We are proud to announce the release of XMS Systems version 3.00

Upgrades will be rolled out manually over the next couple of days. Please do not click the "Upgrade" button in your administration section.

For more information on what is included in this upgrade please refer to the "Upgrade notes" on the XMS Systems website here.

European Cookie Directive

One of the major developments was to find a workable means of ensuring your website will be compliant with the European Union privacy and data protection legislation and in specific the much debated and very controversial "Cookie" directive.

In short the issue is that you as a website owner needs to get explicit permission from your visitors before you can install any cookies on their computer.
Cookies is pretty much an integral part of any website these days and is used to control who sees what on a site once the user is logged in, or not logged in, track the popularity of pages, used in search engine optimisation, social networking, and much more.

The directive makes an exception for cookies "strictly necessary for a service requested by a user," such as placing an online shopping order. But it requires permission for storing cookies that are used for targeted advertising and tracking Web behaviour.

So in theory most XMS Systems based websites will not need to implement the cookie module, however if you use google analytics you will need to get permission from your visitors to track their behaviour. This changes everything as without this usage data you will not be able to properly optimise your website to enhance the user experience and increase your search engine rankings.

The were a number of different options that we tested and found most of them to be to intrusive or to easy to miss. If the user missed the cookie notification he or she would not be able to log into the website or use any of the social networking buttons to share articles.

The solution that we decided on was to firstly attempt to figure out where the user is coming from. This has a slight decrease in performance but ensures that only the visitors that needs to see the warning will be redirected to a page that is editable by you (as everything else). The user will then be given an option to either accept the cookies or opt-out of it.

Once the user has made the choice he / she will be redirected back to the websites home page from where they can view all the pages.

If the user made the wrong choice they can change the settings by simply clicking on one of the links that will appear in the footer of the website.

The solution is scalable to ensure that as more countries adopts the directive or countries from outside the EU come up with their own ideas it is simply a matter of ticking the relevant countries box to include them in the list that needs to be redirected.

Currently only Denmark, Estonia and the UK has taken steps to implement the directive and in the UK, if found to be in breach of the legislation you can be fined anything between £1000 and £500 000 pounds.

Thank you for your continued support and as always we welcome your input to continue developing and improving XMS Systems.