CMSMadeSimple.org: "This [CMS Made Simple 1.3] was originally going to be just a marginal improvement to hold people over till CMS 2.0 comes out, but we just kinda got carried away.

There are new versions of the TinyMCE, ModuleManager, Search, MenuManager, News and FileManager modules, a massive improvement in translations, an automatic update notification mechanism, bugfixes, and lots of other tweaks to help you in your projects."

Complete Story

The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.

The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:

Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:

• Inventory management
• Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
• Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
• Shopping cart functionality

While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.

"Just because the blog has been deserted doesn’t mean nothing is happening. About 3 weeks ago, I got myself into a position where I can resume the 2.0 development cycle. Not only that, I’m starting to get to enjoy all the work I did in the beginning of cleaning up and moving code around to make a more consistent API. New features are falling into place pretty quickly and I’m making some rapid progress."

Complete Story

CMS Made Simple 1.2.1 is now available. This version is a maintenance release and, refreshingly, not a release needed to address security fixes.

New features and additions to this version of CMS Made Simple include:

• New versions of News, Search, Tiny, and FileManager modules
• Fixes the issue with pages being set inactive on edit if not edited by somebody with the 'Modify Site Structure' permission
• Adds function to assist in handling file uploads.
• Adds the ability to set a 'home page' in the user preferences to determine a page to redirect to upon login.
• Adds a site preference for date format

For more details on this release, take a look at the original announcement at CMSMadeSimple.org.

Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

Joomla!, last year's award winner, placed second this year and was awarded $3,000. CMS Made Simple collected $2,000 with a placement in the number three spot. This year, Packt awarded open source CMS projects a total of $20,000 in prize money in five different categories.

The announcement by Packt quotes Jeff Eaton, a core developer speaking on behalf of Drupal, as saying, "We've worked hard to make Drupal as flexible, as scalable, and as accessible as possible. It's a great week for all of Open Source; the winners in every category have shown that OSS can produce powerful solutions for a wide range of needs." The announcement by Packt also reaffirms Jeff's statement that all the projects that made it as finalists should be congratulated.

By golly, Joomla has been awarded as the Best PHP Open Soure CMS in Packt Publishing's 2007 awards.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! was selected as the winner in the Best PHP category due to "its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box".

Now here is the interesting and confusing part, just because Joomla has won the Best PHP Open Souce does not mean they'll be winning the Overall Winner category.  How can this be if the same five open source CMS (CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla, and PHP-Fusion)  that were selected as finalists in the Best PHP are also in the Overall Winner Category?  Well my friends, each category has a different panel of judges that may approach CMS applications with a different perspective.

For some months ago i started with this project that based on Cmsmadesimple.

CMSMS  has some disadvantages - low speed , needs much memory , a very bad module api.

Now i have made several Versions of PowerCMS and changed many from the original.

And now PowerCMS is gone his own way.

The default language is german.

• A very memory efficient CMS, that works without problems on Web server with 8MB memory limit - typically less than 1 mb needed in the frontend
• A very fast CMS with very small generation times - the values are 0.00075507164001465 ... 0.04244296073913 seconds on shared Webservers
• Will run from PHP 4.3.1, including PHP 5.xx versions - no need of PHP 5

There is only one week left to vote for the CMS finalists in Packt Publishing's Open Source Content Management System Award.  If you haven't voted for what you think is the best open source CMS, I would encourage you to vote.  In my opinion, you should vote even in those categories where your favorite CMS may not have made it through the public nomination process.  Remember, not everyone is that sold on open source content management systems.  In other words this award, and those like it, is a chance to help newcomers find the best of the best in open source CMS.

The voting results should really be very interesting this year with five finalists to choose from in each of the five categories.  The five categories in the Packt award are  Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  The five finalists in the Overall category include CMS Made Simple, Drupal, e107, Joomla!, and PHP-Fusion.

Since I'm needing some time to figure out how best to use the Drupal contributed Advertisement module, I've decided to promote via banners each of the five CMS finalists in the Overall CMS Winner category.

CMS Made Simple 1.2 has been released.  In their announcement, the project indicated being pleased at the number of people that participated in the beta cycle participated in the beta cycle helping to help make CMSMS 1.2 a stable released.

Last month, we reported some of the improvements and new features we thought you could expect in CMSMS 1.2.  Below is list listing of changes as worded in the official announcement of the 1.2 release.

Robert Cambell announced the expected release of CMS Made Simple 1.2 with the beta version expected in a couple weeks.  After the CMSMS 1.2 release all focus will be on development of a 2.0 version of the CMS.

• Graphical HTML Text editor (Frontend WYSIWYG)
• News 2.5 has an ‘extra’ field for additional information (maybe an image)  and supports frontend article submission
• Full permissions for the Admin Group (gid == 1) and not just the first user (uid == 1)