From Essence to Cinnamon: Making our Proprietary CMS Open Source for Customizable Web- Platforms

Project Information

Cinnamon

Grant agreement ID: 855241

DOI

10.3030/855241

Project closed

EC signature date 20 February 2019

Start date 1 March 2019

End date 31 August 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

APOGEE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Cinnamon (From Essence to Cinnamon: Making our Proprietary CMS Open Source for Customizable Web- Platforms)

Reporting period: 2019-03-01 to 2019-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

75% of all websites are open source, even the European Commission platform mainly relies on Drupal today. Whilst most of the open source CMS platforms have many users, they each have their weaknesses. This is why many companies still rely on custom software development or simply reach for a template or customize a theme.
Cinnamon Open Source CMS: Since 2005, we are using our Apogee Essence proprietary CMS that is is easy to use, safe and allows changing the core code with limited programming skills. We now want to take the next step and make it open source and call it Cinnamon Web Development Framework. Cinnamon is a powerful CMS and Framework that allows for fast, flexible and problem-free development, management and maintenance of any website, e-shop or portal. Cinnamon allows creating dynamic web applications and websites that are not only well structured and attractive, but that are also visible and popular within the web. Add: Deployed through a cloud infrastructure, Cinnamon support srapid application development capabilities in a content management system.
A website has become a business card and proof of existence for companies. Still, ha lf of all businesses do not have a corporate website. As a consequence, there is still much room for growth, and Cinnamon can facilitate this task. This gives us access to the European web content management market size is predicted to account for 20% of the overall market share by 2022, which is around €1.9 billion.
We will follow a freemium model where developers and designers can use the platform for free and then sell their templates and plugins, etc. within Cinnamon to other users.
of our general partners Nektarios Baziotis (Managing Director) and Markos Giannopoulos (CTO) together with a team of senior developers and UI Experts are fully committed to making Cinnamon a success as we see this as the next logical step for our business as it offers major growth potential. Apogee has delivered over 300 web custom projects.
Open Source CMS platforms can help consolidate European websites. This will help them be more cost-effective, accessible and efficient means of communication. Companies will have a controlled environment to easily create a website.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We performed a feasibility study including Technological Roadmap, Market Assessment, Business Model Assessment, Risk Assessment and IP Assessment.
We will follow the following exploitation and dissemination strategies
1. SEM and SEO: All of our team of growth hackers have experience in the online marketing world and we are experts in creating key words, push ads, gamification, viral campaigns and optimizing conversion funnels. Our marketing plan focuses on targeted digital media. We have access to an official forum of over 5,500 developers and a blog with over 12,600 daily visitors.
2. Events and Training: We will run hackathons to spread the word and to motivate developers to create new features and templates.
3. Social Media: There are numerous groups that use different social media to organize themselves, be it for events or for training activities or simply to share ideas and implements projects. We have identified over 4,000 international tech events that are being organized through Meetup and Eventbrite that are related to our technology. We have created an action plan on how we can part in these groups so we can get visibility there. We are also skilled in systems that identify potential users via social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub.
4. Specialized Media: We will invest in digital press, banners on blogs visited by our target group as well as other specialized media.
5. Community Creation: Our main user group – Joomla, Magento, Prestashop, WordPress developers and designers – are very easy to find over the web, as this is where they work and where they promote their services. We also have access to existing communities/
6. Usability: One the user traffic is generated, the main aspect on making them part of the community is the usability of the Cinnamon open source product. From our own experience and through exchange with experts, we are aware that usability has the greatest impact on user acceptance.
We plan to use the most modern e-marketing tools using our existing resources including a website, free demo, webinars, training videos, an online manual, social media presence, YouTube videos and other viral marketing activities. These dissemination activities will be aimed at developers as well as companies and organizations in need of website.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Added Value of Cinnamon Beyond the State-of-the-Art
• It is very easy to use and has an intuitive interface. Adding new pages, blog posts, images, etc. on a regular basis is a breeze and can be done quickly. Formatting time is also minimal
• Cinnamon isa self-contained system and does not require HTML editing software (such as Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver). Users can create a new page or blog post, format text, upload images (and edit them), upload documents, video files, image galleries, etc. all without the need for additional HTML or FTP software.
• The code behind Cinnamon is very clean and simple, making it easy for search engines to read and index a site’s content and requiring only limited programming skills to be edited (cover page of the proposal)
• Cinnamon sites are very scalable. Clients have hundreds of thousands of pages or blog posts on your site and the performance of the site will not be compromised in the least.
Open source CMR platforms can help consolidate European websites. This will help them be more cost-effective, accessible and efficient means of communication.
The EC web portal is based on open source. The Europa portal is composed of more than 460 websites. In 2014, the Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT), and DG Communication (DG COMM) started the implementation of the new europa.eu platform. This is built on Drupal version 7 and replaced the Corporate Web Content Management System (CWCMS) based on Documentum.
With the Open source software strategy, the European Commission will further increase the role of open source software for many of its key ICT services and software solutions. The renewed strategy puts a special emphasis on procurement, contribution to open source software projects and providing more open source software in the Commission. The objectives of this strategy are contribution to communities, equal treatment in procurement, clarification of legal aspects, open-source and interoperable Commission-developed software and transparency and better communication.
We want to play a small part in the open source movement. Opening up our platform can create synergy effects that benefit everyone involved.

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