Articles

monthly recap Article

It's been a long, hot summer. Everywhere. So it goes without saying that September is a welcome sign of cooler months ahead.
Speaking of cool, we followed some notable news throughout the month of August. We started with Storyblok's <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/storyblok-launches-new-cms-experience-to-shape-the-future-of-digital-storytelling/">launch of a new CMS experience</a> that aims to reshape the future of digital storytelling. We also dug into the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/salesforce-unveils-composable-storefront-a-digital-commerce-solution-to-help-retailers-go-headless-fast/">Salesforce Composable Storefront</a>, a new digital commerce solution designed to help retailers go headless faster than ever – and another signal that the composable movement is continuing to build steam. 
Finally, we had an <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/the-future-is-composable-a-conversation-with-new-mach-alliance-president-casper-rasmussen/">exclusive interview</a> with Casper Rasmussen, the new president of the MACH Alliance. He sat down with Matt Garrepy, one of our contributors, to chat about the future of composable, the role of headless, and what's next for the MACH Alliance and its 60+ members. 
As with all things "autumn," change is in the air. Economic forecasts remain uncertain, and many organizations are looking to 2023 with trepidation. While the M&amp;A cycle may have been a little quieter over the summer months, we're still tracking innovation and growth across the CMS and DXP market sectors – and we'll be featuring a number of exclusive interviews with industry leaders over the coming months.
Let's bid summer adieu with a few newsworthy nuggets to read with your pumpkin-spiced latte:
<h2>WordPress Homepage Gets a Fresh New Design</h2>
OK, so maybe this isn't a groundbreaking piece of news. But a redesign of a website is always an opportunity for a brand or company to "clear its throat" before it has something to say. 
That might be the case for <a href="https://wordpress.org/" target="_blank">WordPress</a>, which has certainly done its share of innovating over the past few years – especially with the introduction of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/gutenberg-2-years-later-is-wordpress-better-off/">Gutenberg</a>. Now, the open source juggernaut will be greeting us with a <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/2022/07/08/project-kickoff-wordpress-org-homepage-and-download-page-redesign/" target="_blank">fresh, new jazzy design</a> on its WordPress.org website. 
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/08/wordpress-new-design.webp" alt="WordPress new design" />
The <a href="https://wordpress.org/" target="_blank">new homepage</a> brings more attention to WordPress's benefits and experience while highlighting the community and resources to get started on the platform. Meanwhile, the <a href="https://wordpress.org/download/" target="_blank">new download page</a> greets visitors with a keen layout that simplifies the flow and presents both the download and hosting options right at the top.
Overall, a pretty sharp design solution. And no surprise: it's powered by WordPress. 
<h2>Optimizely Presents Opticon 2022: Applying the Science of Growth to Digital Experience Creation</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/08/opticon22_savethedate_ads_teaser_1200x628.png" alt="Opticon 2022 Teaser" />
Looking for the optimal conference to attend this fall?
Optimizely, a leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, announced its first in-person annual user conference, <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/opticon/" target="_blank">Opticon 2022</a>. The event will take place October 3-5 in scenic San Diego (if you're in town, make sure you hit the <a href="https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/" target="_blank">Zoo</a> - it's spectacular). Opticon will showcase how customers and partners are continuously "optimizing" their digital experiences across all channels to drive customer intimacy and business growth.
According to Optimizely, the stakes have never been higher when it comes to competing for customer attention. Businesses need sound strategies to navigate evolving market complexities, advance digital journeys, and elevate future-forward solutions to inspire teams and supercharge growth – resulting in strong, lasting customer relationships. Attendees at Opticon 2022 will hear from marketers, digital leaders, and developers who are achieving these outcomes by leaning into powerful experimentation and frictionless creativity to drive better brand experiences and accelerate revenue growth.
"To be competitive today, marketers need to do more than 'business as usual.' In a rapidly changing world, complexity is the enemy of digital marketing and great digital experiences," said Alex Atzberger, CEO at Optimizely. "To meet your customers every day and adapt, you need data and knowledge about your audience, what resonates with them, when they want to engage, and how they want to be marketed to. Great digital experiences, backed by experimentation and data-driven insights, are what enable continuous possibilities and lead to long-term growth. At Opticon 2022, we're excited to bring leading innovators, marketers, and entrepreneurs to the stage to showcase how applying a scientific method allows you to stay ahead of the curve, amidst an ever-evolving state of customer expectations."
If that content doesn't sound enticing enough, Optimizely is going for the slam-dunk with its celebrity keynote by Earvin "Magic" Johnson, who will share his experiences on what it takes to succeed in a digital-first, customer-centric business landscape. As an NBA legend and advocate for Black entrepreneurship, Johnson will explore how his lifelong commitment to dreaming big has pushed his off-court endeavors to new heights — and how leaders in digital, marketing, and growth can meet this pivotal moment with similar courage to unlock boundless innovation.
To learn more about the keynote session, or to register, visit: <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/opticon/#registration" target="_blank">Opticon 2022</a>.
<h2>Acquia Announces New Digital Asset Management (DAM) Integration with Drupal</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/11/acquia_composable.jpg" alt="Acquia logo against a composite background of Tetris-like pieces fitting together, reinforcing the concept of composable DXP" />
<a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">Acquia</a>, a leading DXP platform, has <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-announces-new-digital-asset-management-dam-integration-drupal" target="_blank">announced</a> a new Drupal integration with the company's digital asset management (DAM) solution, <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/dam" target="_blank">Acquia DAM</a> (previously Widen DAM). The solution is aimed at speeding time-to-market for content. 
Using the open source integration, content authors can now leverage Acquia DAM embed codes and manage versioning through the Media Library in Drupal – which has been extended to help users easily find their digital assets via search, metadata, and categories. Acquia DAM makes it simpler to organize and control assets, as well as achieve brand consistency through a centralized, cloud-based library. 
"Content is at the heart of any standout digital experience," said Dries Buytaert, Co-Founder and CTO of Acquia. "With a variety of asset types stored across disparate systems, many content authors struggle to maintain brand consistency as they build digital properties and create campaigns. The new Acquia DAM integration with Drupal makes it easier and faster to leverage brand-approved content, so content authors can focus on launching content rather than hunting down digital assets."
<h2>DigitalOcean to Acquire Cloudways</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/08/digitalocean-cloudways-acquisition.jpg" alt="DititalOcean Cloudways logos" />
DigitalOcean is riding a wave of success, and this latest move is a testament to its growth. 
Billing itself as the cloud for developers, startups, and SMBs, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/headless-cms-strapi-now-available-on-the-digitalocean-marketplace/">DigitalOcean</a> has carved a strong and loyal niche in the market – particularly as large public cloud providers have continued to dominate the space. Now, with an agreement to acquire <a href="https://www.cloudways.com/en/" target="_blank">Cloudways</a>, a leading managed cloud hosting and software as a service (SaaS) provider for SMBs, its ocean is about to expand. 
According to the company, DigitalOcean's acquisition promises to simplify workflows for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for easier ways to create and scale their digital businesses. Cloudways will provide simple onboarding and day-to-day management that is purpose-built for certain SMBs looking to outsource their on-ramp to the internet, helping them offload the complexities of cloud infrastructure so they can spend more time running and scaling their businesses. 
The acquisition of Cloudways expands DigitalOcean’s serviceable market within global SMBs and increases options for digital agencies, eCommerce sites, bloggers, freelance developers, and builders hosting on WordPress, PHP and Magento. WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) – and according to <a href="https://twitter.com/w3techs?lang=en" target="_blank">W3Techs</a>, it powers 43% of all websites on the internet.
Entrepreneurs and SMBs already choose Cloudways to optimize the performance, value, support, reliability and flexibility of their infrastructure and application management. As a result, they can save time and money while they grow their businesses. Cloudways provides a differentiated offering with an open and flexible platform, an incredible price-to-performance ratio, and superior customer experience.
DigitalOcean and Cloudways have been close partners since 2014. Cloudways currently relies on DigitalOcean infrastructure to power approximately 50% of its customers. Cloudways serves an international and growing customer base with an industry-leading NPS score of 71. Together, DigitalOcean and Cloudways will serve over 124,000 customers paying over $50 per month, representing approximately 84% of the pro forma company’s total revenue.
“SMBs represent more than 50% of global gross domestic product (GDP) and spend $70 billion on cloud infrastructure today. With this acquisition, we are making it easier to launch, build and scale a business on DigitalOcean,” said Yancey Spruill, CEO at DigitalOcean. “Cloudways and DigitalOcean share values around simplicity, community, openness and support that are vital attributes to how we differentiate in the marketplace. Together, we will be focused on providing a simple, easy, intuitive, and trusted platform to better serve SMBs so they can build their businesses and pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship.”
In addition to expanding DigitalOcean’s technology and tooling, the acquisition of Cloudways will also increase DigitalOcean’s global employee base by 30% — adding expertise in key growth areas that will continue to drive productivity and performance across the platform.

CMS Monthly Recap: WordPress Homepage Gets a New Design, Optimizely Announces Opticon 2022, Acquia Introduces DAM Integration, and More

paris-tuzun

Above image of a car driving through an autumn forest, with foliage in a wide spectrum of colors.

