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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

cms-critic-staff

Monthly Recap with fireworks in background

<a href="https://wpengine.com/" target="_blank">WP Engine</a>, the managed WordPress hosting solution, has been very busy lately.
<a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/wp-engine-page-performance/">Page Performance</a> was recently rolled out by the company, a feature that makes WP Engine the first managed WordPress hosting platform with a web page speed performance tool built into the user dashboard. This new interface gives users actionable insights to help quickly and dramatically improve the speed of their websites.
WP Engine also just <a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160707005380/en/WP-Engine-Unveils-Web%E2%80%99s-Wordpress-PHP-7">unveiled a PHP7 compatibility checker</a>, which is a plugin that they're toting as the internet's first tool to verify PHP 7 compatibility on WordPress website.
Amidst all this news, I managed to grab a moment with WP Engine's Vice President of Product, Jason Jaynes.
<h2>Who is Jason Jaynes?</h2>
<img style="max-width:175px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/biopic_jaynes_web.jpg" alt="Jason Jaynes" />Jason Jaynes is an experienced software executive with eighteen years of practice across multiple functions including marketing, product management, sales and software development; and multiple disciplines including social media, security, mobile, online advertising, and SAAS.
Jason is currently the Vice President of Product at WP Engine where he oversees product management and product strategy. Prior to WP Engine, Jason served as the co-founder and CTO of Apptive where he oversaw all product strategy and development. Prior to Apptive, Jason has served in numerous roles including Vice President of Business Marketing for Demand Media, Vice President of Product and Marketing for Demand Media's social division, and Director of Product Management for Credant Technologies.
Jason holds an MBA degree from the University of Texas and a B.S. in Computer Science from Texas A&amp;M University.
<h2></h2>
 
<h2>The Interview</h2>
KI: Can you briefly tell us a little bit about yourself, and your role at WP Engine?
JJ: I am responsible for product management and product strategy across the entire company. I work extensively with customers to understand overall market needs and to define and create the next generation of product features. A few months ago, WP Engine released Page Performance, a solution that empowers customers to obtain and utilize actionable insights that boost site performance. It's helped many of our customers improve their site speed, typically a 15% increase in front-end performance.
However, you can only optimize your code so much. Sometimes, the answer is putting a race car engine on your site, that is what PHP 7 is, a high performance PHP engine that will bring even greater performance to our customer base. However, it’s an involved process, so we created this <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/php-compatibility-checker/">PHP Compatibility Checker plugin</a> to help our customers ready their sites for PHP 7, coming to our platform later this fall. As a managed platform, we are enabling our customers in many ways to reach their peak website performance.
KI: As the internet becomes more and more ingrained into the daily life of the human race, can you tell us (preferable with some statistics), just how demanding the average internet user is for fast-loading websites?
JJ: We actually have a great infographic on this, which explores all the ways in which the “need for speed” has evolved over the years in a range of ways:
<ul>
<li>Desire for instant gratification</li>
<li>Online shopping expectations</li>
<li>Mobile site speed expectations</li>
<li>The emotional toll of load times</li>
<li>Site speed in the real world</li>
<li>How to improve page load time</li>
</ul>
KI: What does your latest product, Page Performance, bring to the table?
JJ: It’s clear that a poor digital experience sinks sites in a heartbeat — a <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/">study</a> by Akamai and Gomez showed that even a one-second delay in page load time will result in 11 percent fewer page views, a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction and a 7 percent drop in conversion. With site owners and developers literally on the clock, it’s critical that the customer experience be seamless in order to not affect the bottom line – it’s all about performance and conversion.
Our latest intelligence product, Page Performance, empowers customers to obtain and utilize actionable insights that boost site performance. Integrated into the WP Engine user portal, Page Performance provides a detailed site speed report and actionable recommendations to solve for technical issues impacting digital businesses, resulting in higher visitor retention, improved Google rankings, increased conversions and positive reputations and customer experiences. Key benefits include:
<ul>
<li>Access to key metrics on any Page with report history to see improvements over time. Report includes such metrics as cacheability, render start, visitor complete, render complete and other data.</li>
<li>Actionable recommendations with rich context, including links to a library of support material enable users to make fast, significant, measurable impact to site performance.</li>
<li>Integrated into WP Engine user portal to support a convenient developer workflow.</li>
</ul>
KI: What sets WP Engine apart from other managed WordPress hosting solutions?
JJ: WP Engine powers amazing digital experiences for websites and applications built on WordPress.
With award-winning customer support and state-of-the-art technology, our managed WordPress platform provides performance, reliability and security to brands, agencies, SMBs and individuals. Engineered at a code level to make resource-hungry WordPress deployments run faster, the WP Engine platform displays stunning speed while incorporating an industry-leading hardened infrastructure that allows webpages to load up to four times faster than any non-WordPress platform. Offering different plans to fit the needs of customers ranging from individuals to the enterprise, our platform helps our customers create robust and reliable websites with direct SFTP, Git version control, built-in CDN, enhanced security, one-click staging, automated migrations and restore and more.
Through our efforts, WP Engine has contributed significantly to establishing WordPress itself as a platform that can be reliably deployed in a range of enterprise scenarios. We were involved in introducing or popularizing platform features that have become key characteristics of hosting, including site staging (as we mention above), integration with developer workflow tools and advanced caching strategies.
With the recent launch of our Page Performance service (noted above), WP Engine is adding a layer that is likely to continue evolving customer expectations of a managed WordPress offering. Performance Intelligence for sites, of which Page Performance is the first product, will be an area of continued investment for us.
To find out more about WP Engine, <a href="https://wpengine.com/" target="_blank">visit their website</a>

