January 22, 2011

Catherd News Module Introduced - The News Module allows your CatHerd CMS Site to effectively communicate both to your site visitors as well as those who wish to keep up-to-date with your news, events and announcements through an RSS feed.  You can create and manage important announcements, events and other important information records and ensure your messages to your web visitors get the highest possible visibility to search engines.  The News Module lets you publish newsworthy information when you want it to display and even allows you to set both the Publish date/time and the Expiration date/time for every item.  Please contact your First Call Technical Advisor if you would like to learn more about the Catherd News Module.

January 05, 2011

Catherd Members Module Introduced - The Members Module allows your CatHerd CMS Site to build and maintain a private member area within your web site.  It offers you a database to sign-up and manage a group of registered members.  The Member Database is designed around the Constant Contact Outbound E-mail Marketing System.  As your membership database grows, you can easily export your member list to your Constant Contact mail system to ensure that your outbound e-mail marketing keeps you in direct contact with your members.  Please contact your First Call Technical Advisor if you would like to learn more about the Catherd Member Module.

December 15, 2010

Catherd CMS Controls Introduced - Controls are unique page content containers that you can create and re-use throughout your site.  A control can contain text, images, video or any level of complex content that you desire.  Once a control has been built, you can simply include it on any Page Part for any Page and the control will appear below any other content in the Page Part.

Some common uses for a Custom Control might include an advertisement that you want to show up in your Right Page Part on multiple pages.  You would build the advertisement in a control and then simply add it to the Right Page Parts on all of the pages you want the ad to appear. 

When you no longer want to use the ad, you can simply delete the Control and it will be removed from all of the pages you had used it on.

There are a number of pre-built controls available to you as well.  This list of pre-built controls will be growing over the coming months.  The classic example of a pre-built control would be your Contact Us control.  You can add a contact form to any page by simply including the Contact Us control in your Page Part content.

CatHerd Controls are a very powerful tool and not terribly complicated to build and use.  Controls can be as simple as text and images, or as complex as you would like to make them.  We highly recommend that you contact us (support_web@firstsolution.com) for an advanced training class on CatHerd Controls.