It's July, and the world feels like it's melting. Literally. 
As entire continents experience <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/06/21/heat-wave-records-europe-north-america-summer" target="_blank">record-breaking summer temperatures</a> in the Northern Hemisphere, we're doing what we can to stay cool – and bring you cooler stories from across the CMS and DXP landscape.
This month was hot for a lot of reasons, including <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wix-to-host-first-ever-developers-conference-wix-devcon-2022/">Wix's DevCon 2022</a> – the company's first-ever developer's conference – and of course, the annual epic that is <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reflections-on-wordcamp-europe-2022/">WordPress WordCamp Europe</a>. Cool stuff indeed.
On the ever-present investment side of the ledger, we covered <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/kontent-ai-raises-40-million-to-bring-the-power-of-ai-to-content-management/">Kentico's spinoff of Kontent.ai</a> – and the new company's stellar raise of $40 million. Kontent plans to use the funds to further juice its platform with AI innovation, which has been a key focus area since its inception. We also covered <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/storyblok-launches-1-5m-partner-fund-to-help-agencies-shape-the-future-of-digital-storytelling/">Storyblok's launch</a> of a $1.5 million partner fund to help agencies shape the future of digital storytelling and GraphCMS' announcement that it is <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/graphcms-rebrands-to-hygraph-launches-new-federated-content-platform/">rebranding to Hygraph</a> and what this means for its future growth. 
Just under the wire for July, Magnolia sent a thunderous boom across the CMS market with news that <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/genui-acquires-majority-stake-in-magnolia-and-invests-in-future-growth/">GENUI is acquiring a majority stake</a> in its company, with plans to inject significant growth capital. While details were thin, GENUI has forged quite a reputation over the years as a growth engine for technologies, so we'll be watching as things unfold. 
There are a few other stories from July that you might have missed – so turn down the air conditioning and settle in more for more cool stuff. 
<h2>dotCMS Launches Enterprise Cloud Hosting for Single Page Applications</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/07/dotcms-interface.webp" alt="dotCMS interface" />
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/?s=dotcms" target="_blank">dotCMS</a>, an enterprise <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/blog/post/migrating-headless-cms-hybrid-headless-cms" target="_blank">hybrid-headless CMS</a>, has <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/company/news/dotcms-launches-enterprise-cloud-hosting-for-single-page-applications" target="_blank">announced</a> that <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/videos/enterprise-spa-hosting" target="_blank">the enterprise cloud SPA hosting</a> feature will be available as part of its standard <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/product/dotcms-cloud" target="_blank">dotCMS Cloud</a> offering.
For businesses running multi-channel content-driven sites, one challenge when spinning up a new single-page application (SPA) is where to host it. By leveraging dotCMS' Enterprise SPA hosting, based on AWS Amplify and backed by the global <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/company/news/dotcms-announces-dotcdn" target="_blank">dotCDN</a>, enterprises can speed up development and content delivery for global marketing campaigns without being forced to contract with a third-party vendor.
dotCMS' cloud offering includes features such as:
<ul>
<li>24/7 critical care</li>
<li>Annual core dotCMS upgrades</li>
<li>Up to 99.98% uptime</li>
<li>No API-rate limiting or throttling</li>
<li>Automated security fixes</li>
<li>Native Web Application Firewall (WAF)</li>
<li>Native dotCDN Content Delivery Network to mitigate DDoS attacks</li>
<li>Secure access with Oauth or SAML-based authentication and with IP Whitelisting</li>
</ul>
"We are providing organizations with a way to quickly deliver their content applications to customers around the world," said CTO of dotCMS, Will Ezell. "This latest offering exemplifies our commitment to security and scalability."
With enterprise SPA hosting, development teams can focus on innovation and building engaging applications to support the business outcomes instead of managing the underlying infrastructure. Enterprises can leverage the new service to save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually that they would otherwise spend on administrative and hosting costs.
<h2>Acquia Partners with Workato to Power Enterprise Connectivity to Acquia CDP, Adds Data Subject Deletion Request Features</h2>
<a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">Acquia</a>, a leading digital experience company, has made several important updates to its CDP this month. 
First, they <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-partners-workato-power-enterprise-connectivity-acquia-cdp" target="_blank">announced</a> a partnership with the integration and workflow automation platform <a href="https://www.workato.com/" target="_blank">Workato</a> to power enterprise connectivity to Acquia Customer Data Platform (CDP). They also added new data subject deletion request features that will help their customers comply with the GDPR regulations and privacy laws. Using a new self-service interface, organizations can rapidly process "Right to Erasure" (otherwise known as "Right to be Forgotten") requests associated with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and more from their customers. 
Partnership with Workato 
Acquia's partnership with Workato will allow organizations to integrate Acquia CDP with hundreds of external cloud services via secure, enterprise-grade APIs through out-of-box connectors. As the company noted: "The connectivity powered by Workato will help customers achieve even faster time-to-value by reducing the time it takes to get their data from their preferred cloud services into and out of Acquia CDP."
Workato is a leading enterprise automation platform that enables businesses, and IT teams to integrate their apps and automate their business workflows. It has been <a href="https://discover.workato.com/gartner-ipaas-mq/p/1" target="_blank">selected as a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service</a> for 4th year in a row.
"We're pleased to partner with Workato to add hundreds of integrations between Acquia CDP and marketing, analytics, and commerce applications," said Mark Picone, SVP and General Manager, Marketing Cloud, at Acquia. "The connectivity powered by Workato will help customers achieve even faster time-to-value by reducing the time it takes to get their data from their preferred cloud services into and out of Acquia CDP."
As a part of the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-launches-new-open-digital-experience-platform/" target="_blank">Acquia Marketing Cloud platform</a>, Acquia CDP enables marketers to aggregate and activate data from technologies of their choice into a unified, 360-degree customer profile. From there, marketers can use Acquia CDP to orchestrate personalized, AI-powered campaigns across the entire omnichannel customer journey.
"We're seeing a continued trend around the growing needs for SaaS connectivity, and our partnership with Acquia will allow their communities of partners and customers to keep up with the accelerated demand," said Bhaskar Roy, CMO at Workato. "Not only will they be able to build and leverage robust connectors to their preferred applications, but they will also be able to connect to these applications and automate workflows across them. We're excited to be partnering with Acquia, who has become a leading force in the future of digital experiences by embracing the power of automation."
David Wallace, Research Director, Customer Intelligence and Analytics at IDC, commented: "Digital-first brands must focus on quality, speed-to-value, and agility to deliver the personalized experiences expected by their customers. Customer data platforms help brands achieve their goals not only with productized integrations and APIs but also enterprise-grade, pre-built connectors across an array of digital channels for the flexibility for multiple use cases. Acquia, through its partnership with Workato and inherent low-code tooling enables this increased flexibility."
New Regulatory Compliance Features
Soon after the partnership with Workato, Acquia also <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-adds-data-subject-deletion-request-features-acquia-cdp" target="_blank">announced</a> they added new regulatory compliance features that help organizations using <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/customer-data-platform" target="_blank">Acquia Customer Data Platform (CDP)</a> to comply with data subject requests and privacy laws in general. 
"This feature for legal and compliance workflows is the latest in a series of self-service updates we're making to Acquia CDP," said Janessa Worrell, Director of Product Management at Acquia. "Our goal is to make it simple for organizations using Acquia CDP to process deletion requests from their own customers, ensuring that these requests are handled quickly. Customers can expect more self-service features in the coming months, removing friction and making common Acquia CDP workflows simpler to execute."
Other recent self-service updates include secure credentials management for Acquia CDP out-of-the-box connectors. Organizations can now generate and manage their own credentials for pre-built connectors to external services such as Facebook or Google.
<h2>WordCamp US 2022 Tickets Sold Out, All Sessions to be Livestreamed</h2>
Two months after the most popular WordPress event, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reflections-on-wordcamp-europe-2022/" target="_blank">WordCamp Europe</a>, has ended, WordCamp US will be hosting its two-day event in San Diego, California, from September 9 through September 11. Like WordCamp Europe, this will be the first in-person event since 2019. 
With the COVID-19 still looming and to allow for adequate social distancing, this year's WordCamp US event is designed as a smaller event - limited to 650 attendees - compared to the previous years. Since it is the first in-person event in two years, the demand was extremely high, and the <a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/tickets/" target="_blank">tickets</a> are already sold out but don't worry. You can watch all the WCUS 2022 sessions <a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/livestream/" target="_blank">online </a>without having to purchase any tickets.
WCUS has also begun<a href="https://us.wordcamp.org/2022/speakers/" target="_blank"> announcing its speakers</a>. This year they are making an increased effort to give more opportunities to underrepresented speakers. 
The opening remarks will begin at 9:00 am on Friday and Saturday, and the sessions will run from 9:15 am to 5:30 pm. The last day of the event will be the "Contributor Day" on Sunday.
You can follow the updates via the <a href="https://paper.dropbox.com/?q=%23WCUS" target="_blank">#WCUS</a> hashtag on Twitter.
<h2>Sitecore Experience Manager Cloud (XM Cloud) Now Available</h2>
<img style="max-width:1000px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/07/xmcloud-ui.jpg" alt="SiteCore XM Cloud user interface " />
<a href="https://www.sitecore.com/" target="_blank">Sitecore</a>, a global leader in end-to-end digital experience software, <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2022/07/sitecore-experience-manager-cloud-now-available" target="_blank">announced</a> that it has released its <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud</a>. This latest product release will provide brands with unrivaled speed to market in implementing customer experiences, simplifying design and deployment, eliminating upgrades, and dramatically decreasing ownership costs. With XM Cloud, marketers can instantly create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel experiences with an industry-leading enterprise-ready CMS.
According to a <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2022/05/us-brand-authenticity-report" target="_blank">recent survey by Sitecore</a>, online interactions play an outsized role in driving engagement between brands and customers. The digital experience, while valued by consumers, creates a scalability issue for marketers to meet demand. <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">Sitecore XM Cloud</a> provides a comprehensive SaaS CMS for the Enterprise solution for brands by overcoming global scaling problems, including variable traffic, supporting multi-brand architectures, and site security.
For business users, <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">XM Cloud</a> offers the ability to build pixel-perfect digital experiences via a WYSIWYG authoring experience that can access content anywhere, with embedded testing, personalization, and integrated visitor analytics. For developers, <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">XM Cloud</a> can be used with headless development techniques, working with modern frontend frameworks and supporting all deployment scenarios.
"Consumer behavior has changed rapidly over the past two years. Audiences have become very digitally savvy and have an expectation from brands to deliver highly personalized customer experiences," said Dave O'Flanagan, chief product officer, Sitecore. "This puts marketers in the unenviable position of trying to meet this expectation, but with tools and solutions that don't deliver, and in some cases hamstring, the needed agility to meet demand. Sitecore XM Cloud provides marketers with a truly end-to-end, SaaS-based solution that not only helps brands meet consumer expectations but also delivers a best-of-class omnichannel customer experience."
Through <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/xm-cloud" target="_blank">Sitecore XM Cloud</a>, the company's entire <a href="https://www.sitecore.com/products/sitecore-experience-platform" target="_blank">Digital Experience Platform</a> can now be delivered through a modern cloud architecture, providing brands and marketers with:
<ul>
<li>Continued innovation – new features and capabilities will be automatically delivered and integrated</li>
<li>Elastic scaling – "set-and-forget" traffic volume demands</li>
<li>Composability – all of Sitecore's platform solutions can now be purchased independently and will fit in a best-of-breed marketing technology stack</li>
<li>On-the-Fly Engagement – rapidly create experiences to meet constantly evolving market needs</li>
<li>Multi-channel content management - create content once and reuse across any channel and experience</li>
<li>Simplicity for marketers – business-focused tools and intuitive content authoring workflows</li>
<li>Agility for developers – customized builds with modern frameworks</li>
</ul>

CMS Monthly Recap: dotCMS Launches Enterprise Cloud Hosting, Acquia Partners with Workato, Sitecore Releases Experience Manager Cloud, and More

cms-critic-staff

Image of beach with CMS Critic Monthly Recap logo over water

As fireworks pocked the night skies across the U.S. this past weekend (a celebratory signal that summer has arrived), we had a chance to reflect on a busy June. Needless to say, it was a scorcher – especially in the CMS and DXP sector. Once again, we saw platform vendors holding major events around the globe, with several piling up on one another. 
One standout we covered at the very end of May was <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reflections-from-sanitys-structured-content-2022-conference/">Sanity's Structured Content 2022 Conference</a>, which offered some unique perspectives on the position of content as data. The substance was unique, relatable, and truly applicable to attendees – with some terrific keynotes from the likes of Dirk Voetberg from Spotify, Kusum Kanwar from Shopify, and Carrie Hane from Sanity. We took a snapshot of the event's sessions, which were held live in San Francisco and virtually in Oslo and London. Definitely worth checking out. 
While economic uncertainty continued to obscure the horizon for enterprise software vendors, companies like Strapi bucked the trend by <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/strapi-secures-31-million-in-series-b-funding-plans-to-enhance-open-source-headless-cms-and-deliver-cloud-platform/">securing $31 million in Series B funding</a> to enhance its headless CMS. We also tracked <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/visual-content-management-platform-boom-acquires-visual-production-company-lemonone/">acquisition news from BOOM</a>, a visual content management platform, as it announced the purchase of LemonOne – a visual production vendor. Along with updates from <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/craftercms-releases-version-4-0-adds-api-powered-git-capabilities-and-composable-features/">CrafterCMS</a> and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/proventus-as-announces-release-of-relatude-cms-and-e-commerce-version-6/">Relatude CMS</a>, it was a busy 30 days.
As always, there were a few more stories sizzling on the backburner – right next to your hot dogs and burgers. So grab an ice-cold lemonade, light up a sparkler, and keep reading...
<h2>Shopify invests in Sanity, connecting commerce with content</h2>
We've already mentioned Sanity's fantastic Structured Content 2022 event, but the news doesn't end there. In June, the content platform <a href="https://www.sanity.io/blog/shopify-invests-in-sanity-connecting-commerce-with-content" target="_blank">announced</a> a partnership with <a href="https://shopify.com" target="_blank">Shopify</a> that includes a strategic investment from the e-commerce juggernaut. Sanity is the first CMS partner to launch an app for Shopify’s headless commerce framework, <a href="https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/" target="_blank">Hydrogen</a>, and is Shopify’s only public investment in a content platform company to date. The combo will offer Shopify’s millions of merchants new capabilities to improve shopping experiences by significantly "inspiring" product and brand content. 
As noted previously, Sanity approaches content from a unique angle by treating content as data. At the same time, storytelling lies at the heart of Sanity's vision – something that permeated the themes of its Structured Content 2022 event. One of the conference keynotes featured Kusum Kanwar, Senior Product Lead at Shopify, who talked about how content makes commerce "human." Both companies share a common focus on this expanded value of content – and now, by joining forces, Shopify and Sanity aim to bring commerce and content together so merchants can tell their stories, inspire audiences, and flexibly adapt product information, brand assets, and other content faster than ever. 
Shopify’s investment codifies Sanity’s potential as a complementary resource for sellers. The <a href="https://www.sanity.io/shopify" target="_blank">Sanity Connect </a>for Shopify app was purpose-built to operate with Shopify’s headless commerce stack, which features both Hydrogen and Oxygen. Armed with these capabilities, merchants building custom storefronts on Shopify can also deploy immersive product content with rich media, embed product content on external channels, enable one-click ordering anywhere on a website, orchestrate promotions to email and social media, and much more.
 
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/07/dotcms-image.jpg" alt="Image of dotCMS logo over a screen shot of the CMS user interface" />
<h2>dotCMS unveils major updates to its content authoring experience</h2>
<a href="https://www.dotcms.com/" target="_blank">dotCMS</a>, a leading hybrid-headless content management system, has <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/company/news/dotcms-unveils-major-updates-to-the-content-authoring-experience" target="_blank">announced</a> the latest edition of its platform. The new update includes a drag-and-drop content palette and story-like block editor, along with other enhancements to the overall content authoring experience. These product enhancements come on the heels of what dotCMS calls its "best year yet" in 2021, with that momentum driving a positive outlook for 2022.
In an effort to remain nimble around digital transformation, enterprise organizations are embracing <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/mach-alliance-releases-study-on-adoption-of-mach-technologies-by-tech-leaders-qa-with-sonja-keerl/" target="_blank">MACH architecture and composability</a>. While microservices-based headless architecture brings many benefits and allows developers a great deal of freedom, brands cannot ignore the needs of their content authors – who are often forgotten in the shift to headless. 
The new dotCMS drag-and-drop content palette makes page building easier and improves the flow of content editing. In addition, the <a href="https://www.dotcms.com/docs/latest/changelogs" target="_blank">latest LTS version of dotCMS (22.03)</a> features a JSON-Based Content Store and improved content search results. 
<h2>Acquia Partners with Workato to power enterprise connectivity to Acquia CDP</h2>
<a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">Acquia</a>, a leading digital experience platform, announced a partnership with integration and workflow automation platform <a href="https://www.workato.com/" target="_blank">Workato</a> to power enterprise connectivity to the <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud/customer-data-platform" target="_blank">Acquia Customer Data Platform (CDP)</a>. Organizations can integrate Acquia CDP with hundreds of external cloud services via secure, enterprise-grade APIs through out-of-the-box connectors.
With Workato-powered integrations like this (and others), marketers can achieve a faster path to connectivity with the services they already use. As a part of the <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/marketing-cloud" target="_blank">Acquia Marketing Cloud</a> platform, Acquia CDP enables marketers to aggregate and activate data from technologies of their choice into a unified, 360-degree customer profile. From there, marketers can use Acquia CDP to orchestrate personalized, AI-powered campaigns across the entire omnichannel customer journey.
 
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/07/wpe-img-chianti-1024x512-v01.png" alt="Image of WP Engine plugins from Delicious Brains" />
<h2>WP Engine acquires popular Delicious Brains WordPress plugins, including developer favorite Advanced Custom Fields</h2>
<a href="https://wpengine.com/" target="_blank">WP Engine</a>, a leading <a href="https://wordpress.org/" target="_blank">WordPress</a> digital experience platform for websites and apps, <a href="https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-acquires-delicious-brains-plugins-including-advanced-custom-fields/" target="_blank">announced</a> it will acquire five of the most popular developer-centric tools for WordPress from <a href="https://deliciousbrains.com/" target="_blank">Delicious Brains</a> – strengthening the company’s offerings for both traditional and headless managed WordPress. 
The plugins have a total installed base of approximately 4 million users and are widely adopted by WP Engine’s customers. The acquired software includes <a href="https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-migrate-db-pro/" target="_blank">WP Migrate</a>, <a href="https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-offload-media/" target="_blank">WP Offload Media</a>, <a href="https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-offload-ses/" target="_blank">WP Offload SES</a>, <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/" target="_blank">Better Search Replace</a>, and a preferred developer go-to called <a href="https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/" target="_blank">Advanced Custom Fields</a> (ACF).
The acquisition of these widely-used WordPress plugins will expand WP Engine’s portfolio of market-leading developer tools, including WP Engine’s <a href="https://localwp.com/" target="_blank">Local</a>, the #1 Local WordPress development tool; <a href="https://wpengine.com/genesis/" target="_blank">Genesis</a>, the #1 WordPress theme framework; and <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/atlas-content-modeler/" target="_blank">Atlas Content Modeler</a>, which simplifies the development process of creating content models for headless WordPress sites.

