The November 17, 2008 print edition of InformationWeek has an excellent article regarding the inroads Open Source Software is making into the enterprise.  Drupal and Alfresco are featured as the CMSs that are making serious inroads in the enterprise arena.  As a matter of fact, the Drupal logo is the centerpiece of the print editon's cover graphic.

The link below is to an extract of the CMS portion of the article. To get comprehensive view of the article as a whole, try and get a look a the print edition if you can.

Complete Story

The XOOPS Project, world’s leading Open Source CMS (Content Management System), has released recently the newest version of its award winning software – XOOPS 2.3.1.

The Project Leader, Mr. Jiang Taiwen, stated that this release is significant for two reasons: (1) it is merging the two existent XOOPS branches of 2.0 and 2.2 and (2) it is building a bridge towards the next generation of XOOPS – version 3.0.

The major improvements are addition of Extended Profile and Private Messages modules, and standardizing on one Extended DHTML editor as the default across all XOOPS modules. The administrators will also enjoy the addition of EXM Admin GUI.

There are always two perspectives to a “Content Management System” – the developer’s side, and the user’s side. And XOOPS 2.3 is breaking some more new grounds in both areas for the XOOPS community.

Joomla! Web Security is a new book from Packt that provides a concise overview of all the parts needed to construct and implement strong security measures for their Joomla! website. Written by Tom Canavan, this book teaches developers to secure their website by setting up an SSL and implementing disaster recovery features and using real-world tools to protect against hacks on their website.

Joomla! is one of the most powerful open-source content management systems used to build websites and other powerful online applications. While Joomla! itself is inherently safe, misconfigurations, vulnerable components, poorly configured hosts, and weak passwords can all contribute to the downfall of a website. This book will help conquer all these limitations and will show how to secure a website from security threats.

This year, I was given the privilege of sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.  Judges on the panel were required to select their top three CMS based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.  These top three CMS were to originate from the five finalists in the most promising category which included: CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT Portal, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.

As I promised earlier, I'm posting online my notes and comments on how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category.  For better or for worse, Packt Publishing also gives their judges a lot of flexibility in how they rank a CMS.  While I wouldn't consider this a complete analysis of the CMS, it should provide enough information on the impression each CMS left me when reviewed.  While the methodology for determining the best CMS may be subjective, I do try to design my ranking of the CMS to be fair and non-biased.

The order in which I ranked the top "most promising" CMS were:

1. SilverStripe (my highest ranked)
2. ImpressCMS
3. CMS Made Simple
4. MiaCMS
5. MemHT Portal (my lowest ranked)

In order to come with the above rank, I chose to use factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration, ease of customization, scalability, the the amount of support/documentation offered through the project's site/infrastructure.  I did not use security as a factor in my ranking.  Since the CMS must be less than two years old to qualify in the most promising category, it seemed unfair to rank these CMS by security since by definition they're not fully matured projects.

The UNGweb project, described previously on ez.no, has financially benefited a Norwegian county enormously. Based on open standards and eZ Publish, UNGweb changed more & Romsdal's IT-based student service offerings to a purely web-based model.

Two years ago, the challenge was to achieve an IT infrastructure that could handle the large volume of laptops used in More & Romsdal's schools. Given the existing structure, it would have required several millions of dollars in added resources. Instead, the county decided to aim for a simpler structure, by moving all of the IT-based student service offerings to a clean Web platform, providing as many tools as possible over the Internet. The result is a structure providing a portal that each student can customize for their specific needs. This saves schools from having to maintain and invest in on-site servers, file and printer solutions, and distributed login and user management.

UNGweb also includes social tools, such as discussion forums, comments, surveys and user-generated content, which engage youth in discussing subjects that are often related to history, social studies, and ethics. Additionally, UNGweb offers video streaming and podcasts, all from the same portal.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book that helps developers to create, customize and blend images, videos, and audio into their Drupal website. Written by Content Management expert Aaron Winborn, Drupal Multimedia teaches users to integrate multimedia and contribute modules for a Drupal website.

Drupal is a free Open Source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS). Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence. Written in the programming language PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design means it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.

This book will help developers to contribute modules for adding media, store and display images in any configuration, scale and crop images with ImageCache, and add effects to their images on a Drupal website. They will also learn to create thumbnail overlays with jQuery and custom audio fields.

For Immediate Release

The ImpressCMS Project (http://www.impresscms.org), after an intense period of development and testing, has released ImpressCMS version 1.1 Final!

This release offers a glimpse of what to expect from this new project - the list of new features is truly impressive!

What ImpressCMS 1.1 Offers

Some of the features introduced in this version of ImpressCMS have been on the community's wish list for a long time -

• Built-in content creator and manager
• WYSIWYG editor available throughout the site without having to hack the core or modules
• Increased security options for encrypting user passwords
• Built-in support for RTL (right to left) languages
• Built-in UTF-8
• Password strength meter
• CAPTCHA built-in and used for system comments and registration forms
• Integration of OpenID as an authentication method for user logins
• and many more features...

Getting the Latest Version

ImpressCMS v1.1 is available for download from the Project's SourceForge repository and is provided as a complete installation package and as an upgrade package, for users coming from an earlier version of ImpressCMS or XOOPS.

Alfresco Developer Guide is a new book from Packt that walks users through customizing Document Management and Web Content Management on the Alfresco Platform. Written by Jeff Potts, the Director of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Practice at Optaros, this book shows users how to create their own applications that interact with Alfresco via RESTful web scripts.

Alfresco is an open source platform for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. ECM includes things like Document Management, Web Content Management, Collaboration/Enterprise 2.0, Digital Asset Management, Records Management, and Imaging. At its core is a repository for rich content like documents, web assets, XML, and multimedia. Implementing Alfresco usually involves extending the repository to accommodate a business-specific metadata and business logic. This book helps get these extensions done using a combination of Java, JavaScript, XML, and FreeMarker.