Content Management

Lots of changes are starting to take place here at CMS Report. We're now running on a new version of the Drupal content management system!

Over the weekend, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade CMSReport.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. It's hard for me to believe that it has been almost half a year since Drupal 7 was released. This was a frustrating upgrade for me as I've traditionally upgraded CMS Report shortly after any new release of Drupal is out. In fact, I have sometimes upgraded a site before the release is official. As a content management system, my five-year hate-love relationship with Drupal is still going on strong.

Despite the usual learning curve associated with a major Drupal upgrade, I ran into two additional problems I've never had to face with this site. First, the CMSReport.com of today is a much more complex site to run, maintain, and upgrade then it was in 2008. With the number of readers and sponsors this site now sees, I just don't have the luxury of blowing up the site and say "oh well" lets start again. Secondly, the selection of premium or contributed themes available for Drupal 7 just plain sucks (there, I said it). I must have spent half of my upgrade time just searching for and then tweaking a Drupal 7 theme. People often complain about the lag time between a Drupal release and the availability of third-party modules. In my opinion, it is the lack of theme development going on with Drupal that is the real problem with Drupal upgrades.

Boston – June 16, 2011. Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform company, today announced the availability of a new version of its Case Management Framework. Nuxeo CMF is an enhanced distribution of Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (EP), adding functionality to support the flow and use of diverse but related content that needs to be handled and managed in a case or container metaphor.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. - June 14, 2011 – .NET Forge CMS is a new website CMS for web developers who know and love .NET technology.  The new product includes a free Community edition and a Professional edition with e-commerce capabilities.  .NET Forge CMS is a professional platform for .NET developers with ORM tools and MVC architecture which are field-tested in large projects.

Boston, Paris and Amsterdam, the Netherlands – June 14, 2011 – Hippo, a leading vendor of commercial Java Open Source Web Content Management is proud to announce a new technical alliance with Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM Platform) company.

The two companies have built an ECM/WCM connector based on the OASIS CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) standard.  A webinar with a demonstration of this connector will take place on July 20th.

Both Nuxeo and Hippo are open source, Java-based, CMIS-compliant platforms, so the partnership between the two is a natural extension – bringing high value functionality to developers, content architects and end users of both systems.   The Hippo/Nuxeo connector benefits from a high degree of flexibility and ensures that content coming from any source within the organization can be easily integrated into both platforms.   
“The Hippo CMS and Hippo Portal helps empower our customer’s audiences, by driving multi-channel, multi-lingual, multi-site solutions,” said Hippo CEO Jeroen Verberg. “The CMIS connector to Nuxeo applications adds yet another possibility for the online communication of content. And, of course a connector between these two open source, Java-based platforms is quite empowering for organizations who need a scalable system that can grow and integrate with other tools.”

In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for  Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.

Q. What are Phase2's plans for Open Atrium?

Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.

The next major release of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is now available -- Tiki 7. In addition to more than 200 miscellaneous fixes and code improvements, Tiki 7 boasts several eagerly awaited new features:

• Drag-and-drop of modules
• Dozens of new plugins including Blip.tv, Vimeo, TokenAccess
• Introduction of the Theme Generator
• A new unified search infrastructure, based on Zend Lucene
• Integration with OpenStreetMap and Zotero
• Revamped Slideshow
• Mobile, using jQuery.mobile

With this release, Tiki has made some important technological changes, too. Tiki 7 marks the beginning of movement towards HTML5 and the end of support for Internet Explorer 6. Integration with jQuery Mobile is also featured in this release, replacing HAWHAW (first introduced in 2004) for mobile support.

The code for Tiki Trackers have been completely revamped in this release. This will allow developers to more easily improve the feature and better integrate it within all aspects of Tiki.

The release of Tiki 7 also means that Tiki 6 become the LTS (Long Term Support) version and that development on Tiki 3.x officially ends. Although Tiki 7 is available immediately for early adopters, many site administrators may elect to wait until 7.1. See https://dev.tiki.org/Version+lifecycle to determine which Tiki version is right for you.

For details on Tiki 7, review the Release Notes and documentation. To download Tiki 7 (and all other versions), visit https://tiki.org/download .

Buried deep in a month's worth of unread emails was a request for me to take a look at Percussion Software’s CM1 web content management system. The claim is that "CM1 transforms the content management experience for organizations with complex content requirements, who lack the scale required to deploy and maintain a traditional WCM". CM1 was designed to allow marketing teams to quickly build and manage highly interactive, social, scalable websites, and open up content contribution to users across their organizations.

This week ocProducts released version 7 of the Open Source CMS, ocPortal, making rapid improvements based on feedback from user testing.

ocPortal 7 builds on the user-experience work that has also driven the previous three releases, with the aim of making it easier to build highly sophisticated social web-sites that can be fully customized by regular users.

In addition to implementing user feedback, the developers have enhanced ocPortal further by optimizing how long the simplest common administration tasks take. These have now made things even easier, and more manageable, than in the past.

WordPress 3.1.3 was made available to the public yesterday. This release is not only a  security update for all previous versions but also offers some new features.

WordPress 3.1.3 contains the following security fixes and enhancements:

MODX, LLC, the company behind the open source MODX content management platform has released a major update to its flagship MODX Revolution with version 2.1. This release extends MODX’s reach beyond the traditional Open Source server infrastructure and into the Microsoft channel by adding support for Microsoft SQL Server.