CMS Monthly Recap: Shopify Invests in Sanity, dotCMS Updates Content Authoring Experience, WP Engine Acquires Plugins, and More

Monthly Recap with fireworks in background

The month of May is a wrap, and it was in full bloom with events – both live and virtual. In the last 30 days, we saw a bevy of industry meetings, product user groups, and lively sessions that seemed to coordinate around the same four-week period.
Talk about spring conference fever. 
In the mele, there were two that really stood out for our staff. The first was <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/netlify-to-host-headless-commerce-summit-for-talks-on-building-world-class-e-commerce-experiences/">Netlify's Headless Commerce Summit</a>, where e-Commerce on the Jamstack was front and center.
We also took in a few sessions from Sanity's new <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/sanity-to-host-structured-content-2022-conference-in-u-s-europe-and-online/">Structured Content 2022 Conference</a>, where a few thousand content fans assembled across the globe to discuss... well, content. Structured Content was particularly interesting as it positioned itself as a "movement" within the industry, intently focused on educating and inspiring the cross-disciplinary community of people who work on digital experiences. 
Elsewhere, we tracked a story from <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/amplitude-announces-new-testing-and-analytics-tools-for-making-smarter-product-decisions-at-scale/">Amplitude</a> as they announced new testing and analytics tools for making smarter product decisions at scale. Spoiler alert: we have some additional news from Amplitude in this recap, as they seem to be on a roll. 
We also tracked a big <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/civicplus-enters-into-agreement-to-acquire-optimere/">announcement from CivicPlus</a> – an integrated tech platform that powers websites for local governments. In a stunning move, the company announced an agreement to buy Optimere, the parent company of Monsido (among others). The purchase will expand CivicPlus' capabilities by adding Monsido's accessibility scanning resources to its ecosystem. The added suite of features should provide public sector organizations with a one-stop solution for managing ADA-compliant web experiences. 
Before you turn your spring fever into summer blues, check out a few other stories we noted from across the digital experience landscape.
<h2>Contentstack launches its no-code Automation Hub, making composable content experiences easier to build</h2>
<a href="https://www.contentstack.com/" target="_blank">Contentstack</a>, a leader in the new headless CMS Content Experience Platform (CXP) category, unveiled its industry-first Automation Hub. Aimed at simplifying the deployment of composable architectures at any scale, Automation Hub allows marketing and IT to overcome the technical and operational hurdles of adopting a composable architecture. 
Contentstack launched the new capability on stage at its inaugural customer conference, <a href="https://info.contentstack.com/online-registration-contentcon-2022.html" target="_blank">ContentCon</a>, which featured presentations from Levi’s, Dawn Foods, Golfbreaks, and other leading brands. Automation Hub is available now as part of Contentstack’s Platform Beta Program, with General Availability scheduled for late Summer 2022.
Composable architectures (or stacks) are emerging as the next evolutionary step for enterprises, allowing companies to create digital experiences faster while responding to rapidly-changing market demands and business threats. In a <a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3994550" target="_blank">recent report by Gartner,</a> the analyst firm predicted that by 2023, organizations that adopt an intelligent, composable approach will outpace competitors by 80 percent when it comes to new feature implementation. 
Moving away from legacy monolithic systems often introduces technical complexity and operational challenges. Contentstack’s Automation Hub addresses both of these issues head-on by infusing simple, no-code business logic into the front-end of a composable stack.
“Using best-in-breed technologies is the only way to stay competitive, but enterprises often end up bogged down in integration hell," said Conor Egan, VP of product and engineering at Contentstack. "Implementing business logic today involves writing code that is often slow, brittle, and requires constant maintenance. Our Automation Hub solves this by allowing teams to build complex, cross-vendor connections visually without code. It is a true game-changer.” 
Contentstack is also championing the mantra of  "Connect without Compromise." This has become the centerpiece of a new program that combines Automation Hub with Contentstack’s Blueprints – a library of best practices and expert guides for composable experiences – and its recently launched <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/contentstack-launches-new-marketplace-to-accelerate-composable-digital-experience-innovation-from-weeks-to-minutes-301492844.html" target="_blank">Marketplace</a>. Now, businesses of all sizes can fully embrace composable architectures at any scale with confidence, choosing either a ready-made composable solution based on industry best practices or leveraging the foundation to easily customize to their unique business needs. 
Contentstack's "Connect without Compromise" program is also a complement to its "<a href="https://www.contentstack.com/company/press/contentstack-expands-customer-support-launch-industry-first-cross-vendor-service-commitment-program/" target="_blank">Care Without Compromise</a>" program – a multi-vendor ecosystem designed to ensure cross-vendor support in composable environments. Through "Care without Compromise," Contentstack and its Catalyst partners cooperate, communicate, and cross-train support staff to ensure seamless delivery of joint solutions to customers globally. Now with both programs, businesses of all sizes can move to composable architectures at scale and with ease.
"At Contentstack, we are committed to organizations who choose to challenge the status quo and adopt a modern, composable approach to power their digital experiences," said Neha Sampat, founder and CEO of Contentstack. "Combining 'Connect without Compromise' and 'Care without Compromise' embodies this commitment. We take on the burden of making it easy to work across multiple vendors – from both a support and integration perspective – so you don't have to."
<h2>Amplitude announces new customer data platform, industry’s first "insights-driven CDP"</h2>
<a href="https://amplitude.com/" target="_blank">Amplitude</a>, Inc., a leader in digital optimization, announced the launch of Amplitude CDP, the first insights-driven customer data platform (CDP). Unlike other CDPs that require connecting to third-party analytics solutions, Amplitude CDP both collects and analyzes event data with its natively integrated industry-leading product analytics solution. 
With Amplitude CDP, product and marketing teams can proactively improve data quality, analyze and discover new audiences, and sync data across their marketing and data stack. Amplitude’s CDP – coupled with analytics – helps customers become more operationally efficient and enables better, faster decision-making to increase customer engagement.
The goal of a CDP is to collect data that lead to insights – and ultimately enable data-driven decision-making that improves customer experiences. After working with thousands of companies and analyzing over 1 trillion customer data points per month, Amplitude discovered critical unsolved challenges in the CDP market, which is currently estimated to reach $20.5 billion by 2027. 
Data that is not proactively managed reduces the quality of insights. The various teams that collect, analyze, and take action on customer data struggle to collaborate across multiple solutions – and maintaining both a CDP and Product Analytics solution leads to duplicative costs and implementations. With Amplitude CDP, customers now have an integrated suite to turn high-quality data into actionable insights.
Key benefits of Amplitude’s insights-driven CDP include:
<ul>
<li>Improved data quality: Data planning and governance are built-in to help data and engineering teams proactively maintain trust and quality.</li>
<li>Better audience discovery: Many CDPs move right from data collection to activation, offering segmentation but assuming companies know what audiences to target. Now, deep segmentation combined with analytics helps teams discover audiences based on insights, putting audience discovery before audience activation for maximum engagement.</li>
<li>Reduced costs and redundancies: With analytics natively integrated within Amplitude CDP, Amplitude eliminates duplicative costs for customers by providing a single platform that serves as the foundation for data, the engine for insights, and the driver for action.</li>
<li>Accelerated time-to-insights: Built-in analytics unites product, growth, and marketing around shared data to unlock insights and actions anywhere in the stack.</li>
</ul>
“Customer data platforms entered the market with the promise of making personalization a reality, but aggregating data is only step one," said Spenser Skates, CEO, and co-founder of Amplitude. "As companies look to provide tailored product experiences, they need trusted data that provides insights about their existing audiences and helps them identify new ones, all without unnecessary costs for their business. At Amplitude, we have spent the last few years helping customers solve the problems that existing CDPs in the market were unable to. With the launch of Amplitude CDP, we are now providing customers with the ability to provide meaningful, personalized experiences all from a single platform.”
For years, Amplitude has been introducing capabilities that help teams collect, manage, and activate customer data. More than 50% of Amplitude customers currently send data from Amplitude to other tools in their stack and Amplitude’s integration ecosystem has grown to more than 65 out-of-the-box connectors. Today, customers like Kahoot!, Hex, InvoiceSimple, Marco Polo, and Thrive Market are already using Amplitude CDP and have access to expanded capabilities to drive accurate, actionable insights.
Key innovations include:
<ul>
<li>Unified user interface (UI): Create a single taxonomy for all digital analytics use cases to collect and capture consistent data in one UI.</li>
<li>Event streaming: Federate data to martech, ad, and attribution vendors as well as data pipelines like Amazon Kinesis and Google Pub/Sub through a no-code configurable UI in the Data Connections catalog.</li>
<li>Real-time audience syncing: Match the cadence of marketing campaigns and use customer behavior to drive in-the-moment engagement with real-time syncs that refresh audience lists every minute.</li>
<li>Developer toolkit: Proactively collaborate with developers to define tracking plans with a best-in-class developer toolkit that saves engineers time and helps automate data validation with tracking libraries – no more typos, forgotten properties, or inconsistent naming conventions.</li>
</ul>
A <a href="https://www.cdpinstitute.org/learning-center/what-is-a-realcdp/" target="_blank">RealCDP-certified</a> solution, Amplitude CDP is available to Amplitude customers in the early access program today and will be generally available later this year. Amplitude CDP will be free of charge for customers streaming fewer than 10 million events per month, an offer more than 10 times better than some of the leading CDPs in the market. 
<h2>Agility CMS expands composability through its marketplace</h2>
<a href="https://agilitycms.com/" target="_blank">Agility CMS</a>, a headless content management platform for creating powerful Enterprise ready digital experiences, has announced the expansion of its composability offerings – specifically through the launch of its new marketplace and the redevelopment of its app framework to support its marketplace applications.
By introducing these changes, the headless platform aims to simplify how users integrate with third-party APIs and how developers build new applications. Agility has also enhanced the user interface and editor experience of its CMS and added several new integrations, APIs, and pre-built models – all designed to help enterprises get up and running faster than ever.
More than ever, organizations are moving their products and services online. However, each company has its own unique requirements. To meet these needs, Agility CMS embraces the best-of-breed concepts of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/mach-alliance-releases-study-on-adoption-of-mach-technologies-by-tech-leaders-qa-with-sonja-keerl/">MACH architecture and composability,</a> providing customers with a future-proof design that allows them to iterate and swap components as the customer journey evolves.
“High-growth companies rely on multiple cloud-based tools to help them solve problems quickly," said Agility CMS CTO Joel Varty. "As these businesses evolve, Agility CMS’ microservices architecture enables them to swap out the tools for what can better serve them at each new stage. We don’t want our customers to feel like they need to change how they do things. Instead, our composable approach enhances your business, helping to increase profits in the long term."
“We’ve noticed that customers are looking at their previous monolithic systems and recognizing that it can’t do everything they want it to, and it’s slow to roll out,” said Jon Voigt, CEO of Agility CMS. “We’ve always believed that customers should be able to tie together best-of-breed solutions as they see fit, and we’re happy that the industry and businesses today are recognizing the value of this approach,” he added.
Agility CMS’ long-standing position as a hybrid headless CMS with an intuitive content authoring experience has enticed forward-thinking brands from various industries, resulting in doubled sales in 2021.

CMS Monthly Recap: Contenstack Launches No-Code Hub for Composable Content Experiences, Agility CMS Expands Composability, and More

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April 2022 is already behind us. And when it rains... it pours. 
As bad news befalls the globe – from a persistent conflict in Ukraine to stumbling stock markets – CMS and DXP vendors continue to slug it out. How will tech fare in the coming months with the specter of recession on the horizon? Tough to say, but we'll be watching.  
By most measures, last month was relatively quiet. We saw announcements from <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-releases-new-content-services-and-intelligent-automation-product-enhancements/">Hyland</a>, updates from <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/sitecore-announces-updates-to-product-suite-enhances-composable-features-and-innovation-from-acquisitions/">Sitecore</a> around its composable features, and a new partnership between <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/woocommerce-and-pinterest-announce-partnership-offer-new-integration-for-connecting-with-shoppers/">WooCommerce and Pinterest</a>. We followed a few additional stories in April and wrapped them up (as we always do). 
Enjoy the scoop. And you might want to keep an umbrella handy. You never know if the forecast might change. 
<h2>WordPress.com changes pricing and rattles users </h2>
Speaking of rain, WordPress.com has been gathering a few storm clouds by adding some significant <a href="https://wordpress.com/pricing/">price changes to its plans</a>. To add salt to the wound, the changes were apparently <a href="https://rootprivileges.net/2022/04/03/what-are-you-doing-wordpress-com/">unannounced,</a> and many people have been expressing their disappointment. The biggest sly: replacing all its paid options with a single Pro plan. The platform also slashed the storage on its free tier from 3GB to 500MB. Ouch.
Dave Martin, the CEO of WordPress.com, took to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30896807">Hacker News</a> to address the concerns. As he noted: "You're right to call us out. I did a poor job of sharing context around why we are making change, so I can see how they could come as a shock. I'm sorry! That's on me."
Martin went on to say that more changes were in the works and that this was the first of several phases. He also clarified that no legacy sites or blogs have been affected by these new price changes – so if your site is on an older plan, there should have been no changes to your billing. He mentioned that many of the existing plans were haphazardly added to WordPress.com with no real strategy, making it hard for customers to see at-a-glance why they should choose one plan over another.
That said, it's a classic lesson in the need for transparency. 
<h2>WordPress releases version 6.0, Gutenberg 13.0</h2>
When <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/updates-on-wordcamp-2021-wordpress-5-8-beta-details-and-gutenberg-enhancements/" target="_blank">WordPress 5.8</a> was released in July 2021, it introduced some major features that would pave the way to <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/design/handbook/focuses/full-site-editing/" target="_blank">Full Site Editing (FSE)</a>. <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/5-9/" target="_blank">WordPress 5.9 Josephine</a> took that to the next level, putting users in control of the whole experience of the FSE’s visual editing capabilities. 
Now, WordPress 6.0 is almost here, making it the second<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/about/release-cycle/releasing-major-versions/" target="_blank"> major release</a> of 2022. While the 6.0 beta version arrived in mid-April, it is expected to be<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/6-0/" target="_blank"> released on May 24, 2022</a>.
While we’re waiting for the release of WordPress 6.0, WordPress released another update to Gutenberg on April 14.
<img style="max-width:900px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/05/featured-image-in-cover.png" alt="Featured Image in Cover" />
The major updates include text selection across blocks, cover blocks with feature images, new responsive layouts for the Groups, Rows, and Stacks, and customizable borders to make your blocks stand out. 
There are also many other<a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/04/14/whats-new-in-gutenberg-13-0-14-april/" target="_blank"> notable improvements</a> that are worth checking out. 
<h2>WP Engine accelerates headless WordPress innovation with launch of new plans and Atlas Blueprints</h2>
<img style="max-width:900px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/05/wp-engine-atlas-blueprint.webp" alt="WP-Engine-Atlas-blueprint" />
WordPress has always been a traditional monolithic CMS. While it still maintains its crown as the most popular CMS in the world, it's been playing catch up in the move to headless.
But that's starting to change as <a href="https://wpengine.com/" target="_blank">WP Engine</a>, the world’s most trusted WordPress technology company, as they announced the launch of Atlas – its award-winning headless WordPress solution. It's now available to businesses of all sizes with four new headless WordPress plans, ranging from $49 to $499, allowing developers to learn, build and grow their sites on Atlas. 
WP Engine also announced the launch of Atlas Blueprints, which are free, professionally-designed templates allowing anyone to get started fast with headless WordPress. Developers can also try out Atlas by signing up for a free Atlas Sandbox account, which allows developers to learn more about developing with headless WordPress and create prototype projects.
<h2>Postman API platform surpasses 20 million users, driven by vision for API-First world</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/05/20-million-postman-users.jpg" alt="20-million-postman-users" />
<a href="https://www.postman.com/" target="_blank">Postman</a>, the world's leading API platform, <a href="https://blog.postman.com/celebrating-20-million-postman-users/">announced</a> that more than 20 million developers and builders have adopted its platform to build and use APIs, strengthening the company's reputation for simplifying the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration. Postman's public API hub is the world's largest, with workspaces from Microsoft, Stripe, Meta, Notion, Intel, Oracle, and more.
In <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/postman-releases-2021-state-of-the-api-report-shows-global-trend-towards-api-first-digital-era/">Postman's 2021 State of the API Report</a>, 67% of survey respondents ranked themselves a five or higher in terms of embracing an API-first philosophy – a five-point increase from 2020. Furthermore, the "API-first leaders" who ranked themselves highest produced APIs more quickly, deployed more frequently, had fewer failures, and recovered more swiftly when failures occurred.
<h2>Hyland expands infrastructure to deploy new OnBase and Brainware customers on AWS</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/09/e0030_thumb_big_media.png" alt="Hyland OnBase" />
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-releases-new-content-services-and-intelligent-automation-product-enhancements/">Hyland</a>, recognized as a leading content services provider with more than 1,700 cloud customers, has expanded its work with <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/">Amazon Web Services (AWS)</a> to support its customer base and their increased cloud deployment and migration needs. 
Working with AWS, Hyland will expand its <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/innovation/hyland-cloud" target="_blank">Hyland Cloud</a> infrastructure to deploy new <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/onbase" target="_blank">OnBase</a> and <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/platform/product-suite/brainware" target="_blank">Brainware</a> cloud customers and cloud migration environments in North America on the appropriate AWS Region – fully supported and managed by Hyland's technical experts.
The strengthened relationship with AWS delivers an expansive infrastructure footprint for the Hyland Cloud, allowing Hyland to meet customer requirements with agility and scale while providing a more flexible architecture that supports customers' evolving information technology (IT) and business challenges. Backed by innovative technologies, security-driven policies, and dedicated support from knowledgeable technology experts, customers deploying Hyland's software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings on AWS benefit from its continued focus on cloud innovation and support for next-generation cloud solutions.
"Our work with AWS gives customers and prospects greater confidence and agility when deploying their cloud content services solutions, which are optimized for their unique needs and requirements," said Will Milewski, Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure and Operations at Hyland. "With organizations continuing to evolve their business strategies to support remote work, cloud-based solutions are becoming the default and our relationship with AWS will ensure we're exceeding our customers' requirements from their content services platform."
Gartner has recognized Hyland as a content services industry leader for 12 consecutive years, and the winner of our own <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/introducing-the-winners-of-the-2021-cms-critics-choice-awards/" target="_blank">Critic's Choice Awards</a> for ECM in 2021. 
<h2>Concrete CMS 9.1.0RC1 is now available</h2>
Solid as a rock.
That was the news from the <a href="https://www.concretecms.com/" target="_blank">Concrete CMS</a> team as the company announced the availability of its first release candidate for Concrete CMS 9.1.0 – featuring a multitude of improvements, new features, and bug fixes, including:
<ul>
<li>Enhanced compatibility with PHP 8 and PHP 8.1.</li>
<li>Improved appearance and functionality when editing block, area, layout, and container styles inline in the page.</li>
<li>Express improvements like the ability to mark attributes as unique, handle re-use across objects, and much more.</li>
<li>Much improved version comparison features that can compare the HTML of two-page versions and highlight the differences.</li>
<li>Improvements to Dashboard listing screens and the file details screen.</li>
</ul>
Additionally, there are many behavioral and performance improvements included. The boulder-sized list is far too large for this blog post. <a href="https://documentation.concretecms.org/developers/introduction/version-history/910-release-notes" target="_blank">Click here</a> to read more of the details.
Concrete CMS was also recognized as a 2022 Leader in Content Management Systems by <a href="https://sourceforge.net/">SourceForge</a>.

