Tonight will be the night that a majority of the SMC sites will be upgraded to version 3.31 of the software.  While we do not anticipate any problems, you should be aware that a new version is going out.  We will post details of the upgrade once we know everything is stable, but the biggest feature enhancement in this version is the addition of Captcha to prevent spamming of web forms.

More to come…

There is no such thing as a perfect content management solution for everyone, but there’s probably a near perfect CM solution out there for you.  What does this mean?  That doesn’t make sense!  How does this change the way we think about software?

When I think about software the first thing that comes to my mind is Microsoft and the success they have seen with their Office suite.  MS Office is a “one-size-fits-all” software suite, and might be the one of the most flexible collections of software applications ever written.  With that said, it will never accomplish all needs for all people.  So what do we do?  We accommodate and make it work the best we can.  Why?  Because the price is right and Microsoft isn’t likely putting our request on their ToDo list for the next version.  Well, times are changing my friend!

Accommodation versus Customization.  As thousands of software applications are developed each year, our chance of finding a solution that fits our exact needs is more and more realistic.  Businesses are no longer settling for the one size fits all solution, or trying to fit the proverbial round peg in the square hole.  Profitable business relies on efficiency, and efficiency is not realized with accommodation.

Custom applications have long been the norm for the Fortune 500, but are only now starting to gain traction with the Small to Medium Size Businesses (SMBs).  This trend has a simple explanation.  Big business has the money to customize and the resources to support and maintain those customizations.  The SMBs that are able to customize, however, are experiencing tremendous efficiencies in their day-to-day activities.  Solutions that can be customized for any business process are the future, and the software application that can accomplish this at a low price point will be way ahead of the curve.

The latest version of the SMC’s plug-in builder was designed with this one notion in mind.  Every client has a unique way of doing business, and their content management solution needs to be easily and cost effectively customized for these differences.  Printers do not do E-commerce the same way a book store does.  Ranch and farm real estate is quite different than online marketing of single family homes or condominiums.  Is there any reason to think you can use a cookie-cutter piece of software for each of these instances and optimize success?  No way!

Your SMC provider will not try to change your business processes to accommodate the SMC, but will customize the SMC to adhere to your business processes.  Now that’s not the message we aren’t accustomed to hearing from a software provider!  But how can we be profitable when we have thousands of versions of each plug-in out there?  The answer is simple.  The core technology stays the same, but your instance of the plug-in is unique to your SMC.

For more information on how the SMC can be tailored to fit your unique business requirements, please contact one of our SMC providers.

The testing has finally commenced and SMC sites are being upgraded to the latest version of the SMC.  Contact us today to see what awaits in this much anticipated release.

• Research competition to get an idea of what you are up against, both visually and functionally

• Look for sites with visual appeal that match your taste to ensure designers are clear on your vision

• Gather all needed info and graphic files; Logo, pictures, PMS colors, etc. that you want designers to incorporate in the framework design. It is difficult to begin the project and prototype design without these items.

It has been proposed for quite some time now that we redesign the plug-in builder to allow the SMC developer more flexibility with SMC plug-ins, while also offering the option to easily integrate any application into a SMC site.  The guts of the project will be to create database tables and fields rather than store the structure of the plug-in within a table itself, as is being done now.

The following are a few benefits that the SMC developer and user will realize upon completion:

1. Easy to copy plug-ins.  Make a copy of a plug-in as a starting point for another.
2. Option to share plug-ins.  One version of plug-in shared across many SMCs.
3. Ability to optimize plug-in performance through indexes, views, keys, etc.  This will drastically improve performance on plug-ins that have many fields and/or many plug-in items.
4. Ability to create relationships between tables (PK, FK, etc.).  This is a must-have for any custom built plug-in, and is utilizing a few creative but shaky techniques to pull off now
5. No limitations on field types as will create a table for each plug-in object and a entity for each field.  Have access to create, search, order by, group by, etc., on date, currency, bit, number, text, etc. data types.
6. Option to create plug-in objects that are join tables.  Join table can link two plug-ins created using the plug-in builder (i.e. members to classifieds), but also can be used to link a table within a custom application to a SMC table (i.e. smc user to TMC task), otherwise known as a “hook”.  Easily create a “hook” with any plug-in built for an open source CMS?  Wow!
7. Ability to create views required to improve performance on large queries
8. Great base for complex applications.  Since actual tables and fields are being created, can serve as an excellent starting point for an application that takes on complexity.  Rather than starting over when the application has needs outside scope of plug-in builder, you can reuse the tables and code base generated by the SMC plug-in builder (i.e Stat Nurse Intl CRM).
9. Easy to integrate with mission critical applications or “Back Office” systems that are important to your business (i.e. accounting software, reservations software, property management system, project management, CRM, sales management, MLS for real estate, etc.)
10. Keep all “special” field formats such as Image Set, List Box, Multiple Choice, etc. and add a few more such as Look-up (Select existing table), Join Table (Select two tables), File, etc.
11. Create triggers on specific actions (i.e. On table update, send email notification)
12. Maintain ease and speed of the set-up and management of plug-in (i.e. content forms are automatically created)
13. Maintain existing benefits of SMC plug-ins such as: meta data for plug-ins and fields, can associate items to SMC pages, easy to manage plug-in items with rest of web site, etc.
14. Plug-in versions.  Can keep versions and site users have option to update to latest version as they become available (can do this since everything is standardized or defined…. i.e. update tables, and all templates to latest version)
15. Flexibility and increased function on display templates.  I.e. display plug-in data from multiple plug-ins or objects.  Would like to standardize on smarty for all coding found on plug-in templates.
16. Integration of WYSIWYG editor.  When you create a new field you have the option to specify whether field will require the editor or not.
17. Drag and drop template creation.  Drag a field label, output value, or form field to a table cell in a plug-in template

While this is not a complete list, it is a long one and will require Intrcomm to dedicate ample time and resources to the project.  Any help you can offer for this project will be greatly appreciated.  We are currently looking for projects that can help to fund this project.  If there are no projects to help fund this expense, we will most likely have to charge clients and partners extra to use this functionality.