tab, you can track stories and topics, and edit stories and other assignments right next to the items that you’re tracking. You can write copy, assign urgency, and add other important metadata right next to the content as it tracks.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-104141_qjcfbg.png" alt="superdesk review 8" />
<h3>Automated News</h3>
In addition, there is a type of Newsroom Automation that allows journalists to create templates to speed up reports or stories that have similar content week to week, which is a great idea in practice but I found it a bit difficult to work out. The learning curve on the CMS seems to be a little steep and that might make initial uptake quite time-consuming, especially when it comes to creating content on the platform.
<h3>User Interface</h3>
My one criticism of the Superdesk interface is the colour scheme of the Dashboard area and the effect this has on user experience. With the current colour scheme, it’s difficult to determine one area of the page from the other. While everything is perfectly clean, precise, and excellently put together from a layout perspective, the default colour scheme is a little off-putting when engaging on a certain desk or story.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-100527_bpizae.png" alt="Superdesk Review - 4" />
That colour issue becomes especially prominent in the Monitoring part of the Dashboard, which makes it difficult to keep track of what stories you have and have not interacted with. As I stated earlier, the lack of support available was also an issue for me and this impaired my use of certain sections, such as Monitoring and Content Production.
This issue is all the more confusing given that Superdesk do know how to use colour to distinguish text and freshen up the visuals of a page. Superdesk’s Copy Editing System is based on just that concept and is absolutely fantastic for journalists in that it addresses a common problem: proofreading and word blindness. In the screenshot below, you’ll see that after creating a document, I was able to copy edit and proofread the text by changing the colour scheme.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-101736_yrcfro.png" alt="superdesk review - 11" />
That micro-change and the new colour made the text seem like a different set of words compared to what I had written just minutes prior, which made error spotting much easier.
Overall, the User Interface is very clean, very fast and is intuitively laid out once you get to grips with the general concepts.
<h3>Pricing</h3>
Right now, it’s hard to find what the starting price for Superdesk actually is. Their website writes that it is “developed with new agencies and independent contributors as an open-source newsroom CMS”. And while they state that there is no license fee or a vendor tie-in, it isn’t 100% clear.
I reached out to SourceFabric and found out that there are in fact 3 pricing options for using Superdesk. As it is open source, users with technical know-how can download it for themselves for free. The second option, for smaller operations, is the pro package, and for larger scale organisations Superdesk offers an enterprise package. To find out more about these packages and request a demo, those interested can click <a href="https://www.superdesk.org/products">here</a>. 
<h3>Design</h3>
Once you navigate to the Templates section, the clean design allows you to progress through the stages of creation quite well without tripping you up in relentless click back error loops, which I liked. The presentation of the platform is ultra clean, smooth and performed very well on all the contemporary browsers I tried it on.
I really appreciated the integration with WordPress and their own API-based Superdesk Publisher, which fits into any newsroom software. Superdesk Publisher also has a number of excellent themes that can be easily edited and put together by editorial staff with no need for coding or back-end developers. You can add as many channels as you want, and even publish directly to RSS feeds.
Superdesk has plugin integration for other publishing sites – as you might expect for a platform of this nature – but they also have output settings of their own, which are sleek, easily customisable and are comparable with other bespoke news templates.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-102829_xiaynv.png" alt="superdesk review - 12" />
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-102614_j1zeyr.png" alt="superdesk review - 13" />
The way they’ve integrated video and imagery into the input system and made it easy to export to publishing is particularly useful, especially for journalists and editors who may be under time pressure. I found it quick and seamless with zero lag.
The main page can be further customised by editing widgets. Although this is slightly more complex than editing text, it isn’t too hard to grasp. This element really shows the potential of Superdesk as a publishing platform.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-103440_rf5zvm.png" alt="superdesk review -14" />
<h2>Help and Support</h2>
Superdesk might not have many help options in the workspace but they certainly do aim to make their platform as easy to use as possible, with various training options and videocasts to help upskill users to the site's systems.
At the moment though, their help and support sections seem to be a reference to their user manual and user forums, which isn’t very personable and may seem like too much effort to users. However, it’s worth mentioning that they do offer personal support to commercial clients under a Service-Level-Agreement (SLA).
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-111531_bybxsv.png" alt="superdesk review 15" />
A system as complex and powerful as Superdesk will need a more comprehensive help section to bring along potential users who might be intimidated by its scale.
<h2>Pros</h2>
<ul>
<li>Extremely flexible and powerful layout.</li>
<li>A detailed and extensive search and capture feature for news stories.</li>
<li>Very end-user focused with features and widgets such as colour optimized spell checking, world clock widgets.</li>
<li>Perfectly suited for journalist and newsroom specific collaboration</li>
<li>Multiple language options</li>
</ul>
<h2>Cons</h2>
<ul>
<li>There is a very steep learning curve that may throw off busy editors and journalists from investing time in fully utilizing the systems.</li>
<li>A lack of tool tips or an easily accessible help section adds to this learning curve.</li>
<li>The design is a little monotone, which can hurt readability at times.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Overall</h2>
Once you get past the initial complexity of Superdesks’ setup, you’ll find an incredibly powerful Content Management System and creation tool that really does live up to the idea of being created for journalists by journalists. Little touches like the ability to attach a physical paper trail of attachments to stories in production, publish in multiple languages, and even a projected read time feature on created text show that they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about everything a journalist and newsroom might want.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2018-08-31-at-100811_ng8pat.png" alt="superdesk review 16" />
That blend between journalist and publisher is what makes this such a powerful system. After you’ve progressed through the initial learning curve – which is an unavoidable result of the complexity and power of the system – you have a site that can stitch together content production on a massive scale but is also specific enough to serve a local newspaper.
Its clean design might be a little too stark at times but it makes for a pleasant working environment that is flexible and powerful in equal measure. <a href="https://www.superdesk.org/" target="_blank">Superdesk</a> has the potential to be the next big thing in media content management circles.

