Smartlounge has created a version of www.gimv.com that is especially usable on mobile devices.

Leveraging the flexible templating system of OpenMercury, we were able to reuse the page and navigation management system that is used for the full-blown website. This way a webmaster can use the CMS he is used to work with. The editing and filtering features of the CMS ensure that every page created on the mobile website is usable on mobile devices.

Content that is reusable on both the full-blown website as well as on the mobile website, needs to be administrated only in 1 place and is published through multiple channels, with respect for the specific characteristics of each channel.

Automatic device detection forwards the visitor to the appropriate channel. Mobile users automatically get the mobile website providing them with easy access to contact information, summaries and news.

Together with long-term partners Kunstmaan and Zeropoint, Smartlounge has won the competition on a project to catalogue and present to the public historic photographs and newspapers from the heritage cells Waasland, Meetjesland, Noorderkempen and Kempens karakter.

The project consists of the development of a catalogueing system for digital heritage and a public website for publishing this heritage in an explorative way.

As always, we will be leveraging leading open source tools for a cost-efficient tailor-fit result.

For the cataloguing we will be using CollectiveAccess. CollectiveAccess is open-source web-based software to catalogue, manage and publish museum and archival collections. It is being used worldwide for projects like www.philaplace.org, www.wir-waren-so-frei.de and www.coneyislandhistory.org

For the public website, we chose to use OpenMercury, providing features for seamless integration with CollectiveAccess and world-class page and navigation management.  OpenMercury is being used for developing large interactive websites like www.toerismevlaanderen.nl, www.acco.be, www.ikwilstarten.be and www.gimv.com.

This project will be hosted on Amazon EC2, which is supported by both OpenMercury and CollectiveAccess.

We are proud to present the new OpenMercury logo. Created at Kunstmaan, the kaleidoscope logo symbolizes the creation of order from disorder, as is the function of the CMS with your content. With this new logo and new color scheme, a new look and feel has been implemented in the backend. Check out the screenshots in the gallery below.

We're also pleased to make our second release. Highlights:

• We are continuing our transition to opensource, and our rename from Smartlounge CMS to OpenMercury. This release has a new theme to reflect this.
• We tried to make it easier to build and deploy OpenMercury. See our getting started guide to find out how.
• The code generation and website creation process was streamlined a bit, now it is easier to make multi-site setups
• We made page editing more user friendly.
• The e-mail module received an update, with improved performance for personalized mailings and better and more elaborate statistics. We've added an API to access the statisics, added an email catcher to integrate subscriptions on other websites, a javascript link tracker to follow campaigns, Google Analytics campaigns integration, Useragent tracking, link overlay statistics and SVG graphs in the PDF stats for improved printing.
• Event registrations: the calendar module has been extended with a registration wizard that can handle any and all possible flows. Subscribing yourself, others, with or without CRM integration.
• Various bugfixes

One of the areas we choose to focus on with OpenMercury is the possibility to create professional and rich layouts for pages in a flexible way.

Let me try to explain how this influences the page editing process.

A lot (maybe even most) open source CMSses rely a lot on the capability of rich text WYSIWYG editors (like TinyMCE or FCKeditor) to build pages. This works rather well (and the feature set of these editors grows bigger and bigger), but there are some shortcomings, especially for pages that contain a lot of media. For example, adding pictures works a bit like it does in MS Word: you go somewhere in the text and click the add picture button. This works very well and intuitive if you have a small number of pictures. But suppose you want to "insert" a nice photo album, complete with slideshow functionality. Or think of "JavaScript snippets" like YouTube movies and Google Maps. It would be possible to add such a feature using a JavaScript editor, but to do it well (eg make it editable after you added it), you need very complex logic (and hence, it is not properly implemented in most CMS systems).