Interview With Jason Jaynes, VP of Product at WP Engine

mike-johnston

<a href="https://wpengine.com/">WP Engine</a>, a WordPress hosting company, has announced the introduction of <a href="https://wpengine.com/support/best-practices-using-wp-engine-page-performance/">Page Performance</a>, which will focus on delivering actionable insights for websites across its 47,000 customers and agency partners in 133 countries.
<img style="max-width:432px" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp_engine_logo_bb.png" alt="wp_engine_logo_bb" />
Impressively, this product launch makes WP Engine the first managed WordPress platform to offer a web page speed performance tool integrated into the user dashboard through which customers can quickly improve the speed of their websites.
<h2>WP Engine Page Performace</h2>
Here's a breakdown of the benefits brought forth by WP Engine's newest project:
<ul>
<li>Access to Key Metrics on Any Page with Report History to See Improvements Over Time. Report includes such metrics as cacheability, render start, visitor complete, render complete and other data.</li>
<li>Actionable Recommendations with Rich Context including links to a library of support material enable users to make fast, significant, measurable impact to site performance.</li>
<li>Integrated into WP Engine User Portal to support developer workflow.</li>
</ul>
<h2>“Helping Out Customers Win Online”</h2>
Website speed is a major part of Search Engine Optimization, and WP Engine have recognized this with this release, as Heather Brunner, CEO of WP Engine, states:
<blockquote>“WP Engine Performance Intelligence is our ongoing commitment to develop tools and insights to help our customers win online.
A website’s speed affects nearly every metric a brand or agency might care about from page views to conversion rates. Our Page Performance product gives you specific recommendations to do just that.”</blockquote>
According to a recent study published on <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/speed-is-a-killer/">KISSmetrics</a>, a one-second delay in page load time results in 11 percent fewer page views; a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction; and a 7 percent drop in conversion. Thus proving that site performance can make or break a brand and a customer’s digital experience.
The aim of WP Engine’s Page Performance feature is to gives site owners a detailed site speed report and actionable recommendations to solve for technical issues impacting digital business.
I think WP Engine has made a strong move with this project. It's well established that site speed plays a big role in SEO and overall user experience, and a WordPress-integrated performance checker will surely play into the hands of SEO specialists who work with WordPress.
To find out more about WP Engine's new Page Performance features, <a href="https://wpengine.com/support/best-practices-using-wp-engine-page-performance/">check out their website</a>.
And as per usual, you can explore and review this product through the <a href="/products/wp-engine/">WP Engine hub</a> on our Hosting Directory.

WP Engine Rolls Out WordPress Integrated Page Performance Tool

<a href="https://wpengine.com/" target="_blank"> WP Engine</a>, a leading SaaS content management platform for websites and applications built on WordPress, has launched a brand new GeoIP feature, built to empower WordPress website marketers.
WP Engine provides hosting, backup, and technical support services for WordPress websites and apps. It caters to everybody, from bloggers to enterprising companies.
Delivering personalized content on a regional basis is becoming increasingly important. WordPress marketers will be particularly excited though, as this new prospect, titled <a href="https://wpengine.com/blog/wp-engine-geoip-plugin-now-available-wordpress-org-repository/" target="_blank">WP Engine GeoIP, </a>  allows marketers to offer personalized content even by postal/ZIP code.
<a href="/wpengine" target="_blank"> <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp_engine_logo_bb700x0.png" alt="WP Engine" /> </a>
<h2>WP Engine Hit New Heights (And Locations)</h2>
WP Engine GeoIP allows marketers to target Web content to users based on their physical location, without using third-party IP detection. GeoIP enables global brands to take a geomarketing approach to foster a more relevant, targeted, and personalized user experience down to a user’s country, state, city, and even ZIP code.
<ul>
<li>Powerful Geo-Targeting Capabilities:  create a personalized user experience by showing content especially useful or relevant to visitors on a location-by-location basis.</li>
<li>Same Old High Performance:  GeoIP is a native feature to WP Engine’s platform, there is no speed or performance loss associated with using a third-party service or the need to exempt pages from caching</li>
<li>Enhanced Marketing Effectiveness:  Brands can save marketing/advertising dollars by leveraging WP Engine’s native GeoIP functionality, reducing the need to rely on third-party IP detection tools, as well as boosting efficiency of advertisements through a localized approach.</li>
</ul>
Tomás Puig, Director of WP Engine Labs, made these comments upon the unveiling of WP Engine GeoIP:
<blockquote>“WP Engine is committed to driving better solutions for makers and marketers at global brands who are looking to improve the customer experience and be more effective with their marketing strategy. WP Engine Labs continues to provide innovative solutions built directly into the WP Engine platform, without hindering the world-class performance our customers expect from us.”</blockquote>
<h2>A Step Towards WordPress CXM?</h2>
WP Engine used to be a highly respected hosting company for WordPress users. But this update makes it more than just that.
Make no mistake about it, WP Engine has just taken a sizable step towards becoming a WordPress-dedicated customer experience manager. Personally, I'm excited to see what they'll introduce next.
To find out more about WP Engine GeoIP, <a href="/wp-engine-unveils-geoip-wordpress-marketers-can-now-deliver-location-specific-content/" target="_blank">check out their blog announcement</a>. There, you'll find an explanatory eBook, as well as some FAQs.
Also, be sure to check out our <a href="/wp-engine-review/" target="_blank"> WP Engine Review</a>.

WP Engine Unveils GeoIP: WordPress Marketers Can Now Deliver Location-Specific Content

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