CMS Monthly Recap: WP Engine Launches Headless Plans, Postman API Platform Surpasses 20 Million Users, and More

Featured image of April monthly recap of an umbrella with raindrops

CMS Monthly Recap: Google Sunsets Universal Analytics, WordPress Releases a New Performance Plugin, and More

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It would be impossible to cover any news this month without acknowledging <a href="https://www.economist.com/ukraine-crisis" target="_blank">the crisis in Ukraine</a>. 
As many CMS and DXP vendors rely on the incredible talent and resources of the people in this region, the events of the last few weeks have hit especially close to home. Even as we publish our February recap, things continue to unfold – and our hearts go out to the people of this magnificent country.
Of course, this tragedy is evolving just as many countries are emerging from the worst of the <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/when-will-the-covid-19-pandemic-end" target="_blank">Covid-19 pandemic</a>, with many businesses poised for a return to normalcy (what that looks like still remains to be seen). Still, the lasting impact of the omnichannel revolution is being felt across all digital transformation strategies, giving way to more headless, composable, API-driven solutions as companies plan for a more digital future.
When it comes to movers and shakers, 2022 is starting much the same way as 2021: with big investments.
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/bloomreach-reaches-2-2-billion-valuation-following-175-million-investment-from-goldman-sachs/">Bloomreach</a>, a leading content and search platform focused on commerce, announced a $175 million round of funding – exploding its valuation to $2.2 billion. <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/elastic-path-secures-60m-in-funding-for-composable-commerce-growth/">Elastic Path</a> also made waves by securing $60 million in financing to grow its composable commerce solutions. We also saw <a href="https://www.pymnts.com/acquisitions/2022/ecommerce-platform-bigcommerce-acquires-software-firm-b2b-ninja/" target="_blank">BigCommerce</a> purchase B2B Ninja, an e-commerce platform, in an effort to energize quoting and other commerce services in their ecosystem. (Hint: we have more investment news below...)
As always, we try to recap some of the news you might have missed this month. There's a lot happening across our industry, and on a brighter note, we'll be announcing the winners of the CMS Critic Awards next week – both the People's Choice and Editor's Choice categories. We had a lot of great engagement over the last month across our social channels, and we're looking forward to sharing the results. 
<h2>Twilio Segment releases its 2022 CDP Report, finds CDPs booming as businesses look beyond cookies</h2>
We're all asking the same question: what happens to data in a post-cookie world?
Segment – a leading customer data platform (CDP) purchased by Twilio<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/twilio-acquires-segment-for-3-2b-adds-market-leading-cdp-for-building-data-driven-apps/" target="_blank"> in November of 2020</a> – is helping to shed some light on that query with the release of its third annual <a href="https://segment.com/the-cdp-report" target="_blank">Customer Data Platform Report </a>(CDP).
Based on anonymized platform usage data of Segment's 25,000+ customers between 11/1/2020 to 11/1/2021, the report finds aggressive adoption of CDPs over the past year as businesses build digital-first customer engagement strategies and reduce their reliance on third-party data. 
Covid-19 shifted consumer behavior on a number of levels. In response, organizations changed how they interacted with their customers. As more digital engagements ensued, so too did the amount of data being generated. This spurred an explosive demand for CDP layers, particularly as it related to the broader CMS and DXP ecosystems.
Along with the unimaginable growth in data, the volume of API calls has also skyrocketed. <a href="https://www.postman.com/" target="_blank">Postman</a> – a leading application platform for API testing – conducted a <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/postman-releases-2021-state-of-the-api-report-shows-global-trend-towards-api-first-digital-era/" target="_blank">survey</a> last year that showed the world is moving to an "API-first era" as integrations and endpoints expand exponentially. As an example, the API calls through Segment have been growing steadily year-over-year since 2017, but 2020-2021 was an inflection point – with API calls in their system reaching over 1 trillion per month. 
Another reason CDP popularity has rapidly exploded is the impending "death" of third-party data. With increasing privacy regulations and the shift to a cookieless future across apps and browsers, businesses are embracing first-party data as a focal point. 
Segment's findings validate that customer data has become an integral part of how organizations are powering their digital experiences. The report also lists 2021's fastest-growing apps. For more details, you can access the full report at: <a href="https://segment.com/the-cdp-report" target="_blank">https://segment.com/the-cdp-report</a>.
<h2>Headless commerce provider fabric announces $140 Million Series C funding led by SoftBank</h2>
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-headless-commerce-platforms/" target="_blank">fabric</a>, the fast-growing headless commerce platform, announced the closing of a Series C funding round of $140M led by Softbank, with participation from Forerunner Ventures, Glynn Capital, and existing investors Redpoint Ventures Norwest Ventures, and Stripes. 
This latest round of funding closes a mere 219 days after its Series B – and now positions fabric's value at approximately $1.5B.
"Retailers need to meet modern consumers wherever they are – whether online, offline, mobile, social, or any future entry point. This means merchants of all sizes, and especially mid-market and enterprise, need the right commerce platform to keep pace with evolving trends," said Robert Kaplan, Investment Director at SoftBank Investment Advisers. "We believe that fabric has built the industry's best API-first modular commerce platform and accompanying commerce applications to give merchants unrivaled power and flexibility, all in a manner that reduces the pain of migrating over from legacy, outdated commerce platforms."
Funds from the Series C round will be utilized for accelerating product development largely through automation and intelligence and geographic expansion. 
<h2>Netlify announces Netlify Graph: A faster way for teams to develop web apps with APIs</h2>
Netlify, a Git-powered static site generator and headless CMS that's all the rage in the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-jamstack-static-site-generators-for-2021/">Jamstack</a> community, has <a href="https://www.netlify.com/blog/announcing-netlify-graph-a-faster-way-for-teams-to-develop-web-apps-with-apis" target="_blank">announced Netlify Graph:</a> a GraphQL-powered experience designed to help developers build interactive and connected web applications faster.
The shift to API-first development has created an ecosystem where apps are modular and reusable. While the API-first approach is developer-friendly, it has also introduced new complexities such as discovering, securing, learning, and governing APIs. Netlify's Graph is designed to make this experience easier for developers, allowing them to use APIs without writing undifferentiated glue code, learning every API's unique structure, or composing endless amounts of endpoints to get data from various APIs into your app.
Netlify Graph is in public beta and available globally. It starts with a catalog that includes some of the most frequently requested APIs that development teams use, such as GitHub, Stripe, and Salesforce. The company plans to add more in the coming months. The Netlify Graph beta is available to all Netlify users and can be accessed from your <a href="https://app.netlify.com/" target="_blank">Netlify team dashboard</a>. Once logged in, simply select "Graph" from your Netlify site dashboard menu.
To learn more, head over to the <a href="https://github.com/netlify/labs/tree/main/features/graph/documentation" target="_blank">Netlify Graph docs.</a>
<h2>BigCommerce acquires B2B Ninja to make online selling easier for B2B merchants</h2>
<a href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/?utm_source=Business+Wire&amp;utm_medium=press+release&amp;utm_campaign=BigCommerce+Invests+in+Becoming+World%E2%80%99s+Most+Powerful+B2B+Ecommerce+Platform+with+Acquisition+of+B2B+Ninja" target="_blank">BigCommerce</a>, a leading cloud e-commerce platform, <a href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/press/releases/bigcommerce-invests-in-becoming-worlds-most-powerful-b2b-ecommerce-platform-with-acquisition-of-b2b-ninja/" target="_blank">announced</a> the acquisition of <a href="https://www.b2bninja.com/" target="_blank">B2B Ninja</a> (formerly Quote Ninja) – an enterprise software solution that provides leading business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce capabilities for merchants of all sizes.
<a href="https://www.forrester.com/playbook/The+B2B+eCommerce+Playbook+For+2018/-/E-PLA370" target="_blank">According to Forrester</a>, U.S. B2B e-commerce transactions are expected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2023. This is creating a groundswell of opportunity for e-commerce platform providers to deliver focused solutions to this segment of the market. A longtime BigCommerce partner, B2B Ninja brings its best-in-class quoting solution to help streamline transactions by delivering powerful e-commerce functionality to B2B merchants.
"B2B Ninja is an excellent addition to our already strong B2B capabilities," said Brent Bellm, CEO of BigCommerce. "Complementing our recent launch of B2B Edition, this is the next big step in providing a platform that is easier to use and faster than legacy B2B solutions and more flexible and powerful than other SaaS platforms. We continue to invest in ways that make BigCommerce the best platform for merchants of all sizes regardless of who or where their customers are or where merchants are selling."
B2B Ninja is available to any BigCommerce merchant on any plan to enhance the customer experience and easily manage quotes online.

CMS Monthly Recap: Big Investment News, Segment Releases 2022 CDP Report, Netlify Graph Launches and More

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While some of us are shoveling content across digital channels, others are digging out from record snowfall. 
It's fair to say that "Old Man Winter" has finally arrived, and he's brought a distinct chill to more than the weather. The Nasdaq Composite just <a href="https://variety.com/2022/biz/news/nasdaq-january-drop-covid19-pandemic-1235167945/" target="_blank">experienced its worst start</a> to a January since 2008, with the deepest correction felt across the technology sector. It's hard to know if this is a momentary blip or a trend, but the recent volatility is making things a little less predictable. 
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, tech companies have realized unprecedented growth. If you're not familiar with the <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/five-fifty-the-quickening" target="_blank">McKinsey study</a> called "The Quickening," it's a stunning piece that codifies the rapid acceleration of e-Commerce from late 2019 into 2020 – when the world experienced 10 years of digital transformation in just 90 days. In the report, they refer to the effect as feeling like "whiplash," and that sounds right. But is the whipping and lashing over?
Despite a light dusting of news, 2022 is already shaping up to be "The Year of the MACH," as evidenced by the continued growth in this burgeoning quadrant of the digital ecosystem. While much of the noise is being amplified by the <a href="https://machalliance.org/" target="_blank">MACH Alliance</a>, there's no question that many organizations are expanding their investment in composable and modular solutions – and looking to power their content strategies with headless CMS and commerce platforms. 
Last month, we covered news from the MACH Alliance as they <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/aws-joins-mach-alliance-as-enabler-member-reflects-growth-of-cloud-native-solutions/">welcomed AWS</a> as an "Enabler Member" in the ecosystem, reflecting the growth of Cloud-native solutions (hint: we have more MACH to cover in today's recap). We also covered news from Optimizely, as they <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-integrates-b2b-commerce-cloud-and-content-cloud-combines-headless-commerce-with-cms/">announced</a> an integrated version of its B2B Commerce Cloud and Content Cloud products – as well as a recent <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/new-forrester-tei-study-siteimprove-enterprise-platform-delivers-275-roi/">Forrester TEI study</a> showing some astounding ROI performance from <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/siteimprove-seo-provides-all-in-one-capabilities-for-enhancing-search-performance/">Siteimprove</a>.
VOTING IS OPEN! Cast your ballot for the 2021 CMS Critic People's Choice Awards, which are open through February 20th! We received a ton of nominations across all our categories, and we're thrilled to share the top three for your consideration. Go on... tell us which platforms deserve the crown! <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/vote-for-the-cms-critic-2021-peoples-choice-awards/">Click here to vote now.</a>
Ready to hit the slopes for some news? Grab your skis and keep scrolling downhill...
 
