Pepper 2.6 is cooling in the windowsill, and it smells delicious. Our development team has once again put out a version that is more stable, more functional, and faster than the last.
25% faster Alfresco performance when querying. You can read more about our efforts to improve Alfresco performance from David Wolverton.
CMIS-powered Image Management: Manage your images, CSS, etc. through a new interface that gives you full look and functionality in preview and edit mode.
Automatic Tables: Create tables for your website on-the-fly with our what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor. Then, enjoy automatic column sorting by date, category, author, or any filter you can think of. Then, well you might as well start happy hour early.
SpamBot Blocking: Pepper now automatically detects and blocks spambots and malicious traffic to your site.
8 new developer widgets.
Bug fixes. Our apologies to their families.
If there’s any feature you’d like to know more about, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to chat about Pepper and all the exciting updates our development team rolls out the door.
The past couple years, we’ve given you Pepper to help manage your content and drive your online marketing. We’ve continued to push updates to the platform, adding functionality, speed, and versatility.
Now we give you something completely new: Salt.
Salt: The Content Currentizer
Salt is the ultimate complement software to Pepper. While Pepper makes creating a global online campaign a snap, Salt erases old content to force you to remain current. Stop worrying about whether your site is new enough. If it’s existed for more than 2 months, Salt automatically expires it.
Salt Features
Current Content – Pepper knows when you published your content. Salt does something about it. Content older than 2 months is put out of its misery.
Social Media Integration – Has someone liked your company’s Facebook page for longer than a week? Not anymore. New people are 72% more likely to be more interested in your content. Now everyone is new.
Analytics – If part of your site is getting a lot of traffic, Salt will go ahead and delete it early. All those people saw it already.
The best part: Salt is free and no download is required. Just by opening this page, your Internet browser automatically downloaded Salt. It’s running on your network as we speak.
So while the competition will have pages, articles, and media from way back in 2010, all your content will be fresh and new. Guaranteed.
Keep checking back as we update this revolutionary software.
The Chicago Innovation Awards were established in 2002 to highlight the innovation achievements of Chicagoland companies. Each year, the Chicago Innovation Awards recognizes ten winners--selected by an esteemed panel of judges--for their creativity in bringing new products and services to market that fill unmet needs, spark competition, exceed market expectations, and improve people’s lives. In addition to the winners selected by the panel of judges, you, the people, can select your winner for the People’s Choice Award. (If you missed the link above, again, please vote here). Recent winners include the who’s who of Chicago’s most innovative companies, such as Groupon, Threadless, 37 Signals, Motorola, USG, Abbott, and many more.
As a Finalist, we were invited to participate in a one day Executive Education program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management this past Monday. In addition to listening to some of Kellogg’s most prominent thought leaders in innovation speak, we also had the chance to mingle with leaders of the other seventy-four Finalists. They are quite an impressive list of companies from a wide range of business verticals (including not-for-profit organizations), and we congratulate them on joining Vodori & Pepper as a 2010 Chicago Innovation Awards Finalist. We look forward to seeing many of them again at the final Awards Ceremony on November 1st.
About Pepper
Our clients are our best references, and client marketing teams have been known to refer to Pepper as “magic” (while the product is also fully endorsed by internal IT teams as a best-in-class solution). Pepper is an enterprise-level web content management solution that helps you, the “average” computer user, create and manage your web content quickly, easily, and efficiently, all without having to call the IT Help Desk to ask for a change. And not just your company’s U.S. web content, but your company’s entire global website presence. Learn more about Pepper’s features, and you can see Pepper in action in our screencasts. In addition, you can read more about the latest and greatest features that haven’t yet made it to our website feature list, such as Copying and Pasting entire webpages, and an enhanced navigation manager.
The new and improved Pepper 2.0 Navigation Manager allows you to adjust navigation as easily as any other piece of content.
Previously, navigation was auto-generated. Content loading created a content hierarchy that worked as your navigation.
Each page creation demanded a new auto-generation of the navigation, slowing down content loading and creating noticeable lag with the Create Page functionality.
Adjusting Navigation risked broken links and broken hearts.
Pepper 2.0 Navigation Manager Features
Now, by making the Navigation editable with the Pepper 2.0 Navigation Manager, you can:
Add external links to Navigation – Have links to other sites in your page navigation.
Have multiple Navigations on one site
Duplicate links
Enjoy faster Create Page speeds
All your content gets displayed
Additionally, we’ve fixed the content query problems of the past. Previously, if queries for content took too long, the Navigation would only display the content found at that point, risking gaps in content.
Because the Navigation Manager contains all pages, queries for content now report back with everything you’ve worked so hard to create.
