Content Management Matters ™

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).

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.

Regardless of whether you like or are revolted by the term Web 2.0, most people can at least agree that the Web is a continually evolving place and that significant changes in both the underlying technologies and in the human interaction patterns have taken place over the past few years.

In the first article in this series we discussed in practical terms our take on meaning of Web 2.0 as it relates to content technologies. In this article, we describe the three key constituencies of Web 2.0 Content Management Systems and the functionalities needed to serve them well.

With all the hype that Web 2.0 has gotten, many companies are now looking at their existing Web CMS and wondering whether it meets the new paradigm’s needs or merely traps them in an earlier age of the Web, thereby missing new business opportunities and making them appear dated.

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.

The long waiting game will soon end for enterprises looking to upgrade their Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 installations, as the much delayed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 becomes generally available later this month.

Analyst firm CMS Watch reports that while MOSS makes advances in many directions, the updated version is still held back by a significant number of limitations.

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.

An enterprising young Neil Turner of York, United Kingdom has posted a review of the recently released Movable Type 3.0 Developers Edition.

Neil steers far clear of the recent outcry (whining) about MT's new licensing model (What? Pay for software?). He also doesn't dig too far under the covers with regards to technical changes for MT 3.0.

What he does do is give a very nice overview of the new publishing interface and features. He also takes a little scare out of the prospect of upgrading.

Read the review.