Web CMS: Getting Chatty with Hot Banana

By Brice Dunwoodie | Published Oct 26, 2006

Lifting the bar a notch recently acquired Web Content Management and website analytics player Hot Banana has teamed with a winner for more horizontal add-on modules. This time its integrated forums, blogging, and collaboration from fellow ColdFusion fan, FuseTalk, Inc.

The alliance was unveiled today at the MAX 2006 Adobe User Conference. And given that both Hot Banana and FuseTalk build their products on Adobe's ColdFusion MX platform, the pairing is a natural one.

Other ColdFusion based CMS platforms, such as Paper Thin have similar alliances with FuseTalk. Simply put there is a limited number of CF players in the market and having a working relationship with complementary vendors is a no brainer.

“With Hot Banana, administrators will now have one place to go to manage discussion-forum logins, as well as blogs, RSS feeds and Web-publishing tasks,” says Greg Waite, FuseTalk's president.

The joint Hot Banana/FuseTalk solution provides scalable, integrated discussion forums and importantly a single sign-on for authentication and authorization. With single sign-on, website admins can simultaneously control forum logins and update the web pages containing the FuseTalk modules.

Important FuseTalk features include:

Multiple Forums The product scales up easily to hundreds or thousands of forums.
Wizard-driven Administration Creating forums, and setting up external authentication are both handled by a FuseTalk Wizard
E-mail Integration As expected, forum updates can be received via email, but going beyond outbound communications, FuseTalk supports inbound contributions and conversations via email.
Blog Capability This is a big one for Hot Banana. FuseTalk have shaped their underlying technology in such a was as to now offer blogs as part of the core product. Hot Banana gains an important feature checkbox with this capability.

There are other nice features of FuseTalk, but most of them are on the “expected” list for such a mature web forums and collaboration tool. Some notables are Section 508 compliance, localization, WYSIWYG editing, polling of users, reasonably sophisticated reporting, and content censoring.

For the .NET Web CMS vendors out there, FuseTalk also offers a .NET version of their product, which I'm sure they'd be happy to have you integrate.

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