In OpenMercury, we also use FCKEditor (or CKeditor nowadays). But we gave it a smaller role than in most CMS systems. Let's look at an older but quite typical example, the website of Tourisme Belgique:

As you might know, creating these kinds of pages would either require a fixed "template" or very good FCKEditor / TinyMCE skills.  Without, these pages would look messy and creating them would be a very frustrating experience.

In our CMS, we match the flexibility of working with an editor with the advanced possibilities of building a page out of building blocks.

To illustrate this, let me show you how this blog post looks in OpenMercury:

Some advantages of this approach:

• A building block has its own template, developed by a graphical / HTML expert. No fiddling with margins / paddings / fonts ... the content will always look "right". This is translated immediately in nice, balanced websites, in which every page (not just the homepage) is of high quality.
• A building block is always editable after it has been added: adding a picture to an existing slideshow, changing the URL of a YouTube movie without removing / re-adding it, adding an extra point of interest to a Google map is possible and easy.
• It is much more flexible than a fixed-template approach: you still decide what will be on the page, you can mix different building blocks, we don't fix the page structure.
• It is very easy to build custom building blocks. I think this is where the merit of our CMS is. For KMI, we made building blocks that integrate with their weather forecasting, enabling the KMI to put weather details / live updating tables on every relevant page. For other customers, we built stripped-down versions of building blocks offering only the features they need to avoid confusion. Doing custom stuff here is so easy we do it for every project.

While our CMS is not totally unique in this respect (some call it "web parts", or "template blocks", or whatever), we think it is a very powerfull feature that is often overlooked / ignored.

Acco was founded in 1960 by and for students in Leuven and after almost fifty years it has grown with six book- and office supply stores, a professional printing division and a scientific publishing house. 

Over the course of 2009, three websites were created for Acco using OpenMercury. The first website to go live in the beginning of 2009 was the Acco Medical webshop, a bookstore with a very clear focus on medical literature.

The webshop module in OpenMercury now houses over 14.000 publications for this shop. These publications were imported from an XML database export of the previous website. Each publication is stored with a lot of dynamic properties. Publications can feature in multiple categories, have related products, variants, and "also bought" references to other publications. To make this huge number of publications easily accessible to the visitors, live filtering on category, publication date, product type and price ranges are available. The listing, filtering and counting of the publications matching a certain filter is all done live, without any form of static caching.

While the entire catalog of Acco Medical is managed from within OpenMercury, this is not the case with the Acco Uitgeverij webshop. The Uitgeverij shop has less publications, only those published by Acco, but the data is housed in a mainframe database. Again by leveraging the batchjob module, this information is synced daily with an XML file downloaded over FTP by the job itself. This daily synchronization is enough for static data like title and description, but pricing and availability is checked live through AJAX requests.

In the last website of the series, the bookstore website, a different kind of synchronization is used. The bookstore provides students with lists of all publications they need for their studies. All the data for these publications is managed in a third party application that features a point-of-sale system in use in the stores. Using SOAP webservices, the publications for these lists are synced daily. Again, pricing and availability are added live using AJAX. 

The OpenMercury webshop features an extensive integration with the Ogone payment platform. Customers can pay their orders online using a variety of payment methods, including all major credit card companies, debit cards and local banks all over the world.This process is tracked using the Google Analytics e-commerce tracking system for easy follow-up. 

A webshop contains not only products, but also customers. Customers are stored in this third party system mentioned above, and features as a single sign-on for the websites. During the registration, a customer has to enter one or more interests. These interests are used to personalize the book listings (in the Medical website) based on the customer's preferences. This allows customers to select what type of books he/she is interested in.  

The same interests are used in the mass mailing module. E-mail campaigns are created in OpenMercury and filled with a large list of books. During the sending process, the system will check what publications are needed for every customer, and only send the publications that match the interests of the customer. The results of these campaigns are tracked in detail in OpenMercury, featuring advanced statistics like link overlays, forward tracking and bounce processing. Additionally the result on the websites can be tracked using Google Analytics to measure the return on investment in sales.