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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.
 
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<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

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Monthly Recap with fireworks in background

CrafterCMS, an <a href="https://craftercms.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">open-source Git-based headless CMS</a> for enterprises, announced the general availability of its version 4.0 – which offers a number of new feature upgrades and composable capabilities. 
First and foremost, version 4.0 will allow users to work locally in teams via an API-powered Git repo. This gives developers greater control over versioning while enabling them to work in their preferred languages with their favorite tools and processes. According to Crafter, its flexible headless architecture provides everything a user needs to create modern digital experiences and connect to a wide array of omnichannel endpoints – including websites, mobile devices, kiosk screens, email, video, and more.
<h2>New features focused on composability</h2>
Version 4.0 includes three noteworthy upgrades. The first is a new <a href="https://docs.craftercms.org/en/4.0/developers/experience-builder.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Experience Builder</a> for composing digital experiences from reusable plug-ins and components. The Experience Builder also provides in-context editing and preview features that support all front-end technologies and any digital channels.
Along with Experience Builder, there's also the new Crafter Studio content authoring application, built-in React on top of CrafterCMS's API-first headless content authoring platform. According to the company, Crafter Studio enables content teams to create, edit, review, and publish faster and more productively than ever before.
Finally, Crafter has introduced a new plug-in framework and expanded marketplace, allowing developers to quickly build and easily maintain reusable components and back-end integrations.
"Our new content authoring tools enable content teams to easily compose any type of digital experience," said Russ Danner, VP of Products for CrafterCMS. "Through drag and drop experience building, in-context content creation and editing, and low-code/no-code reusable plug-ins in our expanded CrafterCMS Marketplace, enterprises can rapidly compose digital experience applications faster than ever before. With CrafterCMS version 4.0, we've built a best-in-class content authoring experience delivering unprecedented capabilities for a headless CMS. Developers can build apps with any type of front-end technology, while content authors benefit from powerful and easy-to-use capabilities regardless of the technology or digital channel."
<h2>Improved plug-ins, "frictionless collaboration", and more</h2>
With version 4.0, CrafterCMS is providing enterprises with a modern headless CMS with composable digital experience platform (DXP) capabilities. For example, plug-ins may be used by administrators to compose tailored authoring experiences for a variety of content management use cases and by content creators to compose engaging digital experiences for end-users.
CrafterCMS version 4.0 also improves on its Git-based content repository as well as support for its DevContentOps processes – enabling what it calls "frictionless collaboration" between content authors, developers, and operations. The types of digital experiences powered by the headless CrafterCMS platform at major enterprises today include large-scale personalized enterprise websites, global e-Commerce sites, OTT video experiences, native mobile apps, employee intranets, customer and partner portals, digital assistants, digital signage, AR/VR experiences, among others.
CrafterCMS version 4.0 community edition is available immediately for free download under the GPL v3 open source license, and the enterprise edition is available for customers and certified partners through the CrafterCMS <a href="https://docs.craftercms.org/en/3.0/get-support/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">customer support portal</a>.
The announcement of version 4.0 comes on the heels of the second round of financing that Crafter closed on this past March. We had the opportunity to <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/craftercms-announces-second-round-of-financing-to-fuel-rapid-growth-interview-with-ceo-mike-vertal/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">interview Mike Vertal</a>, CEO of CrafterCMS, shortly after the investment news about the company's plans for the future.
<h2>About CrafterCMS</h2>
CrafterCMS replaces the broken paradigm of traditional content management and enables a new era of fast, agile, and easier development of innovative digital experiences that benefits large enterprises and fast-growing startups. As an open-source, API-first, and Git-based headless platform, CrafterCMS is amazing for developers, easy for content authors, and fantastic for DevContentOps. Enterprises can choose from support options that include self-hosted/self-managed, fully-managed private SaaS/PaaS in the cloud, and community-supported open source. Learn more about the open source project at <a href="https://craftercms.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://craftercms.org</a>, and enterprise solutions at <a href="https://craftercms.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://craftercms.com</a>.

CrafterCMS Releases Version 4.0, Adds API-Powered Git Capabilities and Composable Features