Superdesk Digital Newsroom Review

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cmsexpo2013-620x355.jpg" alt="CMS Expo 2013" />
If “CMS” is a part of your life or career, there's a powerful event designed for you — the <a href="http://cmsexpo.net/">2013 CMS Expo</a>. Held near Chicago, Illinois from May 14-16, CMS Expo is the place to discover the latest advances in CMSs, strategies and insight for using CMS, and best practices to advance users in the world of content management.

<h2>Who Attends CMS Expo?</h2>
CMS Expo welcomes web professionals from all variety of industries and organizations — digital agencies, state and federal governments, educators, and those whose work has anything to do with a CMS. Those who are best served by the conference are online business professionals, creatives, developers, startups, educators, and agencies.
CMS Expo is designed to help everyone, regardless of their level of expertise, grow within their respective industry. Any member of a content team or web agency — admins, sales, developers, creatives — will profit from attending CMS Expo.
<h2>What kind of sessions are provided?</h2>
The nearly 50 speakers at CMS Expo will offer sessions and workshops on a wide variety of topics. Here's a sample:
<ul>
<li>Content Marketing &amp; Sales for Maximum ROI</li>
<li>Prepare for the Mobilocalypse!</li>
<li>How to Grow Your CMS Agency</li>
<li>WordPress IS a CMS</li>
</ul>
Many of the sessions provide information that is accessible for any web professional. Those who want the technical good stuff will profit from sessions like the following:
<ul>
<li>How to Make Your Own Responsive Joomla Template</li>
<li>Using Drupal in Higher Education:  A Flexible Tool in a Mixed CMS Environment</li>
<li>JavaScript:  Level Up Your Code-Fu!</li>
</ul>
<h2>What sponsors and exhibitors are present?</h2>
Although the three-day event is big on information, there's also plenty of opportunity for sponsors to showcase their own value. 2013's sponsors include ARC, OpenText, Acquia, Aluent Group, MailChimp, and Standing Cloud, in addition to dozens of CMS providers. CMS Expo welcomes both open source and proprietary exhibitors, recognizing that users can be best served by one or the other, depending on their unique needs.
CMS Expo is the shot in the arm that many professionals need to reach a new stage of knowledge and capabilities. The networking value, creative innovation, and fresh information provides incredible results for the careers and lives of the hundreds of attendees.
<h2>Registration Information</h2>
If you are interested in attending CMS Expo, you may visit their site, <a href="http://www.cmsexpo.net/">http://www.cmsexpo.net/</a>, or call 1 (888) 804-9525.

