Too Much Media LLC, developer of the NATS affiliate tracking system, has released the latest version of its Content Administration and Release Management Application: CARMA version 1.1.
Among CARMA 1.1’s new features is Publish Mode. Among other things, the “Use Join Date” feature of Publish Mode allows website owners to control the way content is published to their members. Rather than having a general release schedule for all members, publishers may manage content-release schedules based on a member’s join date. According to Too Much Media, this might help webmasters retain new members longer.
“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 just that,” says Fabian Thylmann, lead developer and co-founder of Too Much Media. “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, look for Date-Based Rotating Content Sets in the near future.
CARMA 1.1 also offers performance-enhancing features such as the incorporation of FFMPEG-PHP and the use of Smarty Caching. Both improve the speed of content delivery.
“We have been working on many big and small speed improvements in CARMA over the past six months as our client base grew, and with the final additions of advanced template caching and mem-cached support, we have reached speeds previously only seen with static HTML members’ areas,” Thylmann says.
Smarty Caching improves CARMA performance by allowing templated content to be cached, rather than re-processed every time the page is loaded. The feature comes complete with a SMARTY_CACHE_LIFE configuration setting that allows webmasters to set the duration for which the cached pages will remain cached. The feature does not cache things that are intended to be real-time or dynamic, such as polls, ratings, and searches.
CARMA also incorporates MPlayer, the use of which dramatically improves thumbnail-making performance and quality.
Other new features include the substitution of GDLib for ImageMagick, thereby creating better thumbnails more rapidly; a management system for performers’ and producers’ information; advanced search criteria for greater precision; advanced text watermarks that allow the use of color; hierarchical tree-view menus; and automatic closing of member download sessions to improve system performance.