<h2>MACH Alliance announces MongoDB and Netlify as first members of new "Enabler" category</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/02/image-6-e1643908103417.png" />
Before the well-hyped news about AWS joining the <a href="http://www.machalliance.org/" target="_blank">MACH Alliance</a> – the group of independent tech companies dedicated to advocating for open, best-of-breed technology ecosystems – the organization <a href="https://machalliance.org/newsroom/mach-alliance-announces-mongodb-and-netlify-as-first-members-of-new-enabler-category" target="_blank">announced</a> its new "Enabler" membership category, along with its inaugural members: MongoDB and Netlify. The news was released just as the MACH Alliance's global <a href="https://machalliance.org/members" target="_blank">membership reached almost 50</a>.
The MACH Alliance's Enabler category is reserved for organizations that MACH platforms utilize to deliver their service or technology. Because they "enable" a MACH provider instead of offering a direct MACH solution, they aren't suited for an Alliance membership in the Vendor or System Integrator categories – but can often be key components in how a solution is delivered. 
A bit more about these two Enabler members:
<a href="http://mongodb.com/" target="_blank">MongoDB</a> is a leading database platform designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers and the applications they build. The MongoDB database platform has been downloaded over 210 million times and is running in systems around the globe. 
MongoDB shares a common belief with the MACH Alliance: that modern software's interoperability and open architecture will propel current and future digital experiences – the kind that requires unprecedented personalized capabilities that are delivered at scale and weave a mesh of complementary microservices drawing data from multiple sources. All of this requires a level of flexibility that both MongoDB and the MACH Alliance share. 
<a href="https://www.netlify.com/" target="_blank">Netlify</a> is a web development platform that was an early advocate of separating frontend design from backend business processes. By unifying the elements of the modern decoupled web, Netlify enables a 10-time faster path to more secure and scalable websites and apps. The company announced in November a $105 million Series D to accelerate the growth of its developer platform and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-jamstack-static-site-generators-for-2021/">Jamstack</a> ecosystem. 
Originally started by Netlify, the Jamstack "movement" has changed the trajectory of the web. Jamstack technologies provide nearly limitless choices to developers for designing rich customer experiences in web applications. Netlify unites different services to deliver MACH solutions, making it an ideal fit as an Enabler – delivering the workflow, expertise, and choice of tools for building solutions that reflect the MACH principles. 
"Our first two Enabler members are of the highest magnitude," said Sonja Keerl, president of the MACH Alliance. "The ecosystem of the MACH category and the industry direction that it represents is much bigger and wider than just the current 50 certified members. By having Enablers represented within the Alliance ecosystem, we now better cover the spectrum of businesses that fit within our membership guidelines and play a critical part in bringing MACH architecture to life. We're incredibly pleased to have MongoDB and Netlify on board as the first of many Enabler members."
The MACH Alliance has also <a href="https://machalliance.org/newsroom/mach-alliance-announces-eight-newly-certified-companies-as-global-membership-nears-50" target="_blank">announced</a> eight newly certified members in November. 
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<h2>Solodev launches new platform for building NFT Marketplaces to mint and sell digital assets in the metaverse</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/01/solodev-nft-marketplace-featured-image.jpg" />
<a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank">Solodev</a> – now repositioning itself as Solodev Cloud Services – <a href="https://www.solodev.com/news/solodev-launches-new-platform-for-building-nft-marketplaces-to-mint-and-sell-digital-assets-in-the-metaverse.stml" target="_blank">announced the launch of Solodev NFT Marketplace</a>, a platform that allows developers and organizations to build custom ecosystems for minting and selling NFTs on a fast, secure, and highly scalable infrastructure powered by AWS. 
With Solodev's new solution, users can choose to deploy a custom NFT marketplace on the blockchain of their choice, including <a href="https://www.solodev.com/marketplace/ethereum" target="_blank">Ethereum</a> and <a href="https://www.solodev.com/marketplace/cardano" target="_blank">Cardano</a>, with additional options coming soon. Solodev's advanced marketplace as a Service (MaaS) capabilities will enable organizations to stand up their NFT exchange with greater speed and ease, accelerating their journey to the metaverse. 
"At Solodev, we've always been focused on supporting the builders – and NFT marketplaces are what builders want to build," said Shawn Moore, Chief Technology Officer at Solodev Cloud Services. "There's no doubt that Meta, Amazon, Gamestop, and Walmart are leading the way to the metaverse. Now, with our cloud and blockchain services, anyone can launch an NFT marketplace at scale to reach the metaverse faster and compete."
According to their press release, Solodev Cloud Services is currently developing a high-end NFT gallery in partnership with several organizations, focusing on studio and digital art. The new exchange will be built on Cardano with plans to go live in the coming months, with support for several new blockchains coming soon. In addition, Solodev is also launching a crypto incubator that will leverage smart contracts to govern the creation of high-tech startups.
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<h2>Glassbox and Optimizely partner to accelerate digital transformation for businesses</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2022/01/press-release-blog-featured-images-16.png" />
<a href="https://www.glassbox.com/" target="_blank">Glassbox</a>, a software as a service (SaaS) company that provides digital experience analytics for web and mobile applications, announced a strategic partnership with <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/" target="_blank">Optimizely</a> – a leading digital experience platform (DXP). The two companies plan to strengthen their joint go-to-market offerings to give customers an unparalleled advantage for transforming the digital customer experience. 
The Glassbox analytics platform provides a single source of truth that captures, visualizes, and analyzes digital journeys. It empowers enterprise organizations to manage and optimize the entire digital lifecycle of their web and mobile customers. Through the Glassbox and Optimizely partnership, the companies will enable customers to unlock their digital potential and drive new levels of insights and innovation. 
"Customer expectations for a seamless digital experience are at an all-time high, so this collaboration will be an ideal fit for all those organizations looking to fulfill this objective more effectively thanks to Optimizely's best-in-class digital experience technology and Glassbox's superior digital experience analytics," said Dror Friedman, VP Channel &amp; Alliances, Glassbox.
One thing Optimizely consistently does well is listen to customers. The company also acquired a number of strategic technologies to help address customer needs in a single platform. This includes <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizely-acquires-customer-data-platform-zaius/" target="_blank">Zaius</a>, a customer data platform, and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/optimizelys-acquisition-of-welcome-signals-expanded-focus-on-marketers/" target="_blank">Welcome</a> – a content marketing (CMP), marketing resource management (MRM), and digital asset management (DAM) platform. 
Optimizely has been challenging the crop of leading enterprise DXPs featured on <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/key-takeaways-from-gartners-2021-magic-quadrant-for-digital-experience-platforms/" target="_blank">Gartner's 2021 Magic Quadrant for DXPs</a>, as well as the <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/company/press/optimizely-named-a-leader-in-agile-content-management-systems/" target="_blank">Forrester Wave for Agile Content Management Systems</a>. 
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<h2>WordPress releases Gutenberg 12.4 with accessibility improvements, categories reminder, and and A-List of shortcuts</h2>
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If you haven't heard, there's some new stuff on the WordPress block: Gutenberg 12.4 was released right before the long-awaited <a href="https://wordpress.org/support/wordpress-version/version-5-9/" target="_blank">WordPress 5.9</a>, which includes the Full Site Editing (FSE) feature - an upgrade that's been creating quite a bit of <a href="https://toolset.com/2021/08/full-site-editing-future-of-wordpress-and-what-it-means-for-you/" target="_blank">discussion and debate</a> across the WordPress community. 
These new capabilities help reduce the complexities of building websites using dynamic themes and structured components, all with seamless editing. But for developers creating bespoke designs, Gutenberg and FSE are presenting some obstacles.
There are a few other enhancements worth noting:
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Accessibility improvements
The focus feature now correctly returns to the list view button after closing out of <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37798" target="_blank">list view</a> – saving a lot of trouble to get back to where you were before opening it. There are also more improvements to the block inserter sidebar, ant the search input now receives focus when it's opened.
Post publish panel categories reminder
Tags and categories make it easier for people to navigate your website, but it can be easy to forget to add them when publishing a post. To solve that problem, the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/37703" target="_blank">suggestion for assigning a category</a> to the post is added, and it will show up if a category is not already assigned.
There are a few more minor improvements, and you peruse the full list of updates on the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/01/19/whats-new-in-gutenberg-12-4-19-january/" target="_blank">WordPress press release page</a>.
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CMS Monthly Recap: MACH Alliance Announces New Enabler Category, Glassbox and Optimizely Partner, Gutenberg Updates and More

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It's hard to believe that October has already come and gone.Maybe we can blame Halloween and the ensuing candy coma, but last month seemed surprisingly quiet in the CMS and DXP news cycle.But that's not entirely true: rather than tracking big mergers or major releases, we were served a number of small yet significant improvements from various vendors – more like those mini-sized candy bars that still get the job done.For the record, we're big fans of Almond Joy.The e-commerce sector drove most of the trends in an otherwise not-so-spooky month, with several companies releasing more integrations designed to make online selling easier and more accessible. We're also seeing headless commerce take center stage as more brands look to grow their online sales in an omnichannel world, and it's growing in popularity every day. If you're evaluating solutions, be sure to check out our recent article on the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-headless-commerce-platforms/">top headless commerce platforms.</a>If you're ready to close out October's tricks and treats, keep reading.<h2>Postman's 2021 "State of API" report shows the world is moving towards an API-first digital era</h2><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/11/postman-report.jpg" alt="Postman chart image" />Forget Halloween. <a target="_blank" href="https://www.postman.com/">Postman</a>, a leading platform for building and using APIs, delivered an early Christmas gift with this year's free "State of the API" report. This baby is chock full of data and statistics about API trends across industries and has become a primer for understanding how API-first strategies are transforming everything. For the report, Postman surveyed more than 28,000 developers and API professionals who shared their thoughts on a range of topics, including their organizations' development priorities, how they get their work done, and where they see the industry going. Postman's authors combined these insights with data observed on the Postman API Platform to build a more complete picture of the current state – and the future direction – of APIs.Here are some of the key findings from the report:<ul><li>The pandemic changed the world, and the world responded with APIs: Just a short of two-thirds of respondents stated that the pandemic somewhat or significantly affected their work.</li><li>The API ecosystem is global and growing: Over the past 12 months, Postman users signed in from an impressive 234 different countries and geographies while making 855 million API requests (up 56% from the prior year).</li><li>Developers are spending more time with APIs: Exactly how much time is spent working with APIs? 49% of respondents said that more than half of the organization's development effort is spent on APIs – compared to just over 40% last year.</li><li>More companies are embracing the API-first philosophy: This year, 67% of survey respondents ranked themselves as a five or higher in terms of embracing an API-first philosophy, while only 62% ranked themselves in this way in 2020.</li></ul>Want more? Of course, you do! Let your own API consume the free 57-page report here.<h2>Mailchimp and Shopify launch direct integration</h2> <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/11/mailchimp-shopify-e1635869888639.jpg" alt="MailChimp and Shopify logos" />Monkey see, monkey shop? Yup. And it's now easier than ever. Mailchimp, a leading email and marketing automation platform, <a target="_blank" href="https://mailchimp.com/mailchimp-and-shopify-launch-direct-integration/">announced</a> that they've partnered with Shopify – a leader in e-commerce – to deliver a new integration that's available today. New and existing users of both platforms will be able to connect their Mailchimp account to their Shopify storefront through <a target="_blank" href="https://mailchimp.com/integrations/shopify/">direct integration</a>, eliminating the need for third-party tools and manual data transfers.By connecting Mailchimp and Shopify, merchants will be able to combine the power of purchase data with marketing data and use those insights to help drive conversions, increase revenue, and reach more customers at the right point in their buying journey. The new integration also makes it possible for small business customers to connect with their audiences. This integration is of critical importance right now as retailers gear up for the 2021 holiday season. According to U.S. News &amp; World Report, this year's online holiday spending is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2021-10-20/adobe-forecasts-record-online-holiday-spending-season-as-supply-chain-issues-persist#:~:text=Global%20online%20spending%20is%20likewise,new%20milestone%20in%20e%2Dcommerce.">predicted to increase by 11%</a>. By connecting MailChimp and Shopify, brands and retailers can accelerate their marketing and e-commerce capabilities and capitalize on more online transactions than ever before. "Last year, Mailchimp customers generated 36 percent more orders from Thanksgiving to Giving Tuesday than they did in 2019, showing just how important having an online presence for commerce and retail businesses really is," said Joni Deus, VP of App Marketplace at Mailchimp. "We're thrilled to have partnered with Shopify again ahead of our customers' busiest season to make it easier for merchants to reach their customers, sell more stuff, and be successful.""As our merchants prepare for the holiday season and continue to adjust to the new realities of commerce, we're excited to welcome Mailchimp to the Shopify Partner Ecosystem," said Fatima Yusuf, Director of Commercial, App Ecosystem, Shopify. "The combined power of Mailchimp's suite of marketing tools and Shopify's robust commerce infrastructure will level the playing field and unlock even more opportunity for independent businesses to grow and succeed into the future."<h2>Adobe adds Workfront integrations to creative and marketing apps</h2> <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/11/adobe-workfront-featured-image.jpeg" />Talk about "working it out."Adobe has finally announced some new capabilities in <a target="_blank" href="https://www.workfront.com/integrations/adobe/experience-manager">Adobe Workfront</a>, targeting one of the most challenging aspects of delivering personalized content at both speed and scale: dynamic collaboration, communication, and workflows within creative teams and between creative and marketing teams.Of course, this has been a long-anticipated evolution. Last year, the creative experience powerhouse <a target="_blank" href="https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2020/Adobe-to-Acquire-Workfront/default.aspx">acquired Workfront</a> – a leading work management platform for marketers – for $1.50 billion. The goal was to integrate Workfront's capabilities into Adobe's Experience Cloud and allow customers to manage complex marketing workflows. Finally, that integration has begun to bear fruit. The new capabilities in Workfront integrate seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe XD. As an example, the Photoshop plugin gives users the ability to work together through an embedded Workfront update screen. Creators can see tasks and issues and post and view comments related to their projects. They can also log time, export assets, and seamlessly collaborate on digital proofing, reviews, and approvals — all without ever leaving <a target="_blank" href="https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.html">Photoshop</a>. The integration with Adobe Experience Manager provides integrated approvals and content delivery for enterprises. You can sync metadata between projects and final assets – and keep the work flowing with advanced enterprise workflows, including auto-publishing of assets. This integration is currently available for enterprise customers.There's also an update to the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.adobe.com/products/xd.html">Adobe XD</a> plugin, empowering designers to work with internal/external stakeholders, log time, and view details on all projects, tasks, issues, and documents. They have full access to all Workfront folders and documents, can upload work, send shared links for review, attach proof workflows to assets and maintain version control. This plugin is available now on both the Adobe Marketplace and Creative Cloud Desktop.Adobe also announced additional capabilities to enhance experience delivery to B2B brands and make accessing Workfront features easier for all Adobe customers. This includes the Adobe Marketo Engage Connector for scaling customer engagement and supporting global efforts with a small team – and the Adobe Identity Service for authentication and validation of the end-users, including federation and Single-Sign-On (SSO)."The ability to align complex workflows, processes and the foundational work — especially those handoffs between marketing strategy and content development — is critical in enabling teams to get personalized content to customers faster, with greater impact, and aligned to company strategy," said Liz Miller, Vice President, and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. "Adobe Workfront brings order to the nimble, bidirectional madness of marketing work, serving as the 'effectiveness engine' for the modern marketing machine so critical to moving digital business forward."<h2>BigCommerce launches Ads and Listings on Google, giving merchants a one-stop-shop to list and sync products for free</h2> <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/11/bigcommerce-google-ads-e1635877084866.png" />Love it or list it... on Google. There's no question that Google is drifting deeper into the e-commerce ecosystem, providing a direct path "from search to sell" for a wide range of services. A lot of this has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the consumer shift to online purchases and deliveries. In fact, if you've searched for, say, a new pizza place near you, Google is serving up more than options – it's allowing you to view a menu and place an order without ever leaving Google.Sure, this presents some competitive challenges to e-commerce platform providers, but Google is a ways off from consuming all storefronts. In the meantime, they present a dynamic channel for sellers and retailers to reach audiences at the point of search.To that end, BigCommerce, the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-headless-commerce-platforms/">popular cloud e-commerce platform</a> for fast-growing and established brands, just announced the launch of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/dm/google-native/?utm_source=Press%20Release&amp;utm_medium=Landing%20Page&amp;utm_id=Google%20Ads%20Listings">Ads and Listings on Google</a> – a new native app that enables small to medium-sized BigCommerce merchants in the U.S. to connect their store to the Google Merchant Center and add products for free. Merchants can also take advantage of Google Ads campaigns to reach more customers and uncover performance insights and trends, ensuring a consistent brand experience.<a target="_blank" href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/dm/google-native/?utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_source=partner_google&amp;utm_campaign=keyword_launch_post">With this new integration</a>, BigCommerce merchants of all sizes will be able to easily list their products for free on Google, create ad campaigns, and review performance metrics directly in their BigCommerce store. This also means BigCommerce merchants can now integrate with Google's shopping features across Search, Shopping, Image Search, and YouTube."Ads and Listings on Google is a logical next step for our omnichannel merchants to reach further and attract new customers who rely on Google's powerful shopping capabilities to drive traffic and growth," said Sharon Gee, Vice President and General Manager of Omnichannel at BigCommerce. "As more retailers enter the e-commerce landscape, the more crowded it will be for them to reach the right shoppers across the channels they're searching in. Ads and Listings on Google give merchants a true advantage to get discovered without ever having to leave their BigCommerce store."Merchants can directly access the Ads and Listings on the Google app via the BigCommerce Channel Manager, creating a one-stop-shop experience to upload products, produce paid ad campaigns, and generate reports to track and monitor shopper activities. Key benefits include:<ul><li>Manage product catalogs from a single location: Merchants can upload product listings, create paid campaigns and track and analyze performance all from within their BigCommerce store. Any changes will automatically sync to Google, ensuring a consistent brand experience across all Google channels.</li><li>Reach new audiences and drive traffic: Merchants can connect with the right shoppers at the right moment when they're searching for products across Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and the web to extend customer reach further.</li><li>Gain more insight: In Google's Merchant Center, merchants can measure the impact of every sale and show products to the most valuable customers to better maximize marketing efforts.</li></ul>The Ads and Listings on the Google app are now available to all small to mid-sized BigCommerce merchants and currently support USD currency with international currencies soon to follow. Learn more about the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bigcommerce.com/dm/google-native/?utm_source=Press%20Release&amp;utm_medium=Landing%20Page&amp;utm_id=Google%20Ads%20Listings">Ads and Listings on the Google app here</a>.