CMS Expo 2013

<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/socialmediamoderation-620x385.jpg" alt="Social Media Moderation" />
As the web world hurtles toward an intensely social environment, your CMS needs to get social, too. There are plenty of CMSs touting built-in social capabilities or plugins that can help you to “go social.” Yet for all the frenzy over “social,” it’s easy to overlook one important issue. Who’s managing all that social? More to the point, how does a company protect its brand integrity amidst the incredible amount of external social input? Is moderation possible? Today, companies need social media moderation to help them navigate the social flood.
<h2>Defining Social. Defending Social.</h2>
“Social” takes several forms. In its internal form, it refers to the social tools that allow employees to better interact. Massive enterprise products such as SharePoint and others like <a href="/alfresco-announces-alfresco-team-for-powerful-content-collaboration/" target="_blank">Alfresco</a>, <a href="/new-jive-connector-with-alfresco-makes-social-and-enterprise-cross-platform-publishing-a-reality/" target="_blank">Jive</a>, and Cartella provide excellent collaboration solutions. The other form of social is the external one — the world as it connects with your business and its products via social networks. Tools must be in place to fully manage both of these social environments.
It is the external form of social that can quickly become unwieldy. The tools designed to manage external social interaction are fewer in number than the tools designed to streamline internal social collaboration. Nonetheless, it is absolutely important for any company, whether brick-and-mortar or online, to be present and active on the social networks. Relevance demands it. More importantly, brand integrity requires it. Social media moderation is pretty much the most important way to defend your brand.
<h2>The Importance of Social Media Moderation</h2>
Notwithstanding the limited number of social media moderation tools, social management is just as important as facilitating internal social collaboration. Today, a company’s social media buzz is their brand. No longer can a company simply declare what they are, and expect the masses to blindly accept it. Now, anyone regardless of their reputation, product insight, or business acumen can make whatever statements they want to make regarding a company. With lighting-fast speed and potentially destructive consequences, a single individual can make an impact on a company of any size.
The only way that a company can protect its validity and trust in the social community is to vigilantly manage and moderate its social media. But that’s easier said than done. A truly successful marketing approach involves constant social media interaction. The larger the company is, and the bigger splash that company makes, the greater the need for managing the torrent of social likes, comments, statements, claims, counter-claims, input, tweets, and overall social buzz.
<h2>Managing Social</h2>
Social doesn’t just take care of itself, nor can you risk the unfettered reign of social in forming (or deforming) your brand. In order to adequately protect your online reputation, you must constantly monitor the social buzz surrounding your company.
Few CMSs have the ability to streamline social content management to the extent that is necessary, especially as the company grows. So what does a company do?
<h2>Social Media Management and Moderation Tools</h2>
There are some companies that have stepped into ever-widening gap of social content moderation. Here are a few of the notable ones:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.icucmoderation.com/">ICUC</a> – This multinational and multilingual company provides online content and community management services. Their products cover social listening, community management, social content services, and social ROI services.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.emoderation.com/" target="_blank">eModeration</a> – eModeration covers all social networks, news, media, advertising, and forums. In addition to complete social monitoring, they also provide specialist Facebook services, social media crisis management, and social consultancy.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.powerreviews.com/services/content-moderation" target="_blank">PowerReviews</a> – As part of their larger social package, PowerReviews offers content moderation services. Although backed by a live team of human moderators, PowerReviews provides users with the ability to set filters and maintain ultimate control over the moderation process.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.crispthinking.com/" target="_blank">Crisp</a> – Social media moderation from Crisp provides human filtering for a variety of social platforms, including specific services targeted for gaming/MMOs and online communities for kids and teens.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.liveworld.com/services/moderation/" target="_blank">LiveWorld</a> – LiveWorld provides social community moderation, social analytics, and customer engagement. LiveWorld also relies on human moderators, and provides services in 70 languages.</li>
<li><a href="http://mollom.com/" target="_blank">Mollom</a> – The Mollom service, developed by the brains behind Drupal, provides a hands-on approach to content moderation through their newly updated content moderation platform. The difference provided by Mollom is that it gives users total control over the moderation process using intuitive filters that provide a 99.98% accuracy. Although mostly a spam filtering and content classification tool, it is possible for an IT manager to set up the service, appoint several moderators, and let the system virtually run itself with periodic monitoring.</li>
</ul>
Content moderation is crucial for companies, especially as they experience growth and louder social buzz. Although no content management service or software is free, it is often worth the investment. A single tweet can create a ripple that expands into big waves, whether harmful or helpful. A small voice can have a big echo in the world of social. Part of your business responsibility is social integrity. Social media moderation is an integral component for any business in the online social world.

