Curated information technology news for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. News items are edited to remove hype, unhelpful jargon, iffy statements, and quotes, to create a short summary — mostly limited to 200 words — of the important facts with a link back to a useful source for more information. News items are published using the date of the original source here and in our weekly email newsletter.
We focus on product news, but also include selected company news such as mergers and acquisitions and meaningful partnerships. All news items are edited by one of our analysts under the NewsShark byline. See our Editorial Policy.
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The Joomla! project announced the release of Joomla 4.2 (now 4.2.2). The open-source web content management system (CMS) continues Joomla 4’s focus on accessible web design and brings new features. With Joomla 4.2.2, codenamed Uaminifu, we have new and improved features for bloggers and authors, web designers, extension developers and web agencies. What’s new in Joomla 4.22:
Allow to disable session metadata tracking for guest users
Reduce the number of permission columns
Smart Search: Allow fuzzy word matching
Package filter in the Extensions: Manage page
There are also many feature improvements included.
Joomla 3.10 is released alongside Joomla 4 as the last minor release of Joomla 3. Joomla 3.10 will continue to be supported with security fixes until 17th August 2023. As it is now a year since the release of J4.0, you should be planning or in the process of migrating to the latest version of Joomla. We provide resources to help with the migration on the documentation site.
Botminds AI announced the availability of Botminds Document AI platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications, and services for use on Azure. Botminds’ customers can now take advantage of the Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management.
Botminds is an integrated platform for Document Understanding/Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). Botminds provides AI-powered solutions that read and understand documents, a search engine to query any document, enriched document analytics, and end-to-end document-based process automation. Custom AI models, help organizations transform data into intelligent actionable insights in a matter of weeks.
The Azure Marketplace is an online market for buying and selling cloud solutions certified to run on Azure. The Azure Marketplace helps connect companies seeking cloud-based solutions with partners who have developed solutions that are ready to use.
Squarespace announced a new web design system, Fluid Engine. The reimagined design system provides users the maximum freedom to easily play, experiment, and stretch creative limits through an unrestricted canvas, but the canvas is also guided by an advanced smart grid to ensure quality results. The system provides just enough design guidance to make a website look great without limiting creativity. With its intuitive, fluid, and agile website editing experience, it is powerful enough to be used by the most creative professionals in web design, and easy-to-use for beginners. Fluid Engine is now available on Squarespace 7.1 in English, with plans to roll out in other supported languages beginning this fall. Features include:
Easier customization and creative expression. A modern design system that gives users creative flexibility with design guidance through a drag-and-drop smart grid.
Placement precision. A new level of control when arranging content within page layouts. You can control all aspects of layering, alignment, full bleed positioning.
More control over mobile websites. A smart grid specifically designed for mobile view that helps users create bespoke designs to optimize mobile experience.
Design Efficiency. Intelligent, responsive functionality to help users get their envisioned design results faster and more easily.
Access Innovations, Inc., provider of Data Harmony software solutions, announced the release of their new Recommender as part of the Data Harmony Suite. Recommender is now available to all Data Harmony clients using versions 3.16 or higher.
Recommender uses the semantic fingerprint of an article, its subject metadata tagging, matching to other articles and content within the database. When the searcher finds an article they like, the Recommender automatically displays other items with the same semantic fingerprint nearby on the search interface. This allows immediate display of highly relevant content to the search without scrolling and frustration in trying to find similar items. It also allows for display of other relevant content such as conference papers, ads, books, meetings, expert profiles, and so forth.
This is not based on personalization profiles or purchasing history. By using the metadata weighting and other algorithms it provides only items relevant to the current query faster search and the surfacing of more related information to the user.
For those interested in using Recommender there are two prerequisites: 1) the content needs to be indexed or tagged using a controlled vocabulary like a thesaurus or taxonomy, and 2) the search interface needs to be able to accommodate the API call to the tagged data and subsequent display of the results.
This is a guest post from friend and colleague Girish Altekar, who has been working on this idea and technology for some time. I have been involved as an advisor for a couple of years, and will be republishing the series of posts he refers to below. Check it out…
Be Intrepid on the web
Over the next few days, we take the wraps off a new way to manage personal data. We will showcase applications that empower individuals to manage and reuse their data efficiently while enhancing data privacy, increasing data control, and facilitating genuine competitiveness in marketplaces they are interested in. Our Intrepids technology is a liberating technology for data owners as, untethered from call centers, complex web sites, and repeated data entry, data owners are free to go about their lives feeling secure about their personal data and knowing that their Intrepid driven requests are being honored accurately.
