Kimberly Hanson-Brown
Publisher
KMD Media, LLC.
"We made the decision to revamp our website this past summer. This was a big investment decision for a company of our size, but after a thorough review of the possibilities, we decided that the options GCN provided met the growth objectives we had set forth, and we will never look back on making this capital investment for our online operations. It has been a winner since the day we showed the site design to our sales team. Within weeks they had recouped the investment with advertiser commitments, months before we even launched the site. This has turned our online operations into a 2011 projection of 40% of our total revenues, up from 15% the previous year. This became one of the easiest decisions I have ever made and the most "out of the gate" profitable one! We continue to receive help and support from the entire GCN team as we make decisions to build new areas into our site, allowing us to continue to sell new online ideas to our customers. This has been a phenomenal “winner” for our company as we go into 2011!"
CMS Comparison
Our content management solution is based on the enterprise-class content management framework called Typo3.
Wildly popular in Europe, Typo3 is actually one of the most widely-use Content Management Systems in the world, with an active development community of more than 25,000 and more than 500,000 sites currently in operation. Typo3 takes the benefits of open source, namely a widely dispersed development community and low cost to entry, and add enterprise-class features you won't find in any other open source CMS.
What makes Typo3 unique is a complete separation of template design and programming from the role of updating and producing content. Other Open Source systems are more developer-friendly, and in fact require a developer to add features like blogs, forums, video, RSS feeds and more. Typo3 is designed to separate the programmer from the content creation roles, making it possible for your editors or content producers to build new functionality into your site without calling in the development team or hiring an outside contractor. No other open source CMS can make do this!
Typo3 was developed in 1996 and development of the core product is currently over-seen by a Swiss association of more than 100 companies, which are chiefly developers and content providers.
GCN has taken Typo3 to the next level by adding publishing-specific features and extensions that enhances the capabilities available to magazine publishers.
Typo3 compared to other systems:
Here is how Typo3 stacks up to other popular open source content management systems according to the experts at cmsmatrix.org:
Features | Drupal | Joomla! | Typo3 |
Audit Trail | Y | N | Y |
Granular Privileges | Y | N | Y |
Automated Problem Alerts | N | N | Y |
Sandbox for Testing Content | N | N | Y |
SSL Pages/Logins | N | Y | Y |
Versioning | Y | N | Y |
Drag & Drop for Content | Y | N | Y |
Undo | Limited | N | Y |
Advanced Caching | Y | Y | Y |
Database Replication | Limited | N | Y |
Static Content Export | N | N | Y |
Content Staging | Y | N | Y |
Portal Personalization | Y | N | Y |
E-commerce | Y | Y | Y |
Matrix creation (like this chart!) | N | N | Y |
To find out how Typo3 compares to the CMS you are considering, visit cmsmatrix.org
To learn how GCN can make Typo3 work for your organization, click here.
Features & Benefits
• Complete separate of content and design
• The ability for editors to add new features like blogs, video, forums and content with no programming required
• WYSIWYG editors for creation and editing, just like other desktop tools
• Full categorization and cross-indexing of content
• Output options for RSS, e-newsletters, individualized alerts
• Multi-level access management for every system user
• Integrated social media engines
• Scalable scripting language
• Support for more than 40 languages
• Complete editorial work-flow and asset management capabilities
What is TYPO3?
TYPO3 is an enterprise Content Management Framework that is written in PHP. TYPO3 is currently used by more than 500,000 sites worldwide, and has been translated into 45 languages. There is an active development community of more than 25,000 developers working on Typo3 sites in 60 countries.
Are you locked into a long-term contract?
No. We build your site and train your editorial and production teams how to update and manage the site. At GCN, we enable you to run and maintain your own site without constantly having to involve developers. You can even host your site on your owner servers if you wish.