CMS Monthly Recap: Mailchimp and Shopify Launch Direct Integration, BigCommerce Launches Ads and Listings on Google, and More

Featured image of CMS Critic Monthly Recap logo with background of Halloween decorations and jack-o-lantern

Ah, the bliss of early autumn. Can you feel it in the air?
As September ends and nature's majestic foliage blooms across the Northern hemisphere, our editorial staff is catching its collective breath. It's been a summer like no other, with a pandemic still stoking uncertainty in most parts of the world. But one thing is still certain: digital transformation is exploding – and shows no signs of slowing down. 
In the CMS and DXP territories, we've been following the continuous saga of consolidation and the rabid race to expand features. This month alone, we saw <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/adobe-acquires-video-collaboration-platform-frame-io/" target="_blank">Adobe acquire Frame.io</a>, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/sitecore-acquires-ai-powered-search-platform-reflektion/" target="_blank">Sitecore purchase Reflektion</a>, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/duda-snaps-up-snipcart-to-boost-e-commerce-capabilities-qa-with-ceo-itai-sadan/" target="_blank">Duda snap up Snipcart</a>, and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/acquia-widens-its-dxp-stack-with-widen-acquires-dam-and-pim-capabilities/" target="_blank">Acquia buy Widen</a>. The game is getting tight at the enterprise level, and we'll be monitoring activity across our sector as we approach the end of the year. 
In the meantime, here are some other snippets we've been following in September. 
 
<h2>Cloudways releases Top 9 WordPress page builders based on performance</h2>
<img style="max-width:750px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/09/best-wordpress-page-builders-banner.jpg" alt="Best WordPress Page Builders Banner" />
<a href="https://www.cloudways.com/en/" target="_blank">Cloudways</a>, the managed cloud hosting platform, has selected the top 9 WordPress page builders based on active installations and positive user reviews. The company vetted each entry through a rigorous testing and review process, giving us their top choices based on a variety of criteria. 
So what is a WordPress page builder, anyway? Quite simply, it's a plugin that replaces the classic WordPress editor with a third-party UI. In most cases, this interface lets you drag and drop elements like buttons, social icons, galleries, and images onto a template. There's no code or complexity involved, and almost any user can be successful without a steep learning curve. 
That said, most drag-and-drop builders do bring a modicum of frustration and compromises to the experience (translation: you don't always get exactly what you want). There's often more complexity than you bargain for, and page builders do lock users into their own unique, non-standardized code - so you're stuck with it. They also have a tendency to <a href="https://pagely.com/blog/wordpress-page-builders/" target="_blank">slow down a website</a> with added bloat.
Then why use page builders? Well, in the early days of the web, deep development expertise was needed to build almost any kind of website. Although WordPress was initially designed to give people the ability to publish websites without creating and coding from scratch, the leading open source content management system has become more and more complex over the years – evolving into a platform that is vastly different from its origins. 
Today, it's getting easier to design and develop websites thanks to the evolution of more reliable website builders, and that's why Cloudways has invested in their assessment. And without further ado, here are their top 9 picks:
<ol>
<li><a href="https://www.brizy.io/" target="_blank">Brizy</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/" target="_blank">Beaver Builder</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/10-best-plugins-for-elementor-page-builder/" target="_blank">Elementor</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.seedprod.com/" target="_blank">SeedProd</a></li>
<li><a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-pagebuilder/" target="_blank">WP Page Builder</a></li>
<li><a href="https://siteorigin.com/" target="_blank">SiteOrigin</a></li>
<li><a href="https://oxygenbuilder.com/" target="_blank">Oxygen</a></li>
<li><a href="https://zionbuilder.io/" target="_blank">Zion</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.boldgrid.com/" target="_blank">BoldGrid</a></li>
</ol>
The Cloudways page builder review is jampacked with information, including which speed testing tools they used, the number of active installations and star ratings of each page builder, and their performance analysis results according to GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insight Performance Analysis, Pingdom Performance Analysis, and K6.io Performance Analysis. Click here to <a href="https://www.cloudways.com/blog/wordpress-page-builders" target="_blank">read the review</a> and dig into the details. 
<h2>UserWay and Duda partner to make professional websites more accessible</h2>
<img style="max-width:800px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/09/usw_duda-60460a9263e4c180db740dd2b08cfba0.jpg" alt="UserWay and Duda logos" />
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/duda-snaps-up-snipcart-to-boost-e-commerce-capabilities-qa-with-ceo-itai-sadan/" target="_blank">Duda</a>, the professional website builder, announced the addition of <a href="https://userway.org/" target="_blank">UserWay's</a> AI-powered accessibility widget to their Duda App Store. 
A nearly ubiquitous fixture on websites, Userway's cloud-based widget provides accessibility solutions without refactoring your website's existing code – helping to ensure a comprehensive legal and regulatory compliance framework covering ADA, Section 508, WCAG 2.1 AA, and much more.
There are currently <a href="https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health" target="_blank">one billion people</a> living with disabilities worldwide, and over the last decade, digital accessibility has become one of <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/why-your-website-has-to-be-just-as-ada-compliant-as-your-office-building/" target="_blank">the most important and talked-about issues</a> in the web and digital industries. UserWay is helping to address that with a simple, elegant solution that makes accessibility more attainable. For Duda, adding the UserWay feature helps provide their customers with more assurance that their digital experiences are more accessible. 
"We are constantly looking for ways to better serve our customers," said Itai Sadan, Duda's founder and CEO. "Adding UserWay's accessibility technology to our platform allows web professionals the freedom to design their websites without having to worry about the effects their choices have on accessibility. Some web professionals fear that being accessible will be limiting, but UserWay's solutions change that. We're proud that sites created on our platform will now be more accessible for those with disabilities."
Duda customers will be able to quickly strengthen the accessibility of their websites by quickly and easily installing UserWay's Accessibility Widget – which works perfectly out-of-the-box on any website built with Duda. This includes both purchased and premade templates as well as hand-crafted templates and designs.
You can learn more about it on Duda's website at <a href="https://www.duda.co/signup" target="_blank">https://www.duda.co</a>
<h2>Hyland launches OnBase in AWS Marketplace</h2>
<img style="max-width:720px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/09/e0030_thumb_big_media.png" alt="Hyland OnBase" />
<a href="http://www.hyland.com/" target="_blank">Hyland</a>, a leading enterprise content management (ECM) and process management provider, is now offering their <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/prodview-pt2svfcpfgiga?sr=0-1&amp;ref_=beagle&amp;applicationId=AWSMPContessa" target="_blank">OnBase platform in the AWS Marketplace</a>, supporting the evolving needs of organizations to better manage digital information from anywhere and support their shifting work environments.
Hyland is best known for its <a href="https://www.onbase.com/en" target="_blank">Onbase</a> and <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/perceptive" target="_blank">Perceptive</a> content management products, which securely centralize enterprise content and deliver relevant information to users across a wide variety of industries – including healthcare, finance, insurance, higher education, and manufacturing. Hyland commands the second-place position in the Leader Quadrant of <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/explore/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-content-services-platforms" target="_blank">Gartner's 2020 Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms</a> and has been <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/learn/it-programs/forrester-wave-content-services-Q2-2021" target="_blank">named a content platform leader</a> in the Forrester Wave Report for Content Platforms, Q2 2021.
Designed to efficiently manage content, processes, and cases, OnBase connects and centralizes business-critical content in one secure location. As more organizations choose cloud technology to run their operations, Hyland's cloud-first vision and development methodology set the foundation to support evolving business practices – delivering relevant information when and where users need it to increase productivity, improve customer experience, and reduce risk across the enterprise. 
The addition of OnBase in AWS Marketplace with further Hyland's cloud-first vision – providing organizations across the globe with the business dexterity they need, leveraging content management, business process management, and intelligent automation solutions with the scalability, reliability, and security of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
"Our <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/company/partner-program/strategic-alliance-partners/aws" target="_blank">work with AWS</a> has never been stronger, and we're proud to leverage its infrastructure to power OnBase in the Hyland Cloud," said Ed McQuiston, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer at Hyland. "With joint customer success stories spanning the healthcare, government, insurance, and financial services industries, Hyland and AWS are better together, providing leading cloud-based content services solutions to help organizations thrive in the next normal."
Hyland had been on a buying spree in the past few years, acquiring both <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-acquires-alfresco-focuses-on-cloud-and-global-expansion-of-enterprise-cms/" target="_blank">Alfresco</a>, an open-source content services platform, and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-enters-agreement-to-acquire-nuxeo/" target="_blank">Nuxeo</a>, a content services and digital asset management (DAM) platform.
<h2>WordPress Gutenberg 11.5 achieves a full site editing milestone</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/09/headings-framecap-2048x1152-1.jpg" alt="WordPress Headings framecap" />
Did Gutenberg ever take a break from his printing press? Not likely. Once books could be printed at scale, the demand was never-ending. 
 The same holds true for the folks at WordPress – who seem to never pause on their updates and improvements the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/gutenberg-2-years-later-is-wordpress-better-off/" target="_blank">Gutenberg editor</a>. Just two weeks after releasing 11.4, <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/09/17/whats-new-in-gutenberg-11-5-16-september/" target="_blank">11.5</a> hit the streets with a host of new features. Busy bees to be sure.
Here are a few noteworthy additions:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/33991" target="_blank">Block Gap support</a> now provides opt-in to control for users to choose the distance between items within a block. This feature has also been added to the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/34456" target="_blank">Columns</a>, <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/34570" target="_blank">Title</a>, and <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/32367" target="_blank">Navigation</a> blocks.</li>
<li>Following the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/33359" target="_blank">introduction of Flex Layout</a> in <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/08/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-11-2-0-4-august/" target="_blank">11.2.0</a>, now Flex Layouts are supported within the <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/34493" target="_blank">Social Links</a> and <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/34535" target="_blank">Group</a> blocks. </li>
<li>The Social Links block now has a "Flex" justification option for automatic best-fit. </li>
<li>There's a <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/34535" target="_blank">new variation of the Group block</a> that allows for Flex Layout. You can try it by choosing "Row" from the block inserter.</li>
<li>The Heading Levels menu has been redesigned to a vertical orientation, making it easier to visualize the hierarchy.</li>
<li>There's also a new setting to <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/33656" target="_blank">customize the Next and Previous Page indicators</a> in the Query Pagination block, allowing the addition of an arrow or a chevron to your designs.</li>
</ul>
To see the full list of updates and fixes, check out the <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/09/17/whats-new-in-gutenberg-11-5-16-september/" target="_blank">WordPress 11.5 release notes</a>.
<h2>Canva Raises $200 million at $40 Billion valuation, fueled by the global demand for visual communication</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/09/canva_cofounders_ltr_cliff_obrecht_melanie_perkins_cameron_adams-scaled.jpg" alt="Canva cofounders" />
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/canva-button-gives-cms-users-integrated-graphic-design-tools-for-visual-content/" target="_blank">Canva</a>, the graphic design and collaboration platform, is now officially a "unicorn" valued at $40 billion. This comes after the company raised another $200 million in funding led by the investment management firm <a href="https://www.axios.com/canva-200-million-billion-valuation-t-rowe-price-8ace330a-2b17-403f-9d9f-97efdc223885.html" target="_blank">T.Rowe Price</a>.
Melanie Perkins, the CEO and the co-founder of Canva, launched the first version of the platform in 2013 to make graphic design accessible to everyone. The Canva platform can be used for many things, from designing resumes to creating a wide array of marketing materials including social media images, logos, posters, business cards, presentations, cards, reports, reports, infographics, and more. 
With 60 million monthly active users across 190 countries, there are now 7 billion total designs created on Canva at a rate of more than 120 designs every second. Canva also boasts over 500,000 paying teams on their platform, with their latest release catering to large teams and enterprises across the globe.
The latest funding round will be used to expand Canva's team of more than 2,000 employees, which the company expects to double in the year ahead.

