In TYPO3 4.3 cHashes will use full-length md5 hashes instead of TYPO3′s famous “short md5″ hashes. Why and what impact does it have? View full post on buzz.typo3.org: All entries

It’s been a very good year for content marketing. In fact, visitors searching our site for the phrase “content marketing” increased by 85% in 2009 over 2008.

Social media certainly loomed larger in the past 12 months but interest in content marketing strategy accounted for the majority of the most popular posts.

Here is the Cliff’s Notes bullet point version with more detail and links to the full articles following:

• How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
• 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
• 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
• Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
• 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
• Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
• 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
• Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
• 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business

A more detailed look at the top 10 with links to each complete article is just below.  Kick back and enjoy.

1. How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
   It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others. Click to read more.
2. 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
   Of course, I’m assuming that you already have a website and are probably doing some business blogging.  You may also do a regular eNewsletter to inform your customers and prospects about the great content you have created recently online.  Your next step is to create an e-book that targets your ideal customers. Click here to read more.
3. 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
   You may be wondering why something as seemingly simple as Twitter causes so much confusion and consternation among business people.
   Perhaps, it best likened to a tool like a hammer which is simultaneously simple and powerful.  After all, a hammer can be used to put up a basic bookshelf or to build an entire home that will house a family for a lifetime. Click here to read more.
4. Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
   Think of yourself as the ultimate knowledge resource like those concierges serving fine hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons—But Available 24/7. Click here to read more.
   
5. Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
   How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers
   In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy.
   In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to fashionable. When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed in the past two years. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for ‘content marketing,’ has increased by a factor of 10. Click here to read more.
   
6. 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
   It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook
   Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal. Click here to read more.
7. Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
   Inspiration from ‘Visual Blogger’ Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Marketing
   It’s hard to make things easy. And, it’s even harder to be amusing at the same time.
   But the very best visuals take a complex idea or series of connected ideas and make them instantly understandable. Just the right visuals make those ideas even more memorable when they are funny as well. In the case of the Intersection Marketing blog from Mark Smiciklas, he manages to do both consistently. Click here to read more.
   
8. 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
   Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad. But,  most small to medium-sized businesses have yet to participate fully and enthusiastically.
   We have just written about a powerful new research study that paints a picture of how thousands of smart companies are already benefiting from the inclusion of social media.  What’s clear from that research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.
   Social media marketing is here to stay.  Because you want your organization to be here for the long haul as well, you need to move now.  Not next week. Not next month. But now. Click here to read more.
   
9. Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
   This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.
   Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget.  Click here to read more.
   
10. 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business
    Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool
    Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online.
    But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.   In that spirit we’re happy to can share with you six terrific tips for using video successfully from talented Southwest Florida professional, Kathy Saenz. Click here to read more.

View full post on Content Marketing Today

Here are the best open source scripts that are top rated by users.They are categorized into different category as CMS(Content management system) or called as portals, Blogs, ecommerce, groupware, forums, elearning, image galleries, wiki and many more.

We have produced the 3 top ranked listing in each category.You can see more in http://www.solidscripts.com or http://www.opensourcecms.com/.

Content Management System (CMS)

Drupal

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites. Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

Url – http://www.drupal.org/

Joomla

Joomla! is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.

url – http://www.joomla.org/

Typo3

TYPO3 has to be one of the best CMS programs I have ever worked with. While reading reviews on it I came across the people who didn’t like it. Yes, TYPO3 might take some reading, its not your standard program, also NO TYPO3 IS NOT FOR BEGINNERS. You should know about programming before attempting this software, there is a release for beginners, but it’s not the best. I really recommend this for advanced users!

Url – http://www.typo3.org/

Blogs

WordPress

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

Url – http://www.wordpress.org/

Textpattern

A free, flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites, even weblogs.

Built into Textpattern is Textile, a simple syntax for nudging plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content. Ordinarily fussy text amendments such as headers, hyperlinks, image tags and tables are created with one or two simple markers. Compared to navigating the tag soup of markup, writing and revising with Textile is much more intuitive, being closer to working with ordinary text. Once you’re ready to publish, copy marked up with Textile is automatically converted to valid XHTML, and because Textpattern stores both versions of each article, revising and updating is a snap. When composing or readying articles for publication in Textpattern, you can switch between three views of the article:plain text, XHTML (the code with which a web browser renders the article), and a rendered preview.

Sites published with Textpattern can employ unlimited registered contributors, each of whom may be assigned privileges by the publisher of the site. Five levels of privileges (publisher, managing editor, copy editor, writer and designer) are provided, and each reflects different access to article creation, approval, editing and deletion, and to image uploads, page design and CSS, and of course adding more contributors.

Installing and managing plugins that extend Textpattern’s abilities is straightforward. Once installed, plugins can be turned on and off from within the Textpattern interface, where detailed help and access to parameters used by plugins is also available.

Url – http://www.textpattern.com/

b2evolution

b2evolution is probably the most comprehensive blog engine you can find! It includes almost any feature you could expect from a blog tool, and more. Plus, it’s free, it’s open-source (GPL), it runs virtually anywhere (PHP/mySQL) and it’s available in many languages!

