Last week marked the official release of Magento 1.0, an open source ecommerce platform. Magento has been on my radar scope for some time thanks to those who have left comments about it here. Since, I likely will have need of a good shopping cart this year for a planned project, I've decided to put some focus on Magento. I will be removing Mambo from my top 30 "CMS Focus" list to make room for Magento. My apologies to Mambo fans.

Magento isn't just a "shopping cart" but attempts to also be an "ecommerce platform". Magento recognizes that it needs to improve and introduce additional features, but for a 1.0 version the variety and quantity of features are impressive. Some of Magento's well rounded features include analytics and reports, RSS feeds, site and content management tools, search engine optimization, promotion tools, and multiple theming.

Mambo 4.6.3 was released earlier today in recent weeks. Besides the usual security improvements and bug fixes, this version of Mambo came with some new enhancements. Some of the more notable enhancements in Mambo 4.6.3 include:

• Mostlyce upgraded to 2.4
• Mostlydbadmin upgraded to 1.5
• Geshi upgraded to 1.0.7.20
• Enhanced editor initializing
• Enhanced weblinks component, so the target param is not confusing anymore

" Award winning Open Source CMS now in a better state than ever with new leadership and adds MamboXchange to it’s stable of developer resources."

Complete Story

On Monday, Packt Publishing announced the five finalists in each category of its 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  The five categories are Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  In the finals stage, the public as a whole is eligible to vote for each category through October 26th.  While that may seem like a long time for the polls to be open, I'd encourage you to vote early so that you have no excuse for why your favorite CMS didn't make it to the winners list.

Around this time last year, Packt Publishing announced the "top five" finalists for their award (no separate categories in 2006).  In 2006, those CMS projects that made it to the finalist list included Drupal, e107, Joomla, Plone, and Xoops.  When those five CMS were announced, I chose to double my efforts on covering those applications here at CMS Report.  Although the extra categories this year have brought quite a few more Open Source CMS into the foreground, I still don't see why I couldn't keep most of them on my CMS Focus radar scope.  With 16,000 people nominating their favorite CMS for this award, that amount of generated interest is hard to ignore.  Luckily, I already cover many of the CMS that did make it as a finalist...but there are still many new CMS on that list that will shake things up a bit here at CMSReport.com.

Other features introduced in this minor version release include:

• Stability & security improvements
• Lighter database footprint
• A number of bug fixes
• Improved compatibility with older 3rd party extensions
• Added support for 4.5.x style SEF URLs
• Updates to many of the internal extensions
• MOStlyCE WYSIWYG editor enhancements (cross browser compliance issues addressed via an update to TinyMCE v2.1.0)

"Mambo, the original open source content management system that powered iTWire: before we moved to its derivative fork Joomla, is now celebrating six years as an open source project under GNU General Public License. The celebrations coincide with the announcement of a new project leader and a reaffirmation of the project's commitment to put a sometimes turbulent past behind it and move forward."

Complete Story

• IE7 fixes
• RSS and  search engine optimization fixes
• com_syndicate config parameter fixed
• SQL injection fix in cancel edit functions

"Packt Publishing is offering an exclusive offer to all Mamboserver.com users. Purchase the newly released book (Dec 2006) 'Learning Mambo: A Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your Website' and receive a 20% discount off the full price of the book (this offer is also applicable to multi-buys)."

Complete Story