Squiz News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

 The open source Aussies are coming, this time with MySource Matrix as a fully supported SaaS CMS which includes all the features of its full web content management system parent.

Welcome to the December 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.
 

Welcome to the November 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact for your project updates.

Squiz.net (news, site), the Australian firm behind the MySource Matrix CMS, has released a lite offering, MySource Mini under the GPL license. Squiz has made their CMS fully editable from what they have dubbed the Viper inline interface. Context sensitive help and a selection of pre-loaded design templates ensure that users can have a basic site up and running quickly.

A versioning system which tracks changes to content and integrated image galleries and a movie player round out the features included by default in a MySource Mini CMS install. The image galleries offer an inline or lightbox-style option, and thumbnail images are generated automatically.

The video upload wizard, accessed from the inline editor, makes it easy to upload and display video for the built-in player.

As befits a micro CMS, ease of use is the buzzword for MySource Mini. In a nice little twist, the MySource Mini installer is also available as a VMware bundle, which can be auto updated to avoid complicated update procedures.

How many times have you been on a website and wanted to find something, only to find that it didn't have a search box, or worse yet, that its search was crap. Probably more than you'd like to admit.

Well Squiz (news, site) doesn't want those websites to be any of theirs. And they've made an acquisition that will go a long way towards supporting search on websites that use their MySource Matrix web content management system.

Squiz (news, site), provider of MySource Matrix, the Open Source Content Management System from down under, is all about being supportive. To prove it, the team behind the name announced that it now offers its shoulder to anyone in need, at any time, from any place.

The new Global, 24x7 Service Level Agreement (SLA) is designed to provide assistance via a ‘round the clock support desk for any aspect of the MySource Matrix system. Support is provided on a per-system basis, regardless of location or language. Meaning? As Squiz puts it, “Backoffice users from Victoria to Venezuela can simply pick up the phone at any time of day to get a system fault resolved.”

Standard Squiz SLA offerings also include a 99.9% system uptime guarantee and a complete system warranty.

“We’re introducing our Global 24x7 SLA in order to make Supported Open Source CMS an easier choice for large multi-national organisations and to help them reduce the complexity of managing a distributed web CMS environment,” Said Squiz CEO and founder John-Paul Syriatowicz. We know that this new support offering makes a standard, commercially licensed CMS SLA look arcane and hopelessly expensive by comparison.”

Need more convincing on the "arcane" and "hopelessly expensive" bit? Check out the inner workings of our Australian friends here.

It has often been said that you can prove anything with statistics. If that is in fact the case, then the results of a new survey will prove what many people know already -- companies are still throwing money at web content management systems.

What is striking about this survey however, is that many companies this year are spending, or plan to spend, their CMS budgets on implementation rather than licensing.

The CMS Survey Report 2009, published by UK-based Econsultancy in association with Australia-based Squiz.net (news, site) also shows that companies are doing this because they don’t believe they are getting a high-enough ROI from their existing CMS.

UK-based Sydney-based open source vendor Squiz.net (news, site) has rebundled its MySource Matrix v3.20 content management software so that companies looking to install it will be able to acquire all its different elements, even the high-end applications, using its existing GPL, out-of-the box and free of charge.

The company says its goal is to give its clients the tools to build even the most complex web systems without having to install additional product extenders, modules or widgets.

Squiz is forever telling us what we should do and what we should think: about CMS, about SEO, doing business on the web, about the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha (it’s a WIP). Which is quite irritating, because they’re invariably just about right.

As Web content management tools have evolved, so too have the responsibilities of the people who manage this content. Gone are the days when a site’s webmaster wrapped content with HTML and created Web-safe graphics.

As a matter of fact, we feel a more than little funny even using the word webmaster these days — it sort of conjures up visions of browsers past, when AJAX was still found under the kitchen sink and the <BLINK> tag was just a glimmer in a madman’s eye.

Sydney- and UK-based Squiz just announced they’ll be conducting a demo of MySource Matrix 3.12, their open source CMS solution, at London’s Internet World from May 1-3.

If you happen to be in London in the next two weeks, drop by the Adam Street members club for the latest of Squiz’s “Best Practice” seminars. On Thursday the 26th the OSS aficionados will be regaling open ears with an exclusive called “How to SEO Like a Pro.”

For a small taste of what type of information you may glean, check out our recent article on SEO and CMS deployment best practices.

Squiz recently announced they will be hosting a “best practices” open source CMS seminar for university Webmasters at Oxford’s famous debating society, this month’s end. The seminar neatly follows the London-based Web 2.0 series they launched in mid-February.