How to Effectively Moderate Social Media

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<a target="_blank" href="https://www.phpfox.com/">PHPfox</a>, a social networking software, has released a new version of its “Neutron” edition, alongside three new themes.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfox-emblem.png" /> Neutron is one of PHPfox's two products, the newer and more promising version of their previous flagship product, Nebula. Both are supported. PHPfox has gone through somewhat of a transformation over the last year or so, with Neutron looking like a hot prospect for the social networking CMS niche.Version 4.03 brings about a long list of bug fixes, along with Logo support for all themes. The full list of improvements can be <a target="_blank" href="http://blog.phpfox.com/2015/07/21/phpfox-neutron-v4-0-3-released/">found here</a>.<h2>New Neutron Themes: Wisteria, Green Sea &amp; Alizarin</h2>Three new themes have been released too. Users will need to upgrade to version 4.0.3 in order to make use of them, though.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/bec0db3114b2119834b0b16effe0c892418x0-is.jpg" /> To see the other two themes in action, <a target="_blank" href="http://blog.phpfox.com/2015/07/21/3-new-themes-for-phpfox-neutron-wisteria-green-sea-alizarin/">check out the PHPfox official blog announcement</a>.And of course, be sure to explore more of PHPfox through our CMS Directory.

PHPfox Releases Neutron Version 4.0.3 & Three New Themes

<img title="nuxeo" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/logo340x60.png" />
Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, today announced that it has seen significant growth in the ECM marketplace – particularly in North America. In 2009, Nuxeo more than doubled its revenue, launched several new products and features developed in conjunction with the open source community and won several industry accolades. The open source document management company also now has expanded to 50+ employees in Paris and Boston and more than 50 partners worldwide.
“Our experience over the past 12 + months in North America is that there is a large segment of the market that want the breadth and depth of larger content management systems from first generation ECM vendors such as EMC, IBM, Open Text and Oracle – but today they require more modern, extensible architectures and lower overall costs,” said Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo. “Our appeal is a feature rich ECM platform and packaged applications that address the architectural and functional needs of large enterprises, but are also easily deployable in a wide range of environments and extended and developed by customers themselves.”
2009 highlights include:
– Major Growth of Subscriber Base – Nuxeo has tripled their customer base in 2009, boosted by a move to the North American market and the improvement of its Nuxeo Connect, the company's flagship subscription offering delivering software maintenance &amp; support to its customers. New global customers in 2009 include Orange, one of the world's leading telecommunications and network services companies; Jeppesen, a division of Boeing; EllisDon, one of the largest building contractors in Canada; Serimax, an international full service welding company; Cengage Learning, which makes customized learning solutions for universities, instructors, students, libraries, government agencies, corporations, and professionals; Frequentis, which supports state and local governments with emergency response/command and control applications; and Vilogia, a France-based privately held property management company.
