Bryan Ruby

One of my favorite local companies, Blend Interactive, recently made some news this past week. Blend Interactive has named Karla Santi as their Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Santi has been a partner at Blend Interactive since the company formed in 2005, where, to the public, she served as Creative Director and, behind the scenes, handled a good chunk of operational oversight.

Blend Interactive is a web design, development, and strategy firm located in Sioux Falls, SD. Blend Interactive specializes in custom design, strategy and development for web and mobile, and is responsible for the annual Now What? Conference.

So I'm halfway through my three month sabbatical from blogging and I get an email from my good friend, Shaun Walker. For those that don't know Shaun, he's the CTO and co-founder for DNN Corp. You know, the guy that started DotNetNuke. To make a long story short, Shaun wanted to remind me that the DNN community recently released 7.3 which focuses on platform performance. Shaun thought it would be a good idea to mention the release to readers here at CMS Report.

The nice thing with friends in high places is the ability to see advanced copies of guides and books before they hit the public. Digital Clarity Group (DCG) has announced the immediate availability of an update to the North American edition of its popular Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management. Over the past few days, I've combed through the pages and remain as impressed with the guide as I was with its original release.

Last month, CMS Report celebrated eight years of providing stories to readers focused on content management systems. Over the years, I've told you how grateful and even surprised I am of the success CMS Report has seen. All true, but for fear of sounding ungrateful I've never acknowledged the negatives of blogging over such an extended period of time.

Creative Commons announced this week the appointment of Ryan Merkley to the position of chief executive officer. Ryan was recently chief operating officer of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit parent of the Mozilla Corporation and creator of the world’s most recognizable open-source software project and internet browser, Firefox. At the Mozilla Foundation, Ryan led development of open-source projects like Webmaker, Lightbeam, and Popcorn, and also kicked off the Foundation’s major online fundraising effort, resulting in over $1.8 million USD in individual donations from over 44,000 new donors.

What do we ask for? Consistency. What do we get from Consumer Cellular? More than a dozen ways to configure our Google Nexus 5 to their network. Unfortunately, many of those recommended settings don't work. Luckily, time is on our side. In the past 6 months Consumer Cellular and Nexus 5 owners have settled on APN settings that actually work properly on the Consumer Cellular network.

I've been a big fan of Digital Clarity Group ever since they formed. There are some amazing people working for DCG and the work they put out is quite frankly spectacular. Last year they put out their 2013 North America Guide to Service Providers for Web Content and Customer Experience Management and I was blown away. Many of the answers to the questions I'm often asked about various agencies and integrators are in this guide.

Yesterday, Joomla developers announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.3. The newest Joomla CMS overhauls its approach to security, enables microdata for the first time and replaces MooTools-based JavaScript with jQuery equivalents. These new features make Joomla 3.3 the most secure, searchable and fastest-loading Joomla CMS yet.

This week, CMS Report celebrates our eight year anniversary. No one is more surprised than me.

WordPress 3.9 has been released with a number of refinements that WordPress hopes you'll "love". The changes and new features are solid but perhaps not as many as we've come to expect given past WordPress point releases. Some of the new features that can be found in WordPress 3.9 include improvements in the media editing experience, gallery previews, and live editing of widgets and headers.