Url – http://www.b2evolution.net/

E-Commerce

osCommerce

osCommerce is the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.

The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set.

Everything you need to get started in selling physical and digital goods over the internet, from the Catalog frontend that is presented to your customers, to the Administration Tool backend that completely handles your products, customers, orders, and online store data.

Url – http://www.oscommerce.com/

Zen Cart

Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently. Some solutions seem to be complicated programming exercises instead of responding to users’ needs, Zen Cart puts the merchant’s and shopper’s requirements first. Similarly, other programs are nearly impossible to install and use without an IT degree, Zen Cart can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic computer skills. Others are so expensive … not Zen Cart it’s FREE!

Zen Cart will deliver the ultimate online shopping experience to your customers. Navigating through your merchandise offerings is a breeze with Zen Cart, the program provides several “Spotlight” lists in addition to the traditional category to product links. Once a product is added to the shopping cart, secure checkout is a simple 3-step process. After providing the billing information, your customer chooses the shipping method. (multiple shipping methods including real-time internet shipping quotes are built-in) Next, a payment type is chosen from one of the popular payment modules. (PayPal and AuthorizeNet are just 2 of the included modules) Last, the customer reviews the order, shipping and payment choices, and confirms the order. You are immediately notified of the order and your customer automatically receives an e-mail confirmation.

Zen Cart gives web designers a robust and customizable electronic storefront that’s easy to keep up-to-date with new features. It provides usable, intuitive and unobtrusive purchase flows right out of the box based on proven industry best-practices – there are no major revisions required to get things right for your clients!

One of the secrets behind its power lies in our robust template system that “abstracts” the look-and-feel from the code and logic behind Zen Cart. This enables you to give clients a truly custom solution that integrates quickly and perfectly with their existing marketing websites.

Url – http://www.zen-cart.com/

phpShop

phpShop is a shopping cart application. The goal of the phpShop development team is to provide a stable web application platform that allows for additional development.

phpShop has been used by hundreds of web sites for selling online.

Url – http://www.phpshop.org/

Forums

PhpBB

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.

Url – http://www.phpbb.com/

PunBB

PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

Url – http://www.punbb.org/

SMF

Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources. And, yes, it is free.

Url – http://www.simplemachines.org/

Image Galleries

Coppermine

Coppermine Photo Gallery is a picture gallery script. Users can upload pictures with a web browser or Windows XP Web Publishing Wizard (thumbnails are created on the fly), add comments, send e-cards, rate pictures and have their own gallery. The admin can manage albums/pictures/comments and batch add pictures that have been uploaded by FTP. The script has a theme system and is available in the following languages : Bosnian, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (standard and Brazilian), Russian and Spanish. The script use PHP, a MySQL database and the GD library (version 1.x or 2.x) or ImageMagick to make the thumbnails. An install script makes the installation very fast and easy.

Url – http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/

Gallery

Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!

Url – http://gallery.menalto.com/

Plogger

Plogger is the next generation in open-source photo gallery systems. A web application not bloated with superfluous features or complicated configuration settings. Plogger is a simple yet powerful tool — everything you need to share your images with the world. Plogger is your photos integrated into your website, a fully featured photo sharing package with an attractive and easy to use administrative interface that makes managing your galleries a breeze. Integrating our gallery software into your website is as easy as inserting three lines of PHP code.

Url – http://plogger.org/

There is a big change in version 4.3 with the “New Content Element Wizard”, it is now configured by pageTS. This allows to have specifiv page-per-page-configurations. This article shows you the… View full post on buzz.typo3.org: All entries

Efficient CMS development is an integral part of any business as it helps to easily maintain and update website content on a frequent basis.  When you are choosing a CMS, make sure you choose a SEO friendly CMS as it helps your website being ranked hire in search engines and hence your business gets a global exposure and you get a chance to increase your business revenues. Whether you choose open source CMS or enterprise based CMS does not matter but it should be a SEO friendly CMS and totally as per your business requirements.

Some points to be considered when you are looking for a search engine friendly CMS:

• Try to have a CMS that is customized as per your business requirements
• Your CMS should be able to store content and meta tags separately so that you can change your tags whenever required
• Your content management system should support RSS feeds
• It should be flexible and should simplify process of storing content and keywords
• Your SEO friendly CMS should have more ratio of text than code as search engines read text only
• Well structured CMS so that search engines can easily crawl and read the content
• Well written URL names to increase chances to get higher page ranks in search engines
• CMS should have the capability to integrate with your ecommerce solutions
• Should be able to easily generate sitemap in different formats like HTML, XML etc. whenever required
• Finally a content management system should be non technical and even a person with little technical knowledge should be easily able to manage entire website content

I would personally recommend to try any of the following search engine friendly CMS, as for me the below listed content management system has almost all the required features of a true SEO CMS.