– Revenue Growth: In line with its growing subscriber base, Nuxeo has seen a 285% growth in 2009 revenue compared to close of 2008. This validates the company's strategy to deliver an open source ECM platform as a foundation for content applications. This growth also demonstrates a successful expansion into the North American market and ability to compete with and beat proprietary and open source ECM vendors alike. With demand for Nuxeo Connect subscriptions on the rise, the Nuxeo revenue mix has shifted to more packaged support and maintenance deals. At close of 2009, Nuxeo's revenue is largely driven by its subscription offering.
– Galaxy Partner Program launched – 50 partners — integrators and application providers — have signed up for the Nuxeo Galaxy Partner program since its launch in July 2009. The Nuxeo Galaxy Program gives business and field experts the ability to package their knowledge and offer both horizontal and vertical applications, designed to meet specific content management challenges. Galaxy partners deliver their domain expertise and solutions to their customers as well as to the broader, ever growing Nuxeo community.
– Significant community contributions – Nuxeo was able to expand its product in a number of meaningful ways including through contributions from its open source community. For example, Nuxeo added support for OpenSocial through the contributions of one of its larger customers Leroy Merlin with the Nuxeo DM 5.3 release in October 2009.
– Gained industry accolades – Nuxeo continues to be recognized by leading publications and win awards. It recently won TechWeb’s Intelligent Enterprise Editors’ Choice award that recognizes the most influential technology companies impacting enterprises today. It was also <a href="http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1147" target="_blank">listed</a> as one of “10 open source projects worth checking out” by TechRepublic.
– Now has more than 50 employees, up from 38 in 2008 – Nuxeo continued to grow the number of employees both in Paris, as well as the new office in Boston. Among the high-profile hires was appointing David Cloyd, General Manager of the Americas and Cheryl McKinnon as its first Chief Marketing Officer. McKinnon brought more than fifteen years experience in the ECM space, most recently with Open Text. – Leadership role with Apache Chemistry incubator project &amp; CMIS – Nuxeo spearheaded the creation of the vendor-neutral Apache Chemistry incubator project, which is developing a generic, open source Java reference implementation of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. Nuxeo also participates on the OASIS CMIS technical committee, which is working on creating a standard web services infrastructure to allow enterprises to more easily share information with multiple ECM systems as well as between ERP and CRM systems.
2010 also off to a record start with the releases of Nuxeo DAM and Nuxeo Studio. The Nuxeo Digital Asset Management offering, Nuxeo DAM, helps organizations catalogue, process, store, retrieve, and distribute rich media content, including images, audio, and video. Nuxeo Studio is the configuration and customization environment for Nuxeo EP, Nuxeo DM and Nuxeo DAM. Nuxeo Studio is available to subscription customers to help them accelerate application building with a simple web-hosted design tool. Nuxeo DAM is driving new deals early in 2010, with the first closed contract achieved within 30 days of product launch.
Website: <a href="http://www.nuxeo.com" target="_blank">http://www.nuxeo.com</a>

Nuxeo Gains Record Number of New Customers and Partners

Vivvo is a publishing CMS that has been around for a number of years. We took s0me time to have a chat with it's founder, Boris Krstovic about it's origins and the future of the product.
CC: Please tell us a little about yourself and what role do you play within Spoonlabs?
 
