Content Management Matters ™

Creating a successful e-commerce experience can be tricky. Making it engaging can be downright challenging. Keeping up with the evolving web skills and demands of online customers often means upgrading technology and making sites more interactive -- but at what cost? And who's time? And for what? Having a better understanding of how to execute a strategic approach to an engaging e-commerce experience is the key.

Thank goodness then for Human Factors International (HFI). They will be hosting a free, live webcast on Thursday, June 26 at 3:30 PM (EST) about Optimizing e-commerce UX: Create websites that empower customers, are effortless to use and create a joyful shopping experience.

Kentico has released a new version of it's web content management system. This new 3.1 version combines the power of e-commerce directly with content management. Something very few CMS vendors consider doing... or do they?

If you're running a company that depends on eCommerce, you're probably familiar with the hassles of working in a commodity dependent businesses where margins are tight, prices volatile, and product supply unpredictable. UK software developer Intoscape has come to the rescue with Total Commerce Management (TCM), a system that will help UK retailers manage their supply chain, monitor competitors, automate pricing and content and optimize procurement and data exchange.

Last month Caribou unveiled their Caribou CMS 1.0, a new web-based content management system, specifically designed for full access to the content to be by subscription only. This will clearly be of interest to membership organizations and to webmasters who want to run membership websites where access to the full content is restricted to the paying punter.

Good news for sites pushing product: Mediasurface, a provider of web content management solutions, is joining forces with hybris, an e-commerce provider, to give clients an e-commerce web solution with the strength of a full-blown CMS backing it.

Sweet!

London-based Pixaria has announced a major upgrade of its web content management tool for photographers. Pixaria Gallery 2.0 offers users "everything they need to publish and sell digital images on their website" for US$ 195.

New features included in the release are an updated search engine, improved UI, and a community function which enables the administrator to designate user privileges, controlling access for viewing and uploading photos to the site.

More tid bits from the Plone Conference -- Maurits Van Rees just blogged about a talk here covering the latest news and progress of a new e-commerce add-on for Plone. We like the honesty of the module's name: GetPaid.

Commerce and Kiwis are two wonderful things that just aren’t paired together often enough. ITema, Inc. has thankfully addressed this issue, at least in name, by releasing to the open source community KiweeCommerce, an e-commerce module for the MODx content management system.

Chain Reaction Commerce, an ecommerce shopping cart maker and purveyor of CRE Loaded, a Web store application, are releasing the CRE Content Director. The Content Director is an add-on system that revs the traditional CRE Loaded with the document management features of a CMS.

And it all comes in a tidy little box.

It's good news from Down Under! Gordon Heydon of Aussie services firm Heydon Consulting has lead the release of E-Commerce version 3 for Drupal. This collection of Drupal add-ons empowers Open Source webmasters to set up online stores and hock their wares in an all Drupal environment. Oh the joy!