• Joomla: Joomla is a widely used open source CMS, it is both SEO friendly as well as user friendly and aides to build flexible Content management system as per custom requirements.Joomla is mainly divided into three parts, modules, Plugins and components.
• Drupal: Drupal is a well structured CMS and helps in easy management of content for the web. It is highly customizable and totally a SEO friendly CMS.
• Mambo: Mambo CMS is gaining popularity and is a new age CMS that stores content separately from meta tags and helps in rapid creation of new pages as per requirements
• Typo3: Typo3 CMS is hundred percent SEO friendly CMS that is mostly used in integration with other applications like phpBB, VirtueMart and Joomla.

For more information please visit: http://www.sparsh-technologies.com/

There are precise rules about how to write a RFC for the TYPO3 Core. Use templates to make your life easier. View full post on buzz.typo3.org: All entries

CMS TYPO3 reveals to be a usable and functional open source
software for online shop management. Editing even the wider
products catalogue is now easier and quick thanks to the
Multilanguage support.

One of the most important features of e-business is the
opportunity to reach world markets and most of the times B2B or
B2C websites need to translate the whole site in different
languages. This is sometimes a long time process absorbing
company’s resources and delaying ROIs.

Webformat advanced shop system extension has just been updated
with a multilanguage support. No more long and tedious
copy&paste&translate sessions of each content element in
duplicated page trees. With the Multilanguage support, Webformat
advanced shop system extension offers a turnkey versioning into
a different language. At last, editors have only to take care of
text translations.

Simply by activating the localization function, a new page, with
exactly the same content elements, is generated automatically in
the same content and ready to be translated. Highlighted
original language text helps not to miss the thread of
translation and improves visibility options for the translator.
Backend products descriptions, prices and other detailed
information can be customised according to different price
policies, products range and target markets outline.

Another improvement the WEBFORMAT srl developer Mauro Lorenzutti
has added to the shop extension, is the possibility to modify
shop setup using the constant editor, thus avoiding the browsing
of all the TYPOSCRIPT.

WEBFORMAT TYPO3 ADVANCED SHOP EXTENSION: main features

- list and table products visualization mode: in the frontend
the products can be displayed in the list mode, like in Kasper’s
shop system, and only changing a parameter in TypoScript
products will be displayed in a new table list. - Products
options: a new show modality that brings all the offer products
of a selected branch in the page tree is available. Further,
it’s possible to set two products options (usually size and
color) and a list of correlated products. - Products Page title
and static URL: in the product detail page, the product name or
a different special title can be shown. - Orders management: for
any new order, the extension creates a new page with the order
data in a content element ( so items bought and customer
personal info can be viewed) and in two tables (orders and
rows). This allows the shop administrator to modify the orders
data. - Invoice management: an extra backend extension for the
invoice management has been introduced. For any order a pdf
invoice is generated including also the invoice template. - User
registration: for any new customer, the plugin creates a new
entry in the “tt_address” table with a username and a password
directly sent to the user by e-mail. - On-line payment by credit
card and Pay Pal gateways.

The most striking feature is the possibility to export all the
products database in order to implement the product catalogue in
sub-sites or affiliated sites.

DOWNLOAD & INFO

• http://www.webformat.com/index.php?id=121 •

http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/new/extendedshop/

It seems like the requirements for every site I do this year include lightboxes, video players and slideshows. My guess is many of you have run into the same. Here are my current favorites for each. View full post on buzz.typo3.org: All entries

An update to the TYPO3 4.x Coding Guidelines was released yesterday. This short article highlights the main points. View full post on buzz.typo3.org: All entries

Not two weeks ago I had a chat with someone (an SEO) about some online media buying and although the figures made an infinite amount of sense (6 figure monthly page views – prime location banner purchase for less than £90 per month!), he said, “but there is no SEO value from the banner link” (it was JavaScript)! Astonished, I spent the next hour arguing the case for buying the coverage, but it would seem that the majority of SEOs just don’t see the value of applying traditional marketing techniques to the web – they just don’t “fit” into the SEO mindset.

What is really bizarre though is that while the optimisation industry doesn’t see the value in some less search engine focused marketing techniques, they will pay a veritable fortune for paid links. The likes of ReviewMe (http://www.reviewme.com) change up to $250 for a single “review” (which is SEO speak for a plain text link not so subtly hidden in a purpose written article). One text link. One! Not just that, but a single text link on a new page that has no PR (and will maybe only will ever receive minimal PR filtered through from other page links)!

For that $250 (around £150) there are so many different options you could aim for. While a lot won’t have any direct SEO benefit, we still need to consider traffic and branding benefits.

$250 would allow me to buy banner advertising on a niche site / forum / blog for a limited amount of time. Depending on the type of site and its subject area you could be looking at a decent amount of traffic, enquiries and exposure – certainly enough to justify the cost.

An alternative would be to spend the money on a directory listing on a site such as TheBestOf (http://www.thebestof.co.uk) – £10 per month for a year and you get a full page listing (written by your local contact), an audio advert where you can pitch your service, inclusion in a high traffic site and a direct (SEO friendly!) link back to your site. A link AND qualified traffic – that’s like SEO Christmas!

Online marketing professionals do focus on SEO a lot and that isn’t a bad thing – it just isn’t the only thing and you should be looking to spend your budget wisely and spread your marketing scope.