Web Designer Salt Lake has published an excellent article comparing Hero Framework to Wordpress in terms of publishing, plugins, eCommerce, and search engine optimization.  I'll give you a hint:  Hero wins in all categories!

The way Hero handles different sets of data is a lot more intuitive and logical.   Hero comes with great features for customization out of the box such as separate web blogs, custom fields, forms etc.  These can take an hours to set up in Wordpress can be done in minutes in Hero.  Therefore you can get the functionality and layout you need done in no time at all with a system like Hero.  Along these lines, the template system for Hero is also extremely simple to use. The designer can simply call content and variables into the site and place them where they are needed. Entire sites can be up and running in a few days, instead of weeks!

Read the full review: Alternatives to Wordpress: Hero Framework. 5 Reasons to consider Hero.

We've just pushed a tiny release of Membrr out, with a few bugfixes.  Here are the relevant notes from the changelog, below:

April 24th, 2012
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*  Updated to version 1.74.
*  Fixed has_subscription_for_channel to work with 1 post per channel.

April 19th, 2012
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*  Fixed channel ID column reference for post expiration.
*  Added countries and temp to DROP tables in uninstall.

April 16th, 2012
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*  Force https in current_url().
*  Beefed up the is_ssl() function.

Looking to add subscriptions to ExpressionEngine?  Membrr's your module!

The latest release of Membrr - v1.71 - has been deployed and is available to all licensees.  Featured in this release is the option to enable a CAPTCHA field in a standard Membrr order form (template tag documentation here).  Some users who have free plans that don't validate payment information have been hit with some spam bots that clog up the system with bad data, and this should put an end to that.

Thanks for continuing to use Membrr for your subscription billing needs in ExpressionEngine!

We are happy to announce that all of our hosting customers' accounts have received a complementary upgrade today!  Each of our hosting plans now have more disk space available, and some have upgraded data transfer as well.

Details are as follows:

• 250MB accounts have been upgraded to 1GB disk space, 40GB data transfer
• 1GB accounts have been upgraded to 3GB disk space, 50GB data transfer
• 3GB accounts have been upgraded to 5GB disk space, 100GB data transfer

If your account was not upgraded, or you have questions, please submit a support ticket.

Enjoy the upgrades!

Web designer and blogger John Faulds recently reviewed our open source content management system, Hero Framework.  I suggest you check out his review, but here's his conclusion (we're working on the multi-file upload system, John!):

As I mentioned earlier, without the requirement to attach multiple images to entries, the entire process of installing Hero, learning enough about how it works to get the job done, and building the site would’ve only taken a couple of hours. The gallery module thing threw a bit of a spanner in that works. Because of that I probably wouldn’t use Hero again for projects that require adding multiple images to lots of entries. But for sites that only have a single gallery, or a single page of galleries, or for lots of other scenarios, I think Hero would be a good choice. Those other scenarios also include the ability to do ecommerce which I haven’t tested out, so it’d be good to hear from anyone who has used it for that purpose.

Fans of our Hero framework rejoice!  You can now add a complete social comments platform to your website in just minutes with our new Disqus addon.  With a free Disqus account and this new module, you can drop a comment section in any template of your website with one simple piece of code.

Disqus brings comments, a Facebook login, media sharing, and Tweeting to your website.

We love a good payment gateway.  And so we jumped at the chance to integrate the new Stripe payment gateway into our products and give our users a chance to collect payments quickly and without setting up a merchant account.  Currently for US clients only, this gateway is sure to provide PayPal some competition in the small business market.

OpenGateway, Hero, Membrr, an EE Donations all feature Stripe support.  Enjoy!

For all users of OpenGateway, an update was just released (version 1.97) that we highly suggest you upgrade to, particularly if you were using v1.95 or v1.96 of OpenGateway and have experienced some issues in recurring end dates.

The upgrade is available in your licensees area.

Here at Electric Function, we tend to keep things pretty simple pricing wise.  Prices are set.  Prices are kept.

However, every once in a while, it's nice to shake things up!  So, today, our CMS and eCommerce framework - Hero - is officially on sale for $195!  The offer is extended to everyone, whether you already have a trial or hosted site, or are just looking to get started building your website!

In the spirit of product updates, our Hero content management system and web development framework has had a refresh released today!

Notable changes:

• The member profile manager in the control has been cleaned up.
• You can now globally manage (and edit!) your product options at Storefront > Product Options.
• Email validation has been fixed so that emails like "m.test@test.com" aren't rejected (only one letter before the initial ".").
• You can now pass an array of group ID's to the {protected_link} template plugin.
• Subscription cancellations have been fixed so that multiple subscriptions don't cause issue.
• Miscellaneous bugfixes.

The full changelog can be viewed here.