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/pimlico-580x450_i3z8bp.png" alt="Boris Krstovic" />
BK: I’m co-founder and managing director at Spoonlabs, responsible for business development, product direction and strategy. My background is both in business development and sales/marketing, and current focus around online media, CMS’s and experimenting with measuring reader (audience) engagement in publishing.
CC: What prompted the creation of Vivvo?
BK: Vivvo started as a small script, a helper to deploy article-based websites. I created myself the first version in 2005 (while still tampering with PHP), and looking back to it from this perspective I don’t think I even have the courage to call it a CMS J. The script got the name “Vivvo” in 2006. Thru several iterations Vivvo grew up to a full-fledged CMS, and for the latest major stable release that was a huge leap for product stability and versatility (v4), solution designer was Slobodan Utvic (@utvara).
CC: How do you feel Vivvo compares to other products in the marketplace?
BK: Vivvo holds somewhat unique position in the landscape of commercial CMS’s on LAMP stack. We aim to be #1 platform for publishing – a solution for online publishers, content creators and newspapers. Of course, you can run a portfolio website, or anything else with Vivvo – but it would probably be bulky and cumbersome to manage it. Vivvo is a publishing solution, an when it comes to running a daily paper with 10 writers, editors and 150 articles posted daily – Vivvo runs like hell.
CC: What differentiates it?
BK: The paradigm and framework in Vivvo are tailored for publishing, as well as our proprietary template engine (VTE). Things that need lots of workaround or hacking in other CMS’s are native in Vivvo, such as ability to easily “flag” and exclude used articles on page so they do not duplicate. While other CMS’s proudly feature “setting expiration date” for content, in Vivvo you have article scheduling as a core concept – you can easily manipulate with attributes such as duration and recurrence for an article, opening vast possibilities for publishers.
CC: What are you goals for Vivvo?
BK: To set standards for online publishing and to allow businesses and individuals to run professional-grade publishing solution under $1000. Up to few years ago, this was almost impossible. You had few “article management scripts”, with alternative to use heavily modified Drupal or WordPress as publishing engines. Our mission was to change that, and position Vivvo as publishing solution that can do 70% of things enterprise solution such as Escentic Content Engine or Nstein do, at a fraction of ownership cost.
CC: Do you plan to move into other areas of business such as online marketing?
BK: Well, not in that direction anyway. We gathered lots of experience over the years with content publishing that we channel now on experimenting with ways to improve content effectiveness. We want to provide content creators, bloggers and editors an analytics tool to measure readers’ engagement with content. The platform we’re developing is currently in proof of concept phase and CMSCritic will be one of the first sites to use it in our private beta launch, and I’m looking forward to getting feedback
CC: What kind of migration options do you offer to help get people to transition from their existing systems to Vivvo?
BK: We have completed many successful migrations to Vivvo CMS in the past, involving the websites based on Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Textpattern, as well as various other proprietary/commercial CMS systems.
Being fully aware of commitment migration to another CMS brings, we usually start by offering migration review sessions, free consultancy sessions in which we try to grasp clients’ needs for new platform and help them realize the scope and ownership investment transition to new CMS brings. After that, we offer content, data, design/layout migrations, as well as one very important detail – URL migration, to avoid loss of PR and appearance of 404’s.
CC: Do you have any hosted or SaaS options available?
BK: Not yet, although there were plans for offering hosted solution since 2009 we just didn’t carry out yet.
CC: What can we expect down the road in the next version of Vivvo?
BK: We want to transform Vivvo into native multi-site publishing platform, as managing multiple websites has become de-facto standard for vast majority of bloggers and publishers. This will require a significant shift in product design – transforming to a central content repository from which you can pull content to one or more websites at will.
CC: Whom do you often find yourself competing with and why do you feel Vivvo is the better option?
BK: There isn’t much competition in this niche, and if you look around you’ll see that overall there are few commercial publishing platforms on LAMP stack in $100-$1000 price range. So technically – they are all our competition.
CC: People often ask – why would we purchase Vivvo at $395 when we can use WordPress (drupal/joomla/etc) for free?
BK: Simple answer is – if you just need to install off-the-shelf software and don’t need any support at all – then don’t. But if you take into perspective that typical total cost of ownership for CMS is beyond “off the shelf” installation, and includes process of system integration, design, user acceptance and mostly important – stable and responsible support, you’ll find that “free” solutions are not so free anymore. In such scenario choosing between Drupal and Vivvo is on a totally different level than just comparing license costs.
Our product is a vendor-supported product. If you would like to have “vendor support” for Drupal, you might want to check how much Acquia charges for such service. Or check WordPress VIP support – it starts at $15,000/year with 2 business days response time (?!).
CC: Do you offer 24/7 365 support options?
BK: Yes, we do. Standard support SLA includes support on weekdays during business hours. However, clients in need of tight support level agreements and immediate reaction can count on phone support, 24/7 email support and we even have the option for corporate clients to have my private cell phone number. I strongly believe that this type of trust between our clients and us is essential, and being able to reach out for managing director via skype/email/phone directly brings needed level of comfort to important clients in need of agile responsiveness.
CC: Thank you Boris.
For those interested in <a href="/tag/vivvo/">Vivvo</a>, you can check out their website here: <a href="http://www.vivvo.net">http://www.vivvo.net</a>

