RFPs. Request for Proposal. Every CMS Systems Integrator (SI) loves to find great ones but unfortunately that’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Excellent CMS or WCM Systems Integrators are key to your CMS or WCM project success - but they’re wary of bidding on many RFPs. There are many reasons. First, I will share some some impartial views from CMSWatch.com. Thank you CMSWatch.com for explaining why CMS Systems Integrators don’t respond to RFPs (hence why companies could miss out on the best skill set). Following I will share some thoughts from the CMS Experts at Oshyn. More

Last week I had a demo of Sitecore’s new Emal Campaign Manager “Sitecore ECM”. The Sitecore ECM offers the ability to deepen the understanding of those reading your emails. The greatest obstacle to improving the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns is in understanding what readers do beyond the “open rates” and URLs clicked. So marketers tend to rate the success of email campaigns based on increases or decreases in opens and URLs clicked. This is frustrating because email marketing can be a very effective way of reaching your prospects and current customers. Without much data available it is difficult to understand what is hindering or helping our email marketing success. There are so many factors to consider: subject line, design, CTAs, content… And the worst part of email marketing is that even if you manage to figure how to tweak the above – you don’t know what happens when the email opener clicks through to your website. Sure, you might be able to compare the effects on traffic on the day you sent your campaign and the days following. But that doesn’t necessarily tell you enough. And then there’s the joy of trying segment your email marketing database! More

So we all want to make our Drupal site faster, we expect more traffic, we want our pages to render quickly and to keep our server healthy.  When we start to get a lot of traffic we first must optimize our server and site before making any hardware upgrades. Sometimes doing that may just be enough at the moment. Here is a quick overview of what to do to completely optimize your Drupal site without making any hardware adjustments. To get the detailed steps to achieve optimal performance, download the free white paper we published. More

Well here’s some exciting news! Today Sitecore released a new product: Email Campaign Manager. I’ll be doing a demo next week, so I will write another post then to share as much as I can. In the meantime I can just give you an overview. If you want more info in the meantime, Irina Guseva has the ticket! More

Drupal is an open source PHP based Content Management System which allows you to easily build and customize web applications. Currently, there are innumerable websites on the internet built on Drupal. One of the main reasons for the increasing popularity of Drupal is its extensibility and modularity which allow developers to implement new features and contribute them to the community so it can be maintained and reviewed by other developers. There is a huge volume of contributed modules on the community site so almost any feature needed is very likely to be already implemented.  Bug fixes and feature requests are continuously being added to the contributed modules so it is important to keep modules up to date all the time, this task is even more important when security updates are released. More

Drupal is an open source PHP based CMS that allows easily creating web applications, plug-in themes and creating custom functionality. One of the main advantages of Drupal is that there is a large list of contributed modules available at the Drupal.org site that almost any feature needed is already developed or being developed by the community. Most importantly, is that when any bug is found on any module, developers can report the issue and contribute patches so the module can be updated by the maintainers. When a new release of a module becomes available it is reported on the administration interface so developers can update the site. However, there are tasks that are not so trivial that can be performed with the out-of-the-box functionality of the Drupal core, like the task of updating Drupal modules. Fortunately there is a Drupal tool called Drush, which is a command line application tool used to enable, disable, uninstall, update many aspects of Drupal such as modules, themes, profiles or translations.  More

The Localization Client Module is a contributed  Drupal module that provides enterprises with an efficient, user friendly way of translating content in-place. Localization Client module provides a graphic interface that helps a user translate almost any content through it on every single Drupal page. More

Concrete5 is an Open Source PHP based CMS which is gaining more acceptance among developers, site builders and content administrators. This is largely due to Concrete5’s In-context editing capabilities as well as other features which make the process of building a website a fun task. Building and managing custom themes in Concrete5 is pretty straightforward. In Concrete 5 you can have themes and page types. At the beginning it can be confusing but Page Types are just different templates and layouts for the same theme. On the Concrete5 website there is a simple guide that provides very detailed steps on how to start building a basic theme from a standard HTML template. I am just going to give a little summary here on how this can be done. More

Concrete5 is a PHP based CMS that is used to build block based websites in a very fast way. Compared to other CMS like Drupal or Joomla, it contains a more complete and intuitive set of features out-of-the-box while keeping it simple for site builders, content editors, marketers and developers. There are several features that can be plugged in via add-on modules besides the core features provided. The content management is based on blocks, which makes it easier for content editors to edit each individual piece of content of every page. One of the key features of the Concrete5 CMS that gives it an advantage over other Open Source PHP based CMS solutions is the in-context editing which allows content editors to drag and drop pieces of content in every page and edit them individually without switching the context (i.e. without leaving the page you are viewing). More