Businesses benefit also. The authentication and accuracy that is built into Intrepid driven data transfer empowers business applications to rely on actual dependable user data, instead of screen scraping and heuristics. Dependable data reduces the need for data verification and cleansing and drives the creation of new innovative applications that reduce business costs and improve customer experience.
A key difference between Intrepids and other approaches is that user data encapsulated in Intrepids stays with users, not with intrep-id.com or related servers. Intrepid servers facilitate the data transfer, but all user data is purged when the requested user transaction is completed.
These posts are intended to generate two kinds of interest.
We want to see if there is user interest in a privacy mechanism such as Intrepids. Please feel free to try out any application and give us your feedback if you think Intrepids, if/when widely adopted, may be useful to you.
We are also looking for strategic business partners who may be interested in exploring the use of Intrepids for their businesses and customers. Remember that any repetitive or burdensome data transfer can be eliminated by using Intrepids.
We would be honored if you felt like passing these posts on to colleagues and friends who may have an interest.
In the next post we start with the first Intrepid example.
Future Topics
Previous Intrepid related posts available at intrep-id.com.
Kontent by Kentico announced that they raised an investment of $40 million from Expedition Growth Capital and became a standalone enterprise. Now Kontent.ai, which originally started in 2015 as an internal startup within Kentico, will operate as a separate company, focused on targeting high-level enterprise organizations. This allows Kentico Xperience to return to its roots and refresh its name to Kentico. Petr Palas, the founder of Kentico, is now Chairman of the Board for both companies and the newly formed board has appointed Dominik Pinter, as Chief Executive Officer of Kentico.
Kentico started with a content management system (CMS) in 2004 and have since created two products: a digital experience platform (DXP) with content management, digital marketing, and commerce capabilities, and a headless CMS. In May 2020, the company split into two divisions; Kentico Xperience (DXP) and Kontent by Kentico (headless CMS).
The investment into the Kontent by Kentico division will be redirected straight into the DXP. With heavy investment in product development, the plan is to hire at least 60 more people over the next 12 months to join the 160+ global team.
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, announced enhancements to its cross-cluster search and cross-cluster replication capabilities with interoperability between self-managed deployments and Elastic Cloud, now generally available. Customers can seamlessly search data across multiple Elasticsearch clusters deployed on-premises, on Kubernetes, and in the cloud.
Cross-cluster search enables users to search across multiple clusters and visualize data in one coherent view for deeper insights. Cross-cluster replication allows customers to replicate data between clusters regardless of their physical location (cloud or on-premises) and deployment model. Features include:
Streamlining workflows with a single user interface to search and replicate data between Elasticsearch clusters regardless of environment—on-premises, public cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud.
Enabling customers to minimize risk and increase operational efficiency while retaining complete visibility of their data throughout the gradual migration of on-premises workloads to the cloud.
Optimizing customers’ ability to troubleshoot production applications, analyze security events, and manage where their sensitive data resides.
Improving disaster recovery scenarios where data redundancy and business continuity are critical, while increasing service resilience and lowering latency.
Netlify, a platform for modern web development, announced the first cohort of the Jamstack Innovation Fund, created by Netlify to support the early-stage companies that are driving forward the modern web by arming developer teams with Jamstack-based tooling and practices.
Jamstack is an architectural approach that decouples the web experience from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance and maintainability. Each of the startups Netlify has invested in offers a unique technology that adds to the best development experience for the web. They include ChiselStrike, a prototype-to-production data platform; Clerk, the first authentication service purpose-built for Jamstack; Clutch, a visual editor for Jamstack solutions; Convex, a global state management platform; Deno, a modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript; Everfund, a developer-first nonprofit tool to build custom fundraising systems; NuxtLabs, making web development intuitive with NuxtJS, an open source framework for Vue.js; Snaplet, a tool for copying Postgres databases; TakeShape, a GraphQL API mesh; and Tigris Data, a zero-ops backend for web and mobile apps.
The Fund has a goal of investing $10 million in the Jamstack ecosystem. In addition to a $100,000 investment, Netlify provides a free startup program. Netlify is accepting rolling submissions to the Jamstack Innovation Fund.
