DoubleSpring Media Launches Blackmonk: a CMS Product to Host Web Apps

As digital content across the internet increases, content management systems (CMS) and blogging platforms have gained enormous popularity. These platforms make content management and the digitalisation appear like a breeze. BlackMonk is one such CMS product, made for different web portal projects.

BlackMonk is a scalable and highly customizable content management system for building web portals. It powers online newspapers, magazine sites, business directories, city portals, community portals and more. Its modular design and flexible architecture allows customization of functionalities with ease and convenience.

BlackMonk is a product of DoubleSpring Media, a Bangalore based mobile & web app development company formed in 2008, that specializes in digital content management. Prior to BlackMonk, DoubleSpring Media had launched MyBangalore.com and a CMS product called LocalEngine, which were CMS system exclusively for city portals.

The BlackMonk product

BlackMonk offers the widest range of functionalities to help its customers get started with just about any type of web portal project. It is equipped with web applications needed for any heavy duty site to run, ranging from content, commerce to community portals. Blackmonk is completely flexible with respect to functionality and work flow. One can add modules as per requirement; it also provides intuitive control panels where both the admin and staff can use the content with ease.

BlackMonk is also customized with popular social media platforms and user generated contents. This gives the end user a leverage to post articles, events or classifieds at their end. Different revenue streams are also integrated with the product like banner ads, promotional contents ecommerce, affiliate marketing and deals. At the same time the user can set up different payment gateways such as Paypal, Google etc.

A web portal is incomplete if one cannot access it across different hand held devices. BlackMonk gives you an added advantage to publish your web portal across tablets and smart phones. Platforms for Android and iOS have also been integrated and the DoubleSpring team is further working on other mobile platforms.

Even if one gets stuck within the CMS, they can seek contextual help and a handy ‘quick help’ link leading to relevant page on the online documentation.

The force behind BlackMonk

BlackMonk under the parent company DoubleSpring Media have a 20 member team including Shuhaib Shariff who is the founder and CEO. “As a team our strength lies in our engineering expertise, and we work with technologies such as Python which will emerge to be the key technologies in the web development arena” shares Shuhaib.

BlackMonk has been in the market for over 5 months now and within this time they have had many adopters from North America and Europe such as 5starwedding directory (UK), city portal of Austin. Most of these customers came across BlackMonk through organic searches, looking to upgrade their existing web portals. In a desire to build one from scratch, they found BlackMonk very satisfying. “BlackMonk is the most comprehensive web portal software in the market today, and it is loved by our clients and end-users” adds Shuhaib.

The users need to purchase a licence to get started with the product. “Our licensing terms allows single domain deployment per license — with absolutely no restrictions on number of users or content pages” Shuhaib clarifies. The licensed user also gets the leverage of playing with the source code to shape it according to their desire. BlackMonk operates in a competitive niche, which is dominated by big international players such as eDirectory, GTxcel, EZ Systems etc. And Shuhaib feels it is due to the sheer strength of their product that they have been able to gain traction in this highly competitive niche.