CMS Monthly Recap: Canva Raises $200 million at $40 Billion Valuation, Hyland Launches OnBase in AWS Marketplace, and More

CMS Monthly Recap text lockup with image of autumn trees and foliage

There's nothing quite as sweet as ice cream on a hot summer's day. And speaking of hot, the last month has been a blaze of activity in the CMS and DXP markets. Grab something cold and we'll break it all down for you.
The heatwave started with <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/what-contentfuls-175m-investment-round-means-for-the-future-of-cms/" target="_blank">Contentful's $175 million investment round</a>, making the headless unicorn the latest platform to broadcast a big money moment over the past 18 months. But they weren't alone: <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/umbraco-cms-acquired-by-software-investor-monterro-interview-with-ceo-kim-sneum-madsen/" target="_blank">Umbraco</a> CMS also announced their acquisition by software investment firm Monterro, signaling a bold new chapter for the platform player. 
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wix-launches-new-branded-app-builder-for-creating-code-free-native-mobile-apps/" target="_blank">Wix</a> also made waves with the release of a new code-free app builder, making it easier for users to add a native iOS or Android app to their digital strategy. It's another innovative move for the website builder, and we'll be following up with a closer look in the coming months. 
We also blew out the candles for <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/joomla-cms-turns-16-celebrates-with-long-awaited-release-of-version-4-0/" target="_blank">Joomla!'s 16th birthday</a>. Still want a slice of their open source layer cake? Check out <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/joomla-cms-turns-16-celebrates-with-long-awaited-release-of-version-4-0/" target="_blank">Joomla!'s Version 4.0</a>, which was released just prior to the festivities. Nine years in the making, the new upgrade offers a host of features that are worth sampling. 
Despite the glut of negative news, we also had a chance to hear from <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/solodev-selected-as-cloud-consulting-partner-of-the-2022-special-olympics-usa-games/" target="_blank">Solodev</a> about their partnership with the <a href="https://www.solodev.com/news/solodev-selected-as-cloud-consulting-partner-of-the-2022-special-olympics-usa-games.stml" target="_blank">Special Olympics 2022 USA Games</a>. The CMS-turned-cloud-app-ecosystem has built the first-ever serverless infrastructure for the non-profit, which will power a fan engagement experience for athletes and spectators. It's a feel-good story, and a great one to end your week on.
No plain vanilla in this stack. Keep reading for a few more scoops. 
 
<h2>Zoho launches Canvas, a design studio that rethinks the CRM Experience for enterprises</h2>
<h2><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/08/zoho-canvas.png" alt="Zoho Canvas user interface" /></h2>
Zoho recently <a href="https://www.zoho.com/news/zoho-launches-canvas-design-studio-to-re-envision-crm-experience.html" target="_blank">announced</a> Canvas for Zoho CRM, a design studio for CRM personalization. Canvas brings simplicity to the CRM user experience through a no-code design studio that helps customers craft their own personalized experiences. Businesses can now create their own CRM interfaces that are better suited to the role of each employee without IT or developer involvement.
Canvas looks and works just like a CMS but with drag-and-drop functionality. You simply click on an element in a list of fields, i.e., Full Name, email, and drag it onto the canvas. Once you drag the data on the canvas, you can customize the look of it however you prefer. You can adjust the shapes of elements, spacing, colors, and font styles; basically every visual detail you can think of. If creating a style from scratch is overwhelming for you, Canvas also comes with a library of templates crafted by their in-house designers.
"A lot of CRM software already offers an abundance of personalization for customer experiences, but the same is not true for employee experiences. As a result, everyone's using the same system and paying the productivity tax for no reason." said Mani Vembu, COO of Zoho, "Imagine a reality where the system is tailor-made for each employee's role. That is true all-around for personalization, and that's what we're bringing to market with Canvas. We believe it's a more natural solution to the challenge of software adoption. Our ultimate aim is for businesses to create enterprise-wide software experiences with consumer-grade simplicity."
Canvas Capabilities Include:
<ul>
<li>Drag-and-drop editor: facilitate designing without the need to write a single line of code.</li>
<li>Template gallery: customers can pick a preset template that speaks to them and their industry and dive right in.</li>
<li>Industry-relevant views: companies can create views that are relevant to their industry, their work culture, their sales process, and more.</li>
<li>Self-service portals: customers can share Canvas creations over portals to create a better experience for vendors, stakeholders, and more.</li>
<li>Role-based assignment: admins can assign different Canvas views based on roles, responsibilities, and teams in their company.</li>
<li>Extensive formatting: Canvas houses a wide range of formatting options to edit the finer details of a view and loads styles dynamically based on conditions.</li>
</ul>
Canvas will be available across all editions of Zoho CRM at no additional cost.
 You can find more information on Canvas at <a href="https://www.zoho.com/canvas/" target="_blank">https://www.zoho.com/canvas/</a>.
<h2></h2>
<h2>Acquia renews Drupal Steward Program support, brings critical security fixes to enterprises first</h2>
<img style="max-width:640px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/08/drupal-steward-logo-1024x839.png" alt="drupal steward logo" />
Digital experience platform Acquia <a href="https://www.acquia.com/newsroom/press-releases/acquia-renews-drupal-steward-program-support-brings-critical-security-fixes" target="_blank">announced</a> that it is renewing its founding partnership support of the <a href="https://drupalsteward.org/" target="_blank">Drupal Steward Program</a>, a web application firewall introduced by the Drupal Association and operated jointly with the Drupal Security team. Acquia implemented Drupal Steward protection across its entire <a href="https://www.acquia.com/products/drupal-cloud" target="_blank">Drupal Cloud</a> platform, protecting thousands of the world's largest sites with the most up-to-date security and vulnerability fixes.
Acquia's participation in this program affords seamless, immediate protection to customers by routing their website domains to Drupal Steward, which automatically filters requests through the firewall. Malicious requests are blocked, giving IT teams the time they need to test and implement security updates on their own timelines. 
For example, in November 2020, Drupal Steward implemented protection against a critical remote code execution vulnerability, immediately protecting Acquia's customers. 
<h2></h2>
<h2>HubSpot partners with Envato to launch hundreds of high-quality CMS hub templates</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/08/themeforest-hubspot-collection.jpg" alt="ThemeForest HubSpot Collection" />
HubSpot – an integrated CRM, CMS, and digital marketing platform – has partnered with <a href="https://envato.com/" target="_blank">Envato</a>, the world-leading online community for creative assets like website themes and templates. The result is something HubSpot CMS and website users will be thrilled about. 
This month, the companies <a href="https://www.hubspot.com/company-news/hubspot-partners-with-envato" target="_blank">announced</a> the launch of more than 250 diverse, high-quality website themes on the <a href="https://themeforest.net/lp/hubspot-cms-hub-themes" target="_blank">Envato Market</a>, all made specifically for the <a href="https://www.hubspot.com/products/cms?_ga=2.234685790.1384499146.1628085564-1129582407.1628085564" target="_blank">HubSpot CMS Hub</a>. As part of their partnership, Envato has added a specific HubSpot category to their marketplace, allowing developers to sell themes they have created specifically for CMS Hub. These new options will now be featured alongside other popular content management systems, including WordPress, Webflow, and Drupal. 
Built for marketers and developers, CMS Hub is designed to help customers create seamless digital experiences with drag-and-drop page editing, mobile optimization, premium hosting, and more.
"The Envato Market ecosystem and ThemeForest, in particular, is a well-respected website design marketplace, with millions of customers supported by a hugely talented group of largely exclusive theme authors," said Envato's Chief Content Officer, Cameron Gough.
You can check out the HubSpot CMS Hub themes collection on ThemeForest here: <a href="https://themeforest.net/lp/hubspot-cms-hub-themes/" target="_blank">https://themeforest.net/lp/hubspot-cms-hub-themes/</a>
<h2>WordPress releases Gutenberg 11.2</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/08/gutenberg-search-styles.jpeg" alt="gutenberg search styles" />
Let's consult Johannes before we stop the presses, but just two weeks after releasing Gutenberg 11.1, WordPress pushed <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/08/05/whats-new-in-gutenberg-11-2-0-4-august/" target="_blank">Gutenberg 11.2.0</a>. 
As you might expect, this rapid-fire release focuses primarily on bug fixes and tooling rather than major updates. But there are a few new features worth noting:
<ul>
<li>Search block button and border colors: the range of options for customizing blocks continues to improve. The search block now has<a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/32416" target="_blank"> additional options for customizing button and border colors.</a> </li>
<li>Group block flex layout: an <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/33359" target="_blank">experimental flex layout option</a> is being beta tested on the group block. This is an early glimpse at a feature that would give parent blocks the capability of defining the layout of their inner blocks.</li>
<li>New button for creating posts as part of the publishing flow: if you're creating more than one consecutive post, you can now <a href="https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/33276" target="_blank">create a new post from the editor</a> as part of the publishing flow.</li>
</ul>

CMS Monthly Recap: Zoho Launches Canvas, HubSpot Partners With Envato, WordPress Releases Gutenberg 11.2, and More

Image of CMS Critic Monthly Recap with ice cream cone superimposed

Yup. July officially marked the "dog days of summer" in the Northern Hemisphere. While many of us were melting under the malaise of record-breaking heat, the news has yet to cool off.
Seemingly, neither does <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/02/no-ones-invincible-fresh-mask-mandates-and-rising-delta-cases-hit-california">Covid-19 and its latest wave of hyper-contagious Delta variant</a>. The entire month was mired by headlines about hotspots and breakthrough cases that are once again challenging our world. Delta is the new version that no one wanted an upgrade to, and we're hoping for better days ahead.
But what does a prolonged Covid pandemic mean for the content and digital experience sector?
As more businesses mull the option of <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22583285/companies-remote-work-home-office-tsedal-neeley-harvard">never returning to a physical office</a> – and consumers keep buying their drones and toilet paper online – it's clear that digital experience technologies, from CMS to DXP to eCommerce, will continue to drive transformation across the economy.
This was evidenced by <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/contenful-raises-175m-from/">Contentful's announcement last week</a> that it had raised $175 million in a round led by Tiger Global – valuing the company at $3 billion. After posting a banner 2020, the headless CMS player has a mighty wind in its sails with the confidence of a major investment firm. With 600 employees and room to grown, this news also led the Berlin-based firm to <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2021/08/03/contentful-takes-three-floors-molson-coors-former-headquarters/">secure three floors of a Denver high rise</a>, formerly occupied by Molson Coors.
If that makes you want to crack open a digital brew, you're not alone. So cheers - and enjoy the rest of our round-up.
 
