Round Tale

Previously known as cmPublish, the Clickability Platform is a CMS with a different approach on content management.  Developed by CMS provider Clickability, this platform is delivered on an on-demand basis, as well as full service with the company’s “Innovation as a Service” solution.  Aside from content management, the Clickability Platform also offers analytics, email campaign, web 2.0 and advertising among other functionality.  While there is obviously far more to the Clickability Platform than content management, this is indeed the focal point of the package.

Core Technologies

Though a licensed commercial product, Clickability Platform is based on powerful open-source technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Java.  It utilizes Apache as its web server and Velocity for the templating system.  Even though you have to pay for a license, the leveraging of various popular open-source tools makes Clickability Platform a cost effective CMS product.

Clickability Content

The main content entity in the Clickability environment is the item.  Authors have the ability to create content items by selecting various types of content from the navigation pane.  This CMS gives you a number of different content items out of the box, including jobs, blogs, press releases, case studies and FAQs.  Furthermore, custom content types can be created as well.   The templating system is a major part of the process as it allows you to actually get the content on your web pages.  These templates can be tailored to display numerous types of content in different sections of a single page.  While this feature caters to beginners, Clickability Platform also has something for developers with advanced creation environments and other customizing assets such as stylesheets.

Additional Features

Clickability Platform certainly isn’t short on features.  The package bundles streamlined content management capabilities alongside a host of SEO tools, Web 2.0, capabilities and the following list of features:

Newsletters – Publishers can create a newsletter of content and automatically distribute it to subscribers.  They can also manage mailing lists and have the ability to provide subscribers with double opt-in capabilities.

Advertising - Adverting functionality is tightly integrated into the Clickability Platform.  This allows administrators to create and maintain campaigns as well as all the details that go along with them.  Because ads are considered content pieces, they have targets that provide administrators with a way to track and keep up with the history of their performance.

cmSideKick – Clickability Platform allows you to run your website in the browser and the intuitive cmSideKick in a second frame.  cmSideKick is a utility that enables you to perform deep analyzation of statistics, allowing you to view your site in the administrator mode or selective views to modify certain areas.  This is one tool that you are likely to put to great use in the Clickability environment.

Conclusion

Clickability has come a long way since its days as cmPublish.  However, it has managed to maintain all the basics of content management and received some nice upgrades to compliment the emerging technologies and web trends.  Clickability Platform is definitely a enterprise CMS solution and can help to satisfy the needs of businesses of all sizes.

Originally launched in 1999, the Hot Banana CMS is an award-winning content management tool designed with the small to medium sized enterprise in mind.  It places a strong focus on content optimization and online marketing, but also has a broad range of basic content management capabilities, which helps it appeal to customers with varying needs.  Hot Banana is integrated with Lyris’ suite of marketing products, most notably EmailLabs, its flagship email marketing solution.  This CMS aims to satisfy three key demands: content management, website optimization and marketing automation.  If power and ease of use is something that matters for your project, then Hot Banana certainly warrants a closer look.

Website Optimization

Optimization is a key element of Hot Banana, proven by the fact that it contributes numerous resources to tracking site and campaign performance.  Its SEO tools play a key role in content creation and keyword analysis through a comprehensive editing interface and reports.  Some of the other optimization tools include affiliate tracking, metadata management, automatic Google Sitemap submission and updates, automated tagging and instant SEO-friendly output.  Analyzing your components for optimization is as simple as clicking and entering keywords into the appropriate field.  Hot Banana is one piece of software that allows you to enjoy CMS usability the way it was meant to be.

Marketing Automation

In the Hot Banana environment, marketing automation and optimization go hand in hand.  The software provides a robust web form builder that streamlines the creation of forms and management of captured data.  It also integrates with SalesForce and other popular CRM platforms as well as EmailLabs, which enables form data to be automatically migrated to customer databases.  In addition, Hot Banana aims to ensure marketing optimization with a press release manager, blog administration, and event and survey management tools.  While EmailLabs provides an open framework for integrating with other email marketing managers, Hot Banana has a nice set of default email marketing functions in its own right.

Content Management

A clean and well organized interface makes content creation a breeze with Hot Banana.  The software packs a nice selection of templates with options ranging from standard web pages and landing pages to multi-column email layouts.  From there, your page can be created using the WYSIWYG editor, which offers tools for HTML view toggling and keyword analysis directly from your browser.  Advanced metadata can be inserted via a separate table while all of your content items can be scheduled for publishing dates of your choosing.  Though Hot Banana has a user-friendly interface to work with, it actually conceals many hidden treasures beneath all the open-space, making you dig a little deeper to perform certain actions.

Conclusion

Hot Banana is geared toward small and medium sized organizations whom for marketing, branding and ease of use are essential.  The major downside to the platform is that its based on Cold Fusion, which automatically makes it a turn off for developers not familiar with the language.  Disadvantages aside, this Banana offers enough out of the box functionality to greatly benefit small teams and businesses with a strong internal focus.