Interview with Vivvo founder, Boris Krstovic

<img title="Tikiwiki logo" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/585px-tikiwiki_logo_svg_-150x150_emkc7p.png" />Tiki has released the first public build of the next-generation release of TikiWiki CMS/Groupware. Labeled as Tiki 5.0 Alpha, this latest release includes updates, fixes, and a host of brand new features including:
<ul>
<li>Tiki workspaces</li>
<li>Shopping cart and payments</li>
<li>WebDAV connectivity</li>
<li>New themes and skins</li>
</ul>
Tiki Community members, testers, and early adopters can download the 5.0 Alpha release from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tikiwiki/files/. Please note that this Alpha release is for testing only and should not be used for production sites. Daily builds are also available from http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Daily+Build.
Much of the final work for these new features was completed during the recent TikiFest in Montréal, Canada. TikiFests are a tradition of the TikiWiki community in which Tiki contributors who usually collaborate online, get an opportunity to meet in person. Future TikiFests are scheduled in Canada, Poland, Brazil, Germany, and the United States. Over 35 TikiFests have been held.
The Tiki Software Community Association
The Tiki Community is proud to announce the formation of the Tiki Software Community Association. This incorporated non-profit entity was formed by members of the Tiki Admin Group (TAG) with the goal of supporting the ongoing work and development of TikiWiki. The association will serve as the primary point of contact for the community, handle infrastructure and community tasks, and provide stewardship of community trademarks.
The association is also charged with maintaining the Tiki Community's unique social contract (http://tikiwiki.org/Social+Contract) which features a development model that uses the “wiki way” and open participation. For details, see http://tikiwiki.org/Tiki+Software+Community+Association for more information.
About Tiki
TikiWiki CMS/Groupware is a full-featured, web-based, multilingual (35+ languages), tightly integrated, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, Free Source Software (GNU/LGPL), using PHP, MySQL, Zend Framework, jQuery and Smarty. Actively developed by a very large international community, Tiki can be used to create all kinds of Web applications, sites, portals, knowledge bases, intranets, and extranets. For more information, visit <a href="http://tikiwiki.org" target="_blank">http://tikiwiki.org</a>.

Tikiwiki announces Tiki 5.0 Alpha... and more!

