"The history of science and technology suggests that such absolutism on both sides of a scientific debate doesn't often lead to practical solutions."

-Daniel B. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment, "Absolute Certainty Is Not Scientific", Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2011

A new version of mojoPortal is out and about. The developers consider  the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.5 a "significant release with lots of new goodness". New features and improvements in this version include Windows Llive Writer support, IOS 5 support, and forum enhancements.

The following is a more detailed list of improvements in mojoPortal 2.3.7.5:

• Improvements to Windows Live Writer support. A completely new implementation of metaweblog api with new support for Creating and Editing CMS pages in addition to Blog posts.
• Support for Windows Azure AppFabric cache and new guidance for hosting mojoPortal on Windows Azure.
• New button in Add/Edit Pages (aka PageTree.aspx) to resort child pages of the selected page alphabetically.
• IOS 5 support for rich text editors: Use of WYSIWYG editors CKeditor and TinyMCE is now possible in IOS 5 devices.
• Default roles for new root level pages has been promoted from a web,.config setting to site settings.
• New permission for Roles That Are Allowed To Set Page Level Skins (when page level skins are enabled).
• File Dialog used in the editors now shows meaningful messages when a user's file system quotas prevent upload
• Updated to jQuery 1.7.1 and jQueryUI 1.8.16 when using the Google CDN.
• Webstore improvements: 1) There is a new provider model for OrderCompletedEventHandlers that allows developers to plugin custom code that will be executed after payment clears on an order. 2) It is now possible to checkout in webstore with a zero balance.
• Forum improvements: 1) New setting to copy the posting user on the notifications. 2) New setting to suppress email notifications when a user edits an existing post. 3) New setting to limit the timespan in which a user may edit his post.

mojoPortal 2.3.7.5 is available now on mojoPortal's download page. Information on this page was provided via the official announcement.

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

CMS websites are now the norm as the preferred content management and delivery solution. Nevertheless, many CMS web applications face scalability issues. However, when a CMS is put in the cloud, it theoretically resolves the scalability issue to obtain a complete benefit.

But, if a cloud platform is not configured to match the particular needs of the CMS, it will need to work harder. This will result in higher loads than what is actually needed to serve the incoming traffic. Therefore, in most cases, it is sensible to cache the static content. The issue that one faces here is whether the cloud is able to tell the difference between a user who has signed into an application and is therefore being served with dynamic content and the one who has not yet signed into the application.

At the same time, a CMS presents many other challenges other than scalability due to the paradigm shift from the traditional model of sharing files from a central repository.  The reason behind this is that websites no longer operate isolated or in standalone mode. They must be able to interact with a range of other business applications that range from ecommerce business solutions to CRM databases to a range of reporting as well as analytics tools. To cut a long story short, websites have become increasingly data and content hungry because of their complex nature and the requirements of their users.

Managing such websites is now a full-time job.  Earlier in the traditional hosting scenario, the site owner had to figure out how to look after the application, but also the servers, backups, databases, and others.  Now, the platforms are specialized, so handling a web application which was a full time job can now be addressed by a person who can pay full-time attention.

The XOOPS Development Team is pleased to announce that a new version, XOOPS 2.5.4 Final, is available for download and testing. In addition libraries have been updated to their latest versions:

• phpMailer 5.1
• TinyMCE 3.4.6
• jQuery 1.6.4
• jQueryUI 1.8.16

• Increased productivity
• Decreased training and support costs
• Reduced development time and costs
• Reduced maintenance costs
• Increased customer satisfaction

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyke's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.

OpenCms 8.0.3 is now ready and available for download.

OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions. This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 8 contains a greatly improved user interface for content managers and numerous other enhancements.

With OpenCms 8.0.3, many important and useful additional features and improvements have been added to the core system and a number of issues that persisted in the 8.0.2 release have been fixed.