<h2>Contentsquare Accelerates Machine and Deep Learning Capabilities with Acquisition of AI company Upstride</h2>
<h2><img style="max-width:768px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/contentsquare-upstride.png" /></h2>
It's hip to be square. And with this kind of investment capital, you can take almost anything in stride.
That must have been the sentiment at <a href="https://contentsquare.com/" target="_blank">Contentsquare</a>, a digital experience analytics platform, as they announced the acquisition of <a href="https://ww2.upstride.io/" target="_blank">Upstride</a> – a Paris-based deep-tech company. Upstride's engineers will join Contentsquare's data science and Clickhouse development team in their Paris product hub to accelerate the company's ambitious AI innovation roadmap. 
As far as we know, their offices are not located in the Eiffel Tower. Or are they...
The news isn't that surprising considering that in May, Contentsquare raised <a href="https://contentsquare.com/blog/contentsquare-500m-series-e-investment/" target="_blank">$500M in Series E funding – placing them at a $2.8B valuation</a>. At this time, Contentsquare revealed its plans to further invest in AI and accelerate innovation both organically and through acquisitions. 
"AI will fundamentally reshape our digital journeys towards better and more personalized experiences," said Gary Roth, Co-Founder, and CEO of Upstride. "With trillions of user interactions analyzed daily, Contentsquare is ideally placed to lead this transformation and become one of the world's top tech companies. We are very excited about joining such an amazing company and leveraging AI to its fullest potential!" 
As Contentsquare continues to transform the way teams use behavioral data to elevate the digital experience and transform their business, the company has also been investing in digital trust – and recently cemented its leadership on digital privacy with the launch of a cookieless version of its solution.
<h2>Salesforce Completes Acquisition of Slack</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/salesforce-slack.png" />
Unicorns unite! After one of the most anticipated and gut-wrenching battles in recent M&amp;A history, Salesforce just <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/07/21/salesforce-slack-deal-close/" target="_blank">announced</a> that it has completed its acquisition of Slack. 
So... what happens when the world's biggest CRM and most used business messaging platform join forces? You show everyone how to navigate a pandemic. 
With the persistence of Covid languishing over the economy, businesses are still adapting to an unpredictable "normal" and continuing to rely on digital technologies to maintain continuity and drive revenue. While much has changed in the latest Delta wave, what hasn't is the need to connect people across systems, apps, and devices – from sales to collaboration. 
This acquisition crystallizes that connection and paves the wave to a more meaningful and integrated future for Salesforce. 
"We've learned over the past year that the workplace isn't snapping back to the way it was," said Bret Taylor, President and Chief Operating Officer of Salesforce. "Together, Slack and Salesforce Customer 360 will give every company in the world a single source of truth for their business and a single platform for connecting employees, customers, and partners with each other and the apps they use every day."
With the acquisition, Slack will be integrated into every Salesforce Cloud. Together with Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will provide a single source of truth for businesses – and a single platform for connecting employees, customers, and partners in one ecosystem. 
<h2>Optimizely Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ for Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)</h2>
<img style="max-width:715px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/optimizely-logo.png" />
In the DXP Game of Thrones, Optimizely <a href="https://www.optimizely.com/company/press/optimizely-named-a-leader-in-digital-experience-platforms-by-independent-research-firm/" target="_blank">announced</a> its crown as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ for Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), Q3 2021. 
While no dragons were involved (at least to our knowledge), Optimizely – <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/episerver-rebrands-as-optimizely-following-acquisition/" target="_blank">formerly Episerver</a> – has had a series of industry-conquering <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/search/acquisitions/field/organizations/num_acquisitions/episerver" target="_blank">acquisitions</a> in its rise to DXP domination. Their latest snack: Zaius, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) with key AI and ML capabilities and a decent industry footprint. Like other leading enterprise DXPs, Optimizely saw this acquisition as a necessity for addressing its critical data gap and improving its competitive posture. 
In its vendor profile, the Forrester report noted that "Optimizely has a highly acquisitive strategy as it grows beyond its content roots as Episerver. Compared with other vendors we evaluated, Optimizely shows strength in testing and optimization, digital commerce, and platform operations. It also has strength in campaign management, customer journey management, and platform certifications." 
All solid points in Optimizely's favor as the competition at the top gets heavier. 
You might recall that Optimizely was also recognized as a Leader for the second consecutive year in the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/key-takeaways-from-gartners-2021-magic-quadrant-for-digital-experience-platforms/" target="_blank">Gartner 2021 Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms</a>, trailing right behind Adobe and <a href="https://www.acquia.com/" target="_blank">Acquia</a>. But the Forrester report reorients the players on the chessboard, with Optimizely trailing just behind Adobe but outperforming the likes of Acquia, Sitecore, and Bloomreach.
Optimizely's platform received the highest possible scores in experience management and delivery, vision, delivery model, supporting services, and average deal size criteria. According to the Forrester report, "Reference customers told us that they like Optimizely's flexibility in their licensing model when expanding the set of sites… one reference said, 'Optimizely was very simple to get up and running — more so than other DXPs I've implemented.'"
Not a bad place to be as the race heats up.
<h2>WordPress Releases "Tatum" 5.8 </h2>
<img style="max-width:632px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/5x8-album-1.jpg" />
There's a moment in "Kind of Blue" where Mile Davis and John Coltrane start merging into one being, completing each other's scales and echoing one another's brassy calls. Like anything in jazz, it's the improvisation – and the unexpected composition – that makes your toes tap. 
And like jazz, the latest version of WordPress attempts to bring a little more poetic soul to its code. Whether it hits the right notes is entirely up to users now.
Speaking of... WordPress <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/07/tatum/" target="_blank">released its new 5.8</a> record last week. They're calling it "Tatum" in honor of Art Tatum, the prolific jazz pianist. It's now available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. 
Last month, we talked about WordPress 5.8's Beta and the features that it was expected to deliver, such as more powerful blocks, enhanced editing capabilities, and other <a href="https://make.wordpress.org/updates/2021/01/21/big-picture-goals-2021/" target="_blank">big picture goals</a> like <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/updates-on-wordcamp-2021-wordpress-5-8-beta-details-and-gutenberg-enhancements/" target="_blank">Full Site Editing</a>. Here are just a few of the highlights:
Manage Widgets with Blocks: The power of blocks has come to both the Block Widgets Editor and the Customizer. Now you can add blocks both in widget areas across your site and with live preview through the Customizer.
Display Posts with New Blocks and Patterns: The Query Loop Block makes it possible to display posts based on specified parameters, like a PHP loop without the code. Easily display posts from a specific category to do things like creating a portfolio or a page full of your favorite recipes.
List View: As blocks increase, patterns emerge, and content creation gets easier. As a result, new solutions are needed to make complex content easy to navigate. List View is the best way to jump between layers of content and nested blocks. Since the List View gives you an overview of all the blocks in your content, you can now navigate quickly to the precise block you need.
Edit Templates Around Posts: You can also use the familiar block editor to edit templates that hold your content. Simply activate a block theme or a theme that has opted in for this feature. Switch from editing your posts to editing your pages and back again, all while using a familiar block editor.
Global Styles and Global Settings APIs: Control the editor settings, available customization tools, and style blocks using a theme.json file in the active theme. This configuration file enables or disables features and sets default styles for both a website and blocks. 
You can see the complete list of new features and updates <a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2021/07/tatum/" target="_blank">here</a>. 
<h2>Agility CMS Announces GraphQL Support</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/agility-cms-graph-q.jpg" />
Agility CMS, an API-first headless CMS, has <a href="https://agilitycms.com/resources/posts/agility-cms-graphql" target="_blank">announced</a> the general availability of its GraphQL API, which provides users with a GraphQL Playground Interface – where they can query content from their Agility CMS Instance using a GraphQL schema based on defined content models.
"GraphQL powers modern e-commerce and digital transformation," said Jon Voigt, CEO at Agility CMS. "With this launch of GraphQL support, Agility CMS can help enterprises to build superior digital solutions with ease." 
Developed by Facebook, GraphQL has been the query language of choice for many CMSs, especially headless CMSs. GraphQL is designed to make APIs flexible, fast, precise, and developer-friendly, and it's rapidly becoming the standard for API-based data access.

CMS Monthly Recap: Salesforce Completes Acquisition of Slack, Contentsquare Accelerates ML Capabilities, and More

CMS Critic Monthly Recap image with piano background

As the U.S. heads into the Fourth of July holiday weekend, we've got some fireworks on display across the digital experience stack. 
Let's light things up with some of the biggest news we've been following this month.
 
<h2>Constant Contact to acquire SharpSpring</h2>
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/constant-contact-sharpspring-1.jpg" alt="Constant Contact and SharpSping logos " />
<a href="https://www.constantcontact.com/" target="_blank">Constant Contact</a>, the e-commerce focused marketing platform, announced it has signed a <a href="https://news.constantcontact.com/2021-06-22-Clearlake-Capital-and-Siris-Backed-Constant-Contact-Agrees-to-Acquire-SharpSpring" target="_blank">definitive agreement to acquire</a> SharpSpring. Backed by Clearlake Capital Group and Siris Capital, the all-cash transaction is valued at approximately $240 million.
<a href="https://sharpspring.com/" target="_blank">SharpSpring</a> is a cloud-based marketing automation platform that improves the effectiveness of marketing strategies for small businesses (SMBs). A preferred toolkit for digital agencies, SharpSpring helps generate leads, improve conversions to sales, and drive higher returns on marketing investments. 
Nearly a household name across the digital marketing community, Constant Contact is a legacy platform that provides a full suite of marketing tools catering mainly to small businesses, freelancers, and nonprofits. Constant Contact continues to be one of the most recognized services for managing email marketing campaigns but has more recently added <a href="https://www.constantcontact.com/website" target="_blank">website building features</a> and social media marketing capabilities. 
With the integration of SharpSpring, Constant Contact's users will be able to easily engage customers throughout their journey and deliver better marketing-driven results. SharpSpring also brings a layer of CRM capabilities to the mix, allowing Constant Contact to elevate and evolve the customer experience.
"Constant Contact and SharpSpring share a mission to help small businesses succeed, and this acquisition represents a powerful opportunity to combine our best-in-class email and e-commerce offerings with SharpSpring's strong suite of revenue growth and marketing automation tools," said Frank Vella, CEO at Constant Contact. "Today's Constant Contact retains the customer-first culture that defined our heritage, and I am excited to expand upon that with a commitment to innovation that will accelerate our growth and build upon the passion and agility that has made our brand a leader in digital marketing for so many years."
<h2>WP Engine launches Premier, its new enterprise WordPress platform</h2>
<img style="max-width:899px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/wpengine-premier.png" alt="WPEngine Premier" />
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wp-engine-releases-worlds-first-study-of-the-wordpress-economy-cites-awe-inspiring-numbers/" target="_blank">WPEngine</a>, a digital experience platform for WordPress, has <a href="https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-launches-premier-enterprise-wordpress-platform/" target="_blank">announced</a> the launch of Premier – a new enterprise platform that delivers improved security, performance, and scalability. 
An established <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wp-engine-releases-worlds-first-study-of-the-wordpress-economy-cites-awe-inspiring-numbers/" target="_blank">leader in managed WordPress hosting and services</a>, WP Engine powers the top 200,000 websites by traffic, making it one of the most trusted brands on the market. Now, with the addition of Premier, the DXP will offer enterprise-grade security for WordPress – a sought-after requirement for many organizations concerned about the risks posed by WordPress. 
As part of their enterprise strategy, WP Engine completed a <a href="https://www.imperva.com/learn/data-security/soc-2-compliance/" target="_blank">SOC 2 Type II</a> examination to ensure that Premier met the highest standards of security and availability. It also features protection from unauthenticated file system access, managed web application firewall (WAF), DDoS mitigation, and encrypted global network routing.
For WP Engine customers, Premier is an island of stability in a sea of open source. The new platform boasts a 99.99% uptime SLA, a global network of data centers, managed CDN, <a href="https://wpengine.com/evercache/" target="_blank">WP Engine Evercache</a> (proprietary front-end caching), and automatic PHP and WordPress updates. This mix could have a dramatic influence on organizations as they consider modernizing and re-platforming on WordPress for enterprise applications. 
"Enterprises need more time focusing on their customers and growing their business, rather than worrying about the security and scale of the technology they use," said Lisa Box, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise for WP Engine.
To learn more about WP Engine's Premier Enterprise WordPress platform, visit the <a href="https://wpengine.com/enterprise/" target="_blank">Premier web page.</a>
<h2>Salesforce and AWS expand partnership with key integrations</h2>
<img style="max-width:770px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/aws-salesforce.jpg" alt="AWS Salesforce logos" />
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/reviews/salesforce-cms-review-evolving-a-crm-powerhouse-into-a-dxp-challenger/" target="_blank">Salesforce</a>, the world's leading CRM platform – and <a href="https://www.aws.com" target="_blank">AWS</a>, the industry's undisputed champion of the cloud – <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/06/23/salesforce-aws-partnership-expansion/" target="_blank">announced</a> a significant expansion to their global partnership. 
While the two tech giants have had an existing relationship for some time, they are now offering an enhanced set of capabilities that will make it easier for developers to build and launch custom applications in Salesforce that natively leverage AWS services. This tighter integration will also connect data and workflows securely across both ecosystems.
Custom coding has long been a requirement for integrating AWS and Salesforce, but this expanded offering will enable customers to use both platforms seamlessly through a set of unified capabilities. The companies have also collaborated on new low-code tools to help customers build innovative applications that connect data in real-time between Salesforce applications and AWS services. 
"For more than five years, our customers have benefitted from a tight relationship between AWS and Salesforce. Now, we are taking the partnership to the next level by integrating our offerings so developers using both AWS and Salesforce can build unified applications much faster and simpler than ever before," said <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/andy-jassy-amazons-new-ceo-signals-bold-future-for-loud-and-digital-experiences/" target="_blank">Andy Jassy</a>, CEO of Amazon Web Services. "With this partnership, we are significantly simplifying developers' lives and empowering them to develop applications however they want, from wherever they want globally, at any scale."
You can read all the details of the new capabilities in the <a href="https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2021/06/23/salesforce-aws-partnership-expansion/" target="_blank">Salesforce press release</a>.
<h2>Joomla 4 RC 1 and Joomla 3.10 Alpha 8 are here</h2>
<img style="max-width:870px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/joomla4-400-rc1.jpg" alt="Joomla 4" />
The Joomla! Project <a href="https://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5839-joomla-4-rc-3-and-joomla-3-10-alpha-8-are-here.html" target="_blank">announced</a> the availability of the first <a href="https://joom.la/4rc3" target="_blank">Joomla! CMS 4.0 Release Candidate 3</a> and <a href="https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/releases/tag/3.10.0-alpha8" target="_blank">Joomla 3.10 Alpha 8</a>. These releases are aimed at extension and template developers so they can prepare their products for the stable release of Joomla! CMS 4.0. 
Here are a few of the standout features:
Joomla4Accessibility: Accessibility is a must with every modern digital experience, and Joomla! 4 delivers some marked improvements from the ground up. The platform aims for <a href="https://www.w3.org/" target="_blank">W3C Accessibility Guidelines</a> (WCAG) 2.0 with AA compliance – and the layout, contrast, and infrastructure all have accessibility built-in at a foundational level.
Joomla4Speed: Whether a website is focused on e-commerce or static content, speed is one of the top factors impacting conversions. With Joomla! 4, users can benefit from increased load time and performance, which can improve the overall customer experience. 
Joomla4Workflows: Combined with a number of improvements in the media manager, Joomla!'s new workflow and media manager are designed to streamline processes and help users work more efficiently with their content operations. 
Joomla4Emails: From a marketing automation perspective, Joomla! now lets you craft and deliver customized emails with its new templating system, allowing for greater control over branding and formatting.
Joomla4Search: With advanced filtering and indexing, Joomla! 4 boasts a boost to search with its enhanced capabilities.
<h2>OpenText and Hyland named "Leaders" in Content Platforms by Forrester</h2>
<img style="max-width:600px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/forrester-wave-content-platforms-2021.gif" alt="Forrester Wave Content Platforms 2021" />
It's hard to believe that it's already Q2 of 2021. Like clockwork, Forrester has issued its quarterly Wave Report for Content Platforms, and both <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/opentext-adds-new-content-services-to-power-modern-work-in-the-cloud/" target="_blank">OpenText</a> and <a href="https://www.hyland.com/" target="_blank">Hyland</a> are battling out the pole position with <a href="https://www.microsoft.com" target="_blank">Microsoft</a>. 
OpenText <a href="https://www.opentext.com/about/press-releases?id=D5A0D9EE2F914B948C0C0722E5F2B23B" target="_blank">announced</a> that its Extended ECM has been named a "Leader" in the <a href="https://www.opentext.com/info/ecm/forrester-wave" target="_blank">Q2 2021 Wave Report,</a> receiving the highest possible scores in the criteria of support for team or project workspaces, packaged applications, integration and interoperability, and lifecycle management.
OpenText's product strategy and focus on enterprise applications have been amplified by its multi-year cloud investment. In April, OpenText also launched its cloud-native SaaS offering, <a href="https://blogs.opentext.com/introducing-opentext-core-content/" target="_blank">Core Content</a>, built on its OT2 platform. All of this is shifting the dynamics in its favor, and Forrester is clearly taking notice – as they are only trailing Microsoft. 
Likewise, Hyland has also been <a href="https://www.hyland.com/en/learn/it-programs/forrester-wave-content-services-Q2-2021" target="_blank">named a "Leader"</a> in the report, buoyed by its cloud and innovation strategy and its vertical focus. If you recall, <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-enters-agreement-to-acquire-nuxeo/" target="_blank">Hyland purchased Nuxeo</a> in March of this year, giving the platform some extra juice with both enterprise content management (ECM) and digital asset management (DAM) capabilities. 
Hyland is clearly driving digital transformation with a modern and forward-thinking approach, leveraging a cloud-first vision and a variety of scalable cloud offerings – including the <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/hyland-acquires-alfresco-focuses-on-cloud-and-global-expansion-of-enterprise-cms/" target="_blank">Alfresco Digital Business Platform.</a> Additionally, Hyland is gaining ground with its wide array of options, including open platform development, low-code toolkits, and repeatable, specialized industry and departmental solutions. 
<h2>Firecrackers, anyone?</h2>
We prefer bottle rockets, but that's just us. From the entire staff at CMS Critic, we wish you a safe and happy Independence Day.

CMS Monthly Recap: WP Engine Launches Enterprise WordPress Platform, Salesforce and AWS Expand Partnership, and More

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