EpiServer 7.1 was released yesterday and with it come some new features for those in the marketing world including new multivariate testing, additional personalization and more. With previous EpiServer releases, you would have to download the latest edition and follow an upgrade process. With this release, however, you can upgrade directly with a few clicks through the Add-on Store (introduced in EpiServer 7). The benefits of this type of upgrade capability are obvious; no more dependency handling requirements and more peace of mind knowing you can quickly and easily get up to date with the latest feature sets.
Also new in this release:
<h2>Multivariate Testing</h2>
The new multivariate test feature is intelligent.  It learns over time what content works best for your visitor segments and displays that more often. This allows marketers to optimize the customer experience with less effort. You will notice that you work with test and optimization following the same pattern as for content – using drag and drop.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2013-04-04-at-1_33_30-pm-1-620x438.png" alt="Multivariate Testing - EpiServer" />
 
<h2>Personalization of Blocks</h2>
In EPiServer 7.1 CMS personalization goes one step further making it possible to create blocks in one place that later can use information about the visitor and target the message accordingly.  This information, or user context, can for example be the location of the user, what type of content he or she has interacted with on your site earlier or what device that's being used. Since blocks can be re-used across channels this becomes really powerful. Another example is to run a multivariate test only for a specific visitor segment.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screen-shot-2013-04-04-at-1_09_01-pm-620x637.png" alt="Screen Shot 2013-04-04 at 1.09.01 PM" />
 
<h2>Workflows and languages</h2>
Standard workflows have also made a comeback in this release. You can now use all workflows from within the UI. Active workflows are highlighted making it easy to find what's assigned to you and take action on it. Language handling has also been improved. You can now toggle between different languages using the View Settings button and all content, including blocks, can be in different languages.
Additional improvements include a faster and more responsive UI and a settings header available on all content giving you quick access to the most important properties. Just scroll up when inside edit mode to see it.
<h2>Social Reach</h2>
A new version of EPiServer Social Reach is also available through the add-on store. Social Reach drives traffic from social media to owned media and connects the content creation process with social media communication.  The add-on allows for social messages to be created, delivered and tracked within a single interface. New features include scheduling, the possibility to re-send failed messages, and on page access to social engagement. By removing many small steps such as publishing content in social networks, creating shortened URLs, and adding analytic tracking tags, marketers become more agile in increasing traffic to their sites.
Looking to learn more? Visit EpiServer online at <a href="http://episerver.com/">http://episerver.com</a>

Newly released EpiServer 7.1 CMS brings Intelligent Optimization and Personalization

I get a lot of emails. This is simply a fact. Every day, I receive a huge amount of email from users who are looking for solutions for their CMS needs. As a result, I decided to post this article to help with one of the most common questions I receive: How do I add a CMS to my existing website? Today, I'm going to show you how.Before we get started, let me just say that there are plenty of CMS that work like the one I'm going to recommend today, this just happens to be one of them that I think does the job well so if you find it doesn't suit your needs, let me know and I can offer some other recommendations. To get started, you'll need to sign up for an account with <a target="_blank" href="https://instantcms.io/">Instant</a>.Instant is a content management system that lets you quickly and easily add a CMS to your existing website. The image below gives you a bit of an idea as to how easy it is to use.<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/instant.gif" alt="How to Add a CMS to an Existing Website " />To get started with Instant, you simply have to <a target="_blank" href="https://instantcms.io/">sign up for an account</a> and once you have, add their script to your website. Their script works out of the box on any visible text meaning you are, for the most part, ready to go from that point. That's how quick and easy it is.If you need to get more advanced or want to enable more editable areas, they have excellent documentation that explains easily how to do so. The best part? Instant is free for up to 20,000 requests per month and allows you to edit in 2 languages. If you think you'll go over this allotment that's ok, it's super affordable ($5 / month and up) so it won't break the bank.That's it. Instant CMS. Works like it sounds. <a target="_blank" href="https://instantcms.io/">Try it out</a> and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

How to Add a CMS to an Existing Website Quickly and Easily

Call Tracking + AI 

Call Tracking + AI that Turns Calls into Leads

Explore a wide range of informative articles, insights, and industry updates. Stay informed and ahead of the curve with our diverse collection of news and posts covering the latest trends and developments in the industry. Page - 80