Pulse- A New Future with New Owners

Dear Pulse customers,

We're excited to announce that PulseCMS has new owners.

Michael has done a great job of building up Pulse to what it is today. And now, it's time to open a new chapter. The company has been acquired by Levion Partners, a partnership of 2 developers, Simon & Elvin.

We're excited to hear about your vision for Pulse, and what our priorities should be moving forward.

Simon comes from the startup world, where he ran his own small business. Later, he joined IBM before going back into the business world. He has over 10 years of programming & cloud experience.

Elvin spent years as a consultant doing programming work before going into the financial sector, and is now back at running a technology company- Pulse.

We're excited about what lies ahead. We'll be speaking to the community to learn about what they want to see.

All existing Pulse staff will carry on, including @palej who leads support. In addition, more resources will be placed on support and code stability. And, we've got some great ideas of improvements we can make on the product. Feel free to let us know, in this thread, what you'd like to see as a focus moving forward.

Regards,
Simon & Elvin

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Welcome Simon and Elvin!

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Wow, good luck guys.
Looking forward to a more stable Pulse future.

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Welcome! A very interesting development! As somebody who has used Pulse extensively over the last few years, I was starting to give up hope for it, and had actually stopped adding it to new builds recently.

I will be watching closely, and hopefully Pulse will fulfill its potential going forward.

Good luck guys!

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Thanks Michael and welcome to the new owners!

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Thanks for your post, and welcome to the community Cesar! If you have questions, comments or thoughts about Pulse so far, I'd encourage you to make a new post about them.

Welcome.

It would be nice to see just one release that doesn't need significant time hacking code to get an install to work as advertised.

Every download I had access to over the course of a year had a major flaw.

Maybe fix all existing bugs before introducing a new version with all kinds of changes, functionality and new bugs.

For $299, I never did get a version of pulse that worked as advertised.

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I think a lot of people echo this. So it will be our focus for the first release. Keep in mind we're still in transition and it will be a few weeks before things are "revved up". But so far I hope we can focus on that stability element.

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Hi everyone,
We have a release candidate that some are reviewing. If you'd like it, let me know. You simply unzip it on top of your install. The modified files are listed in a .txt file so you can review it.

It enables spaces in navigation and improves/fixes blog lookup... So even an old blog post that is renamed will be served correctly. There's a variety of small fixes.

If you'd like it, please message me.

This is just the beginning. We're excited for the future of PulseCMS. As we slowly learn and ramp up, we're improving the core code and functionality.

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Welcome Simon and Elvin!
Looking forward to a more stable Pulse future.

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Welcome to both Simon & Elvin.

It's good to see some movement on Pulse after what seems like ages with the CMS lost in spiralling decline. I'm still very fond of Pulse as a CMS although I've not used anything past version 4.5.2 simply because v5 releases tended to ship with issues. I became so despondent with v5 that I ended up forking v4 and adding my own features myself. I learnt a lot about how the CMS worked and improved my PHP skills in the process so it wasn't a total waste of time. :slight_smile:

Some of the features I added were;

  • A site-wide cache, and compression system to speed up page delivery
  • A drag and drop palette in the editor so users could drag images, blocks, snippets, etc directly into their pages
  • A menu data type so users could add and edit their own menu bars
  • An image editor so users can resize, crop, flip and replace images from within Pulse
  • A 'focal point' tool so that images that are used as backgrounds can always show the focal point of the image without it getting lost when the image resizes
  • An admin status panel so that users can see when the domain and SSL certificate are due for renewal

Plus a load of other changes that I've almost certainly forgotten about. Overall it served me well while I used Pulse with new clients and still proves to be worthwhile as I support existing clients who use this version of Pulse.

Personally I'd love to see Pulse retrace it's steps slightly and find that lightweight, fast and adaptable CMS that I last saw in version 4.5.

I'd love to see;

  • The ability to add data types. I've been known to hard code this into v4 if needed which is a lot of work and isn't reusable at all. I did a site for a client who is an artist and I ended up restructuring Pulse so that the workflow originated around her art rather than pages. I created a 'work' data type that allowed her to add the paintings, descriptions, prices, availability etc all from a single interface rather than have her skip around inside the CMS adding data in various areas. I know that v5 has the ability to add some new data types but I never found that at all intuitive.
  • A focus on improving the core speed
  • Focus on the core offerings of Pulse. Pulse users have been inundated with various rebadged 3rd party tools (form builder for example) that could never really be fully supported because they weren't developed in house. If users had issues with them then they were stuck.

I'm keen to see where you will take Pulse and hope you can tempt me away from my custom Pulse build to a new CMS future.

All the best,
Tim. :+1:

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Hi Tim. Great post. Yes, we're focused in exactly the area you say- a great core. Pulse has added caching and some of the features you mentioned. As we build out the roadmap I'll refer to your post here. We will still be knee-deep in finalizing the deal for some weeks and ramping up. Although we released a quick beta with the much-needed improvements.

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^^ this

Hello All and Welcome Simon & Elvin.

I am intrigued by the announcment and look forward to increased activity and progress with the framework. The new Positive activity has renewed my interest.

Thank you Micheal and those involved for all you have done over the years, looking forward to where pulse will go and how I maybe able to contribute. I am not a crafty coder, just a simple motivated user that appreciates fast, efficient, secure static solutions.

Best

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Not sure I am willing to spend money again.

Especially since I never actually got a usable product at the $299 price point.

As much as I like the concept, I still feel robbed and just can't justify spending more money to get what I should have had.

Hi @sean

I sent you a direct message. I want to learn a bit more about your case, what bugs you hit and if we can resolve it for you.

Tried to write back. This is what I got.

Hi Sean- Support@ is not our email. it is help@. Although the best is to use the online chat to send a message. I messaged you directly on the forums here. Please check your direct messages on the forum. (Top-right.)

Hi Sean,
I sent you a direct email based on your email on the forums, so we can connect.

Hm.. I now see the forums notification "from" email was set to support@.. I've forwarded that to our help address for the future.

Glad to see Pulse CMS getting a new lease on life. I am the original creator of Pulse CMS and occasionally check in to see how it's doing. It seemed a bit stagnant for a while so this is exciting news.

Hey Tim Plumb, glad you're still around, you were always a helpful community member! I'm sure the new team will benefit from your help around the forums, etc.

Best of luck to you guys, I'll be rooting for you!

Mark

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