Sitecore Fetch Squad

Starting today, visitors to your blog can use their Facebook or Twitter account to leave comments. This saves everyone a few steps and gives visitors control over which identity they use.  It’s a win for everyone.

As an important touch, we let you stay logged in to multiple services. This means you can stay logged in to Facebook for convenience, but still leave a comment through Twitter or your WordPress.com account. Just click whichever identity you’d like to use, and the selected one will be associated with your comment when it is published. You’re in control of your identity, as you should be.

Depending on your theme, you may notice the comment area looks different than before to make room for these new features. We also intelligently choose to use a light or dark visual style for the comment box, depending on the theme you are currently using.

And since you know your readers well, you can now change the text above the comment box to be whatever you like. We recommend using the default we are applying to new blogs, “What are you thinking?”, as questions often encourage more comments, but you can change it to whatever you like by going to your dashboard, then Settings → Discussion.

We know you like comments and this will help you get even more. Stay tuned for better Twitter and Facebook integration features, coming soon.

I am happy to announce that Sitecore today has released 6.4.1 Update-2 (rev. 110621), our 4th update since the 6.4 Technical Preview.

Sitecore 6.4.1 Update-2 is a regular maintenance update with a lot of good stuff.

The update backports a large number of issues from 6.5 to 6.4.1, as well as resolving two additional issues (one related to the link database, and one related to the size of the rendering properties dialog box in the Developer Center).

Everything is already available on SDN, including:

• The release notes which describes the improvements and fixes in this update
• The update page which contains download links for the full distribution, as well as instructions for updating existing Sitecore solutions to the update.

Happy coding!

As most of you have probably already realized, Sitecore has now officially released CMS 6.5 and DMS 2.0 (Digital Marketing System, formerly known as OMS). Together, these products make up the new Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform.

The release is a major milestone for Sitecore and our customers, bringing tons of new and exiting functionality to the market in some key areas, such as:

• Inline personalization and multivariate testing right on the page using the Page Editor
• Engagement automation that allow business users to build and manage integrated campaigns that flow across channels
• Executive Insight Dashboard that allows business users to measure the qualitative value of their campaigns
• Completely re-written analytics reports, optimized for better usability and also incorporating value metrics
• Optimized and redesigned Analytics API and database schema
• And much more

I can wholeheartedly recommend that you brew a nice cup of coffee, lean back and read through the extensive release notes – not only for the official release, but also for the Technical Preview from April, since all the good stuff from that release are also present in the official release.

And when you’re ready, download, install, explore!

And as for modules? We have released new versions of Web Forms for Marketers, Seach Engine Optimization and Calendar, and the AD and CRM Integration modules have been tested and verified with CMS 6.5. A new version of Email Campaign Manager will follow in the next weeks.

Happy coding!

PS: Does this mean that we’re no longer going to focus on 6.4 maintenance updates? Not at all. We have some good stuff coming up…