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While 2022 has already been unpredictable in almost every way, the one persistent trend in the CMS market is the continuous flow of investment dollars.
Speaking of investments: the latest announcement comes from <a href="https://craftercms.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">CrafterCMS</a> – an open source Git-based headless platform for enterprises. The company revealed that it has closed on a second institutional round of funding from Lighter Capital, the leading fintech lender of non-dilutive financing to tech startups. 
Crafter first partnered with Lighter Capital in 2019 with an investment of revenue-based debt, which was paid off ahead of schedule thanks to CrafterCMS's faster than anticipated growth and profitable operations. According to the company, this new and larger second round of capital will fuel continued growth for the niche CMS player. 
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<div>Crafter's news comes on the heels of a heated cycle of funding, including <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/bloomreach-reaches-2-2-billion-valuation-following-175-million-investment-from-goldman-sachs/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Bloomreach's</a> $175 million round and <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/elastic-path-secures-60m-in-funding-for-composable-commerce-growth/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Elastic Path's</a> securing of $60 million in financing to grow its composable commerce solutions. It appears that investment dollars are finding their way to every layer of the CMS and DXP stack in response to the continued focus on digital transformation. 
<h2>Driving value in a competitive headless CMS marketplace</h2>
CrafterCMS is a Git-based headless content management system, allowing users to work locally in teams via an API-powered Git repo. This gives developers greater control over versioning while enabling them to work in their preferred languages with their favorite tools and processes. Crafter's flexible headless architecture provides everything a user needs to create modern digital experiences and connect to a wide array of omnichannel endpoints – including websites, mobile devices, kiosk screens, email, video, and more. 
Crafter also has the distinction of being open source with an active community across a variety of channels. Developers can access a range of resources from source code to documentation and connect with the company and other users via Slack, Discord, and StackOverflow. 
The platform offers self-managed, self-managed on-premises enterprise support, and fully-managed private SaaS/PaaS operations and support. All offerings are sold as recurring, annual support subscriptions. 
<h2>Enhancing digital experiences in an omnichannel world</h2>
According to the company, Crafter appreciates high customer renewal rates, low customer churn, and strong upsell with major brands and enterprises across the globe – which has helped it achieve rapid growth. Crafter's enterprise customers range from the Fortune 500 to large government agencies to digital-native startups – all running mission-critical, highly scalable enterprise websites and various multi-channel digital experiences that include e-Commerce, OTT video, employee intranets, customer portals, interactive voice assistants, AR/VR experiences, and more.
"CrafterCMS continues to scale to meet growing customer demand, which we've seen accelerate as major enterprises and hyper-growth startups are looking for a modern content platform on which to build next-generation digital experiences," said Mike Vertal, President and CEO of CrafterCMS. "With growth comes the need for financing, and Lighter Capital has proven to be an ideal partner for us. This second round of capital will allow us to accelerate our expansion plans and do so without any of the ownership dilution of traditional venture capital financing. At the same time, it will foster the discipline to maintain both capital efficiency and a strong balance sheet for the long term, allowing us to focus entirely on driving customer success and nurturing our open source community."
Lighter Capital is the largest provider of non-dilutive debt capital to startups. It has revolutionized startup financing by making it easy for entrepreneurs to quickly access up to $4 million in non-dilutive growth and working capital through our tech-enabled lending process. With no hidden fees, warrants, or covenants, founders have full control over how to use the funds. Since 2010, Lighter has invested hundreds of millions of dollars of non-dilutive funding to hundreds of companies in the US, Canada, and Australia.
"Crafter is an ideal Lighter Capital client," said Jon Prentice, Investment Director at Lighter Capital. "We look for strong recurring revenue models and capital-efficient operators. Mike and his team have built a scaling company. Investment from Lighter allows them to immediately access capital to achieve goals and boost growth without dilution or changing the company's vision."
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<h2>Q&amp;A with Mike Vertal, President and CEO, CrafterCMS</h2>
CMS Critic had an opportunity to connect recently with <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikevertal/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mike Vertal</a>. He shared some of his views on the CMS market, the value of being open source, and their plans with Crafter Studio.
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CMS Critic (CC): The CMS and DXP markets are getting extremely dense and commoditized, and headless seems to be taking up more of the air in the room. Where do you see Crafter having its greatest strategic advantage? And how will this new funding be used to support your growth goals?
Mike Vertal (MV): Yes, headless is all the rage, but this is only one of many features needed in a modern enterprise CMS. The CMS market is, of course, dense and highly fragmented, with many of the headless-only CMSs focused on simpler use cases. In contrast, CrafterCMS focuses on the needs of larger enterprises and fast-growing startups that have more sophisticated content management needs and who are building a wide variety of new digital experience applications. To address this segment of the market, Crafter’s unique differentiators include:
