In response to an increasing demand for new features and improvements, and in conjunction with Too Much Media’s commitment to developing the most powerful content management program possible, it has released CARMA version 1.1. The company believes it to be the next step in content management evolution from the makers of the NATS affiliate tracking system.
CARMA 1.1 offers a wide range of new features, including the new publish mode feature. In the first step of many future publish mode features in the making, the new “Use join date” publish mode allows users to change and control the way content is published. Rather than having a general release schedule for all members, users now may manage content release schedules based on the individual member’s join date.
This development means that content set availability or deployment to individual members happens on a schedule that’s relative to member’s join date, rather than just the current date. This allows each member to have its own schedule of content rollout, so the individual can potentially be retained longer in anticipation for future content.
Advanced management of content deployment, publishing and availability to the membership has been a high-demand feature, according to Fabian Thylmann, lead developer of Too Much Media, LLC.
“Being able to base content release on the member’s join date was one of the main features asked for by our current and potential clients, and we made sure our next release offered that,” Thylmann said. “With more staff handling our customer support, our developers have more time to extend our software, making our development cycle even faster than before.”
In addition to the “Use join date” option, customers can look for date-based rotating content sets in the near future.
In addition to publish mode, CARMA 1.1 offers performance-enhancing features such as the incorporation of FFMPEG-PHP, and the use of smarty caching.
“We have been working on many big and small speed improvements in CARMA over the past six months as our client base grew,” Thylmann said. “And with the final additions of advanced template caching and memcached support, we have reached speeds previously only seen with static html member’s areas.”
Smarty Caching improves CARMA performance by allowing templated content to be cached, rather than reprocessed every time the page is loaded. This feature comes complete with a SMARTY_CACHE_LIFE configuration setting that allows users to set the duration that the cached pages will remain cached. This feature does not cache things that are intended to be real-time or dynamic, such as polls, ratings, and searches.
CARMA also has incorporated FFMPEG-PHP in addition to MPlayer, the use of which dramatically improves thumbnailing performance and quality, Thylmann said.
In addition to these features, CARMA 1.1 has also added many other new features, such as:
More information about CARMA can be found at TooMuchMedia.com/products/carma. Too Much Media can be reached at (732) 385-1536 or by email at albright@toomuchmedia.com.