And because the Navigation is as editable as any piece of content, translations can be added. Vive le gestionnaire de navigation!
We'll be spending the next couple weeks shouting from Chicago's rooftops about all the new features of Pepper: our marketing platform built on Alfresco. Take a look at the webpage copy/paste feature we've brought to Pepper 2.0.
No one enjoys repeating themselves. No one enjoys repeating themselves. Ow, typing that all out twice was painful. And who has the time to copy/paste every element and every field? Let's use Pepper 2.0's 'Create from an Existing Page' magic to avoid having to manually recreate any of this post ever again.
Create from an Existing Page
Time and time again, our clients' marketing campaigns call on us to localize their sites across an international scale. These sites can be largely similar, at times involving subtle changes in regulatory status or product measurements; while at other times requiring full language translations. And as much as we enjoy the nuances between the Swedish and the Norwegian marketing initiatives, we wanted to make the process of differentiating their sites faster. And our solution eases language translation as well.
The new 'Create from Existing Page' feature automates much of the heavy labor involved with the localization process by repeating the work you already did with just a few clicks.
To utilize it, simply create a page as you normally would in Pepper by clicking on 'Create Page' in the Pepper Toolbar. With Pepper 2.0, you now have the option to 'Create from an Existing Page' in the Create Page window.
Your site map appears in the window. Select the page you wish to create from, click 'Create Page' and enter your Page Description as you normally would. You'll have a new page with all the content from your previously created page copied and pasted into it.
Copy and Paste Page Content
'Create from an Existing Page' copies all the content from the selected page and pastes it into your new page. The template, along with all images, copy, widgets, etc., are duplicated and ready to launch. We can then specifically adjust the product information or country specific details to our clients specifications and the page is localized. Or, we can use the duplicate page as a template for language translation with our WYSIWYG editor.
See Create from an Existing Page in Action
What else is new to Pepper 2.0?
Continue to check back as we present you with more tastes of Pepper 2.0 features. Or we'll just publish a duplicate of this blog post with a new title, because we can in about three seconds. Sweet, huh?
We're always improving Pepper for Alfresco: the Content Management System that utilizes in-context editing for an incredibly simple user interface. Through our client requests and in-house developer inventiveness, Pepper is nearly unrecognizable from the software we launched two years ago. It's faster, smoother, and sports a host of new features.
In the coming weeks, we'll spotlight new features that have been baked into Pepper 2.0:
Improved Navigation Management
Workflow Enhancements
Color-coded HTML Editor
And so much more, including the "Pepper Labs" Screenshot Ability
Each feature has been seamlessly integrated into the current software suite. We're excited to introduce you to a more powerful Pepper.
Being a new hire at Vodori often means enjoying some time as a content loader. I saw this as a good thing because it gave me some time to learn many of the basics that go into developing and designing websites. In addition to this, it exposed me to our Pepper™ platform.
After initially working with other Content Management Systems (CMS), Pepper was a welcome change.
There were so many times while using other CMSs where I would have to ask someone to explain some process or another and would be left wondering why things didn't work in a different way, or why a common task required so many steps.
When I began working with Pepper, it became clear I was not the first person to ask these questions. Many of the stumbling points with other CMSs that gave me so many headaches were handled in a totally different way in Pepper. The most immediately obvious difference was the ability to edit pages in-context (you can see the changes you are making right there on the page as you are making them). This made tracking my changes much easier, and was so much more intuitive that it was hard to go back to another CMS after using a system like Pepper.
Pepper really preserved my sanity with the way it handles images. I always dreaded the process of uploading images, publishing them, and then inserting them onto a page. Pepper did all this from the same window and took a fraction of the time. Plus, I saw the images I inserted, could resize them if necessary, and added image text for search engine optimization. All from the same window. All done in a few moments. Glorious.
Another feature that I personally thanked the developers/gods for was the way Pepper handled navigation. Having pages automatically created within parent folders was great. And being able to add a page into a site's navigation by simply clicking a check box was almost sinful. A check box! All of this, combined with Pepper's many other time saving additions (one-click simultaneous page check-in and publishing, drag and drop navigation reordering), and my obsolete CMS-induced nightmares disappeared.
The web's first intelligent editor. Only in Pepper(TM) / Alfresco.
The Einstein Editor is not only the simplest editor on the planet, it's also the most powerful. Developers simply drop it onto a page and Einstein takes care of the rest.
Spend the saved development time extending Einstein with cutting-edge plugins, adding new Pepper features, or just leaving early every day and enjoying the summer. Either way, the client is going to be thrilled with the results.
Pepper is available now. Find out more about Pepper.
