Content Management

Two years ago, I made an attempt to distance myself from CMS Report. The ability to shutdown ten years of work proved more difficult than I thought so I eventually compromised by rebranding the site to socPub. Since then, I've been working on a number of additional side projects. I'm still trying to throw new ideas against the wall and see which ones stick. 

For those curious, these are the personal projects I'm working on for 2018:

Effective immediately, CMS Report has been shutdown with socPub designated as the website's full replacement.

Two months ago, I introduced CMS Report "Lite" as a slimmed-down version of the original website. Since our rebranding from CMS Report to socPub earlier this year, a number of content management professionals expressed the need to cite reputable CMSReport.com for their information and were uncomfortable with referencing an "unknown" website like socPub. With limited success since bringing this nostalgic website back online, I decided this it was time to: let the past go; redirect all remaining traffic from CMSReport.com to SocPub.com; and to shutdown the website for good.

Your hosting account was found to be causing an overload of MySQL resources. What can you do? Upgrade your Drupal 8 website to Drupal 8.4 or higher.

One of my goals in rebranding my website from CMS Report to socPub was to write diverse articles beyond the topic of content management systems. Yet, here we go again with another CMS related article. The Drupal open source project recently made available Drupal 8.4 and for me this version has been a long time coming as it addresses some long standing frustrations I've had with Drupal 8 from the perspective of a site administrator. While Drupal 8.4 adds some nice new features, I'm just as excited about the bug fixes and performance improvements delivered in this new version of Drupal.

Results highlight significant concerns among higher education institutions about student recruitment targets due to proposed visa/travel restrictions as well as accessibility priorities. 

Last week, I received an email inviting me to take a sneak peak at a press release that became public today. In the email, I was asked if I would be interested in hearing "news from new open source startup, DRUD Tech, founded by a couple of long-time Drupal contributors". According to the email, the company has been in "stealth mode" quietly working on their new product which is ready for launch this week. Given that I'm a long time fan of the Drupal content management system of course I said yes.

Earlier this year I rebranded the website CMS Report to this site, socPub. The website's new identity has allowed me, article contributors, and our readers to explore topics well outside the norm of conversations surrounding content management systems. Although we're going through a bit of growing pains with establishing a new identity under socPub, I'm fully committed to this new website. The change has been good for me and I'm once again inspired to write on topics that interest me.

SendGrid, a MailChimp competitor, pushes forward with new marketing campaign enhancements

While I may be an old dog with decades of experience utilizing websites for marketing purposes, I'm more like a newborn puppy when it comes to email marketing. Until a couple years ago, I never utilized email campaigns or email newsletters in hopes to get more visits to my websites. My current email marketing service provider is MailChimp, but there is another customer communication platform that is on my radar, Colorado-based SendGrid.

This week, SendGrid announced a new editing experience for SendGrid Marketing Campaigns. The new email marketing editor addresses familiar pain points for marketers who previously had to choose between the convenience of visual design and efficient editing of code.

WordPress 4.8 is named "Evans" in honor of jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans.

WordPress 4.8 is now available and introduces users to new content management tools including three media widgets covering images, audio and video. The "Evans" release also includes link improvements, an updated text widget that supports visual editing, and an upgraded news and events section in your dashboard. 

When Matt Mullenweg announced the release of WordPress 4.8 he mentioned that this new version was built with you in mind. While the updates seem minor, he indicated that users will find that the improvements intuitive enough that "you’ll welcome [the changes] like an old friend".

Sometimes I get too nostalgic over computers or software that I once used in my daily life. I remember my first computer (the Commodore Vic-20), I remember my first programming language (BASIC), and I remember my first spam filtering software for user generated content (Akismet). But nine years ago, a new spam filtering service originally intended for Drupal called Mollom emerged and I quickly forgot about the other spam blocking software.

A more feature rich Joomla! has just been released.

This week, the Joomla! Project announced the release of Joomla 3.7. This new release in the Joomla! 3 series features over 700 improvements to the popular content management system, including many features which "make administration of Joomla! Web sites easier and more feature-rich, as well as several security updates". The following are the seven biggest new feature improvements I found in Joomla 3.7.