Opening proven proprietary CMS will give nonprofit organizations control and reduce costs

AUSTIN, TEXAS – March 12, 2012 – Schipul – The Web Marketing Company (www.schipul.com) today announced plans to release Tendenci (www.tendenci.com) content management system (CMS) as an Open Source product. Tendenci is a CMS designed specifically for non-profits organizations (NPOs) and associations. The announcement was made at the SXSW Interactive Festival.

For the past decade, Schipul has developed and managed the proprietary Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model of Tendenci, a powerful CMS platform that has proven to be an especially potent tool for NPOs. It currently powers hundreds of websites for nonprofit organizations and associations around the world, with more than 1 million users. The Tendenci Open Source download will be available to everyone at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco, held in April. External beta testers are working on the code now and participating developers will have early access.

“Because Tendenci is specifically designed as a CMS for NPOs, we believe opening the source code will allow us to better fulfill our mission of doing good,” said Ed Schipul, president and CEO. “The best way to expand the Tendenci community – from a community perspective as well as a capabilities perspective – is to open it up and encourage the development community to build on it and to participate in making improvements.”

Many NPOs prefer an open source solution because of cost and control. According to the 2011 Nonprofit Data Ecosystem Report from the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), over 90 percent of Nonprofits surveyed manage their website content on either an open source or custom in-house built CMS.

During the past two years, Schipul rebuilt Tendenci using Python on the Django open source framework as a necessary first step toward releasing the CMS platform as an open source product. This provided greater flexibility with custom Django application integration and greater integration with Web applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin and Vimeo.

The initial open source release of Tendenci will include core modules for content management, user and member management, custom forms and event registration.

Schipul will continue to offer Tendenci as a hosted solution that includes a wider range of functionality for NPOs and businesses that prefer a fully managed Web marketing solution delivered “as-a-Service.”

Tendenci powers websites for Houston Technology Center (www.houstontech.org), Metropolitan New York Library Council (www.metro.org), and San Francisco Bay Area Innovation Group (www.sfbig.org).

About Schipul - The Web Marketing Company

Schipul – The Web Marketing Company develops and builds websites on the Tendenci CMS system for NPOs, a revenue generating online tool with over a half million people logging in during the past year and millions of users overall. Schipul is headquartered in Houston with an office in Silicon Valley, and provides web marketing services to an international client base that encompasses a variety of service industries in local, national and international markets. Schipul’s clients include the Houston Zoo, Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles and Tony Chachere's^® Creole Foods, among many others. Additional information about Schipul is available at www.schipul.com and www.tendenci.com.

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