This is not your typical update, in fact it may be my largest update ever for any of my products. Total CMS v1.2 brings in 45 new stacks into the CMS. That is nuts! Most of these new stacks are for powering the revolutionary new Blog.
While the Blog is just getting released to the world today, its already a highly mature product. It has gone through a highly active public beta for the past 6 months. The sites that users are building using the new blog have been blowing me away. These are no longer your typical RapidWeaver sites.
Sites built with Total CMS and Blog can now stand toe-to-toe with any website built with Wordpress. I am even proud to say that Total CMS based sites have replaced at least (that I know of) 3 Wordpress sites out there already. And the clients are in love with them. They are reporting that the admin interface is much easier to use that they ever had with Wordpress.
Total CMS Blog contains all of the features that you would expect to see in a blog.
Fully customizable blog layouts
Multiple blogs on a single site
Search and filter posts by category, tags and author
RSS Feed generation
Sitemap.xml generation for SEO
SEO and Social meta tags are automatically generated for each blog post
Every blog post can have its own image gallery
Add images inline with your post content
The feature list can go on and on…
The blog isn’t the only thing amazing about this update. The rest of the CMS components saw a ton of bug fixes and enhancements as well. Here are some highlights.
There are now 50 macros that you can use to integrate CMS content inside your favorite 3rd party add-ons.
New Date Admin stack allows users to control dates. Example: Users can now control the dates used inside the Tardis stack from within the CMS.
Hipwig has been improved with colors, fullscreen edit, code view, character counter and more.
Last and definitely not least is that Total CMS now has an official API that 3rd party developers can leverage to easily integrate into Total CMS. There have already been some amazing stacks released. Check out the CMS Integrations page for details.
We have already done a bunch of great video around this Total CMS update. Here are a few that you may be interested in watching.
This is huge news Joe… Super excited to finally get to put this to use and it could not of come at a better time. Also it appears this is a free upgrade for existing users? Wow Joe, you did not have to do that, this new TotalCMS with Blog is well worth a full 2.0 version and pricing.
Thank you so much for putting a product like this out there, truly love the modular approach and the ability to customize the admin section. Have big plans to integrate it with SiteLok for a robust subscription based site. Again thank you for all the time and attention you have put into this. It takes a herculean amount of effort to design and build a product like TotalCMS, my hat is off to you.
I too would love to see how this could integrate with Sitelok… I have been waiting for ages to see whether Webyep 2.0 will ever materialise, but Joe’s solution could well blow that out of the water if a single sign on would allow certain Sitelok users to administer the CMS/Blog content…
I have been using Total CMS Blog since the beta, and it is a fantastic product. It is well-designed, easy to install, and constantly updated by Joe. You can’t go wrong.
Hello Mark… TotalCMS is super powerful and with this huge leap forward it is going to be even more powerful. Since it is modular it allows us the flexibility to architect extremely creative solutions.
Interesting that you mention WebYep as I have used it quite extensively in the past for some very advanced online solutions. Actually the new version of the software has been completed, the developer has just decided to take a little extra time to bring it up to PHP 7 standards. I should mention I am speaking about the actual system developer (Max) who has picked the project up after ObjectiveDevelopment made the product open source a few years back. Max is an absolutely stellar developer and in many ways Joe’s approach and attention to detail reminds me of his work. Max is a part of another Mac based site publishing community I had the pleasure of being a part of for about a decade.
While WebYep and what Max has done with it is truly amazing, I don’t want to suck the oxygen out of this truly important announcement. TotalCMS with all it’s new functionality, which I have not had a chance to fully explore, as well as a super flexible blog platform or should I say a super powerful information posting platform, provides the RapidWeaver community with an extremely intuitive way to implement CMS based solutions. Think about that last point, because of the modular nature of the overall CMS, one can dream up and implement some really powerful web based information posting solutions. I would agree with Joe’s statement that TotalCMS is a fully matured piece of software and I would add that it also takes a thoughtful and modern approach to doing what it does.
As for SiteLok, the single sign on feature was actually developed for my company and later made available in both Max’s product and from SiteLok as a plugin. While I have not fully put TotalCMS through the rigors of one of my projects, I would not suggest making a single sign on solution. From what I understand of TotalCMS, it is unsecured by default unless you use the included page locking feature. This is actually a plus for those of us using SiteLok as we simply don’t use the page locking features and thus hand all securing of various pages, subscriber, administrator and such over to SiteLok.
Apologies for going on and on about all this but I could not be happier about this new TotalCMS and this announcement could not of come at a better time. So I guess it really is time to CELEBRATE and start weaving with TotalCMS.