CMS Reviews, CMS Software Reviews

Digitalus CMS is a fairly new player in the simple CMS market. Their first open source Zend/PHP-based version 1.0 was released in August 2008.

Recently, version 1.5 came out and caught our attention with new features like simple globalization capabilities, web-based installer and the 960 Grid system page layout management.

Some of Digitalus features are strikingly simple, others definitely call for some geeky brains.

Vivvo is an Web Content Management System based on the popular LAMP stack of technologies. Built by Serbian software house, Spoonlabs, the product is designed to deliver and manage interactive publishing websites.

This PHP-based Web CMS features a modern AJAX-ified user interface, a clean and easy to use backoffice set of tools, and the ability to create your front-end website without having to write a line of code. Come along as we take a closer look under the covers.

Their website says it all: Clover CMS is a simple web content management system. Designed to provide basic content management functionality, the intent is to bring content management capabilities to organizations with only minimum requirements and a minimum of appetite for learning new technology.

What Clover Content offers is a straightforward way to create content for your website in a hosted environment, delivered to your website via two simple lines of code.

With this Quick Take Review (see more quick take CMS reviews), we show you exactly what Clover Content CMS is and isn't. Come take a closer look.

Our hearts are thumping and adrenalin levels are high as we tell you about the just-released Day's CQ5 WCM. To get as close as possible to a real-life experience, we went ahead and installed the software from scratch and played with it for a couple of days. It was a fun ride.

Without further due, let’s jump in and see what Day came up with after three years of WCM silence.

Every Content Management Solution Provider seeks to find and market what makes them unique. For Nstein, it's a little about their ability to produce a multi-lingual content management solution for the digital publishing industry. But that's not what makes them unique — they have a “secret sauce”. And it may just be the thing that pushes them ahead of an ever growing and growling pack.

What is Tridion? Or is it Trillian, Trideon or Tridian? What can we say, it’s tough being a Euro web content management vendor in the U.S. market.

After conquering most of Europe, SDL Tridion started its Web CMS quest in the U.S. in 2006 with their flagship CMS product — Tridion R5 — an offering that has received accolades from such critics as analyst firm, Gartner. R5 comes with a myriad of standard Web CMS features, like inline editing using SiteEdit and some unique functionality such as the Translation Manager.

This Quick Take Review is an overview of SDL Tridion R5.2 with a detailed summary, full of “meat,” at the tail end of this article.

Xythos is a provider of on-premise and hosted (SaaS) document management solutions for organizations both large and small. Their hosted product has a somewhat unique history in that is was designed and developed from the very beginning as a web-based service.

The SaaS version of their document management product, launched in December 2006, is the software we've got in our sights today. Xythos on Demand (XOD) is a full featured enterprise document management solution, and true to its name, it is delivered as a hosted service. Join us as we poke around in the binary guts of XOD.

Matchbin is touted as the world’s first ecommerce platform as a service that specializes in both product and service matching. They've created something called the Community Marketplace Multimedia Edition. This technical wonder bundle is a fully fledged social media system, web content management system and ecommerce marketplace rolled-up in one.

Hot Banana is a web content management system (Web CMS) with a heavy emphasis placed on web marketing and content optimization, but with a full range of core content management capabilities which attract customers with a broad range of needs.

The CMS is a part of and integrated with the Lyris suite of marketing solutions, most notably with EmailLabs.

The Lyris marketing suite — following a slew of takeovers of top players in core marketing technologie — has now been formally packaged into Lyris HQ, which is comprised of Hot Banana, EmailLabs (email marketing), ClickTracks (analytics), EmailAdvisor (email campaign analysis and toolset) and BidHero (bid-management).

Clickability is a web content management provider with a twist. Their product, the Clickability Platform, is provided On Demand and is a full service solution offering starting with Infrastructure as a Service and ending with what the company calls Innovation as a Service. The package covers both the back office content management interfaces and, importantly, the delivery and rendering infrastructure.

While there's much more to the Clickability Platform then web content management, it is definitely the central component.

This Quick Take Review is an overview of the Web CMS portion of the Clickability Platform. For the purposes of this review we have restricted most of our discussion on the Web Content Management capabilities — although we do mention some of the additional components in their Software as a Service (SaaS) solution set, as interesting differentiators.

DISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated Web Content Management infrastructure for www.discovermagazine.com. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.

After analyzing current needs and taking stock of the Web CMS landscape DISCOVER ultimately selected the open source Plone platform. This is a two-part series where we look at the CMS features which convinced DISCOVER to chose Plone.

Some rivalries run deep: Army vs. Navy, Mac vs. PC, and dogs vs. frisbees. With the release of Moveable Type 4 and the near-simultaneous release of ExpressionEngine v1.6, it's time to to examine this perhaps less well-known rivalry.

Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007, or “MOSS” for short, is Microsoft's first integrated server platform that aims to provide web content management, enterprise content services, and enterprise search, as well as shared business processes and business intelligence dashboarding to the small/medium enterprise.

Reprinted with permission from CMS Watch — www.cmswatch.com
OpenCms 6.0 is a mature, open source Web Content Management (WCM) system based on the J2EE platform. We recently acquired hands-on experience installing and customizing OpenCms on a client project. Our take: OpenCms is well suited to supporting small to medium web sites, but comes with a steep learning curve.

Announced without a lot of fanfare yesterday was Six Apart's latest version of their enterprise blogging platform.

Movable Type Enterprise (MTE), a souped-up version of 6A's commercial blogging platform, has just turned one-point-five. Still, some say MTE is just glossy packaging, the “E” word, and an inflated price tag. Perhaps, perhaps not. By and by the “E” (for Enterprise) is being earned and despite the nay sayers, there is a place for Enterprise Blogging software.

Since January 2001, Canadian web services company Simian Systems, Inc has marketed their own brand of Web Content Management System called the Sitellite CMS.

Simian recently released the latest version of their Web CMS, the Sitellite 4.2 Content Management System, and CMSWire has had a change to poke under the covers and speak in depth with Simian staff.

New York-based Quantum Art produces the QP7 content application server. QP7 is geared towards web content management, but aims to break away from the page-based metaphor and provide a framework for developing content centric web applications utilizing QP7 content objects.

Plone is a popular Open Source Web CMS based on the Zope application framework. A recent review of Plone by Roger Johansson is definitely worth a close read if you are considering Plone as a Web CMS.

This post was authored in FireFox and so far, with good reason. After not so lengthy a pursuit, we have yet to find a blogging client (free or commercial) with the features and usability that inspire us to click the browser to the curb and start authoring from a desktop app.

As it turns out, we might have better luck if OSX is what we called home, but being Win32 geeks, we do tend to drag that perspective around with us.

An Article by Steve Drucker

CommonSpot Content Server, developed by PaperThin, Inc., has been simplifying Web site development and authoring since its introduction in 1998. On April 8, 2004, the newest generation, version 4.0, was released.

Web Content Management products usually seek to empower nontechnical users by allowing them to modify Web content from their desktops; enforcing standards; and categorizing, structuring, and cataloging information in a way that makes it easy to locate.

With over 200 commercially available products spanning every conceivable market niche, CommonSpot has earned a reputation for ease of use and best overall value among its competitors. The fact that it's written and extensible through ColdFusion should come as no surprise to anyone.