1) Git-based content repository: Unlike most other CMSs that are built on top of databases (either SQL or NoSQL), Crafter is built on top of Git as its content repository. This not only provides much more extensive content versioning, auditing, branching, and rollback capabilities but also allows developers to leverage GitOps to accelerate development cycles of content-enabled apps.
2) DevContentOps processes: Headless is only about building apps on top of APIs; Crafter also streamlines developer workflows by eliminating bottlenecks of traditional database-centric CMSs, enables better collaboration among the developer teams and content authoring teams, and eases integration with enterprise DevOps and CI/CD tools via APIs. This is what we call DevContentOps – integrating content management processes into the traditional DevOps processes and tooling.
3) Powerful and user-friendly content authoring: Many of the simpler headless CMSs have crippled the content authoring teams, leaving them with primitive content creation/editing/preview/workflow/publishing capabilities. In contrast, Crafter has a sophisticated content authoring toolset (Crafter Studio) that supports in-context editing, multi-channel previews, drag/drop experience building... that content teams can use to improve productivity regardless of the front-end technology that the development uses to build the end user experience. So whether the development team has used React, Angular, Vue, HTML5, A-Frame (for AR/VR), or whatever, the content authors get a truly WYSIWYG editing capability. This is quite unique in the industry.
4) Proven in larger enterprises: our clients include Marriott, MasterCard, Penn Mutual, BNY Mellon, Papa Johns, UK Government, US Navy, among many others. The funds will be used to continue investing in CrafterCMS development, including our upcoming Version 4 release that will significantly advance Crafter Studio (content authoring platform) and will add significantly more reusable plugins available on the CrafterCMS Marketplace, along with further investments in customer success and our open source community.
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CC: What part is open source playing for buyers in 2022?
MV: Open source is slowly but surely taking over more of the enterprise, you just have to look at the tremendous success of Elastic, MongoDB, Confluent, Datastax and Gitlab to name just a few as proof. This is because savvy enterprise technology buyers realize that open source not only delivers better value over the long term, but also provides higher levels of security, agility, and innovation.
At CrafterCMS, we spend less than 20% of our revenues on sales/marketing expenses (compared with 70%-100% or more spent by proprietary and SaaS-only vendors), as our open source business model allows us to reach into enterprises much more cost effectively. Further, our open source community helps us 1) identify a wide range of new use cases and interesting new features, 2) contribute to the development efforts, 3) test and document early releases, and 4) find and resolve any security issues extremely rapidly, among a host of other benefits that are typical of open source projects.
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CC: How are you adapting to the composable revolution that’s driving more MACH-based solution selling for headless platforms?
MV: CrafterCMS fits perfectly well into composable, MACH-based architectures. We have always focused exclusively on being a best-of-breed CMS, and not building out a full-suite of DXP capabilities. Furthermore, CrafterCMS itself is a MACH-based system. How?
Micro-services: CrafterCMS is composed of several decoupled services: content authoring, content delivery, content publisher, content search, Git-based content repository, user profiles, etc..
API-first: Both Crafter’s content authoring and content delivery systems are API-first headless platforms, supporting REST, GraphQL, Javascript (Nodejs, Next js, etc.), and Java APIs. Furthermore, Crafter supports extensible APIs, allowing server side APIs to be scripted, extended, created.
Cloud-native: Crafter’s content delivery system is stateless and serverless, allowing elastic scalability in any cloud and allowing operations to be extremely simple.
Because CrafterCMS itself is based on a MACH architecture, our users can integrate Crafter easily with other MACH-like services such as e-commerce tools like commercetools, cloud-based OTT video streaming services like AWS Media Services, interactive voice assistants such as Alexa devices, to name just a few. Moreover, many of these integrations are available off the shelf in the CrafterCMS Marketplace today, allowing composability of solutions with minimal development. As mentioned above, the new funding will allow us to invest in many more of these integrations and make them available on our marketplace.
<h3>About CrafterCMS</h3>
CrafterCMS replaces the broken paradigm of traditional content management and enables a new era of fast, agile and easier development of innovative digital experiences that benefits large enterprises and fast-growing startups. As an open-source, API-first and Git-based headless platform, CrafterCMS is amazing for developers, easy for content authors, and fantastic for DevContentOps. Enterprises can choose from support options that include self-hosted/self-managed, fully-managed private SaaS/PaaS in the cloud, and community-supported open source. Learn more about the open source project at <a href="https://craftercms.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://craftercms.org</a>, and enterprise solutions at <a href="https://craftercms.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://craftercms.com</a>.
<h3>About Lighter Capital</h3>
Lighter Capital is a fintech company revolutionizing startup finance by offering a new funding path for early-stage tech companies. We understand that an entrepreneur’s two greatest constraints are time and money, and we’ve developed technology to fund companies quickly and easily. We provide up to $4 million of non-dilutive growth capital in a fraction of the time it takes to raise from traditional sources. Based in the US and Australia, we’ve provided over 800 financings to 425+ companies across the US, Canada,

CrafterCMS Announces Second Round of Financing to Fuel Rapid Growth: Interview with CEO Mike Vertal

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

CrafterCMS Releases Version 4.0, Adds API-Powered Git Capabilities and Composable Features

CrafterCMS Announces Second Round of Financing to Fuel Rapid Growth: Interview with CEO Mike Vertal