Sitecore Keeps Ahead of Web Trends
One of the many reasons we choose to partner with Sitecore for our content management system is that they keep ahead of business trends, and are ready for the future.
Sitecore recently identified the three key web content management trends for 2009 – do any of these sound like goals for your company this year? If so, let us help you implement them using the seamless integration tools Sitecore provides.
The first trend is the growth of ecommerce elements. Companies want to integrate more and more ecommerce tools into their websites. One of the most popular tools for businesses to implement is InSite Commerce, a program that integrates ecommerce solutions. It allows a business to manage multiple websites and allows a great deal of flexibility for customers.
The other top ecommerce solution used by businesses is Microsoft Commerce Server, which offers intuitive tools for integrating ecommerce solutions including an out of the box shopping solution.
Piwik as your web analytics software!
I know, you would probably argue with me on Google Analytics being the best of them all, but what’s the harm in knowing about this new web analytics tool on the block? Piwik, as its website claims, is an open source alternative to Google Analytics.
Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?
Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:
Required Sitecore Improvements
Here are a few things Sitecore can improve on:
Sitecore Admin needs to load faster
Need an easier way to assign renderings to place holders
Need an easier way to Assign roles & users to folders and content items
Right now it is a pain to get it setup on Windows 2008 with SQL Server 2008, it would be ...
Web Analytics
Web Analytics, as the name suggests is the process of colleting, analyzing and interpreting the data about the activities of online users accessing your website. This has become an integral factor in almost all online businesses as it optimizes your business by providing meaningful data about how your site is being utilized.
Sitecore CMS 6 Fundamental Concepts
Here is a PDF about Sitecore CMS 6 Fundamental Concepts. I hope you find it useful.
Rich Internet Applications
Rich Internet Applications, a well-acquainted term to most of us these days, was coined in the year 2002 by Macromedia. At first Microsoft called it, Remote Scripting and later Forrester Research named it as X Internet in the years 1998 and 2000 respectively.
In spite of such changing terminologies, the basic domain of Rich Internet Applications remains the same over the years. The changes that Rich Internet Applications brought in today’s web world is significant. It has almost abolished the traditional web applications that revolved all its activities in and around a client-server design with a thin client. With slow but continuous evolution of internet standards, it has become a tough job to delineate what exactly constitutes in a Rich Internet Applications and what does not. However, there is one common characteristic shared by all the Rich Internet Applications and that is all of them introduce a middle layer of code, also known as a client engine, connecting the server and the user.
Internet Explorer 8 RC1
After the release of IE 8 Beta 2 in August 2008, Microsoft has released the near final version of its web browser, the IE 8 Release Candidate 1 on January 26th 2009. Unlike IE 7’s monolithic browser architecture, IE 8 comes with architectural changes that are referred to as “loosely coupled IE” or “LCIE” by Microsoft and hence ensures better browsing stability and lesser propensity to potential exploits. The loosely coupled system puts the different tabs in different system processes unlike IE 7, where there were different processes for different windows but the tabs, toolbar extensions, ActiveX controls were managed by the same process and hence a crash or failure in any one of them lead to the crashing of the whole browser window. Google Chrome too uses this approach of running separate processes for different tabs and in addition it also gives plug-ins separate processes.
