A couple weeks ago my family spent some vacation time at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. If you have ever been to a Disney theme park then you know full well that it takes a lot of work in those parks just to have fun. Some of the most popular rides in these parks have waiting periods of up to two hours due to the long lines of people wanting to get on board. Luckily, my wife brought a Disney tourist guidebook that gave our family the helpful hints, recommendations, and information we needed to beat those long lines.  In the end, we ended up with a very enjoyable trip (so enjoyable that we got to ride Space Mountain twice!). That travel guide was a valuable asset to my family's vacation. 

Mastering Drupal is very similar to visiting a theme park as it takes some effort on your part to ensure you get rewarded for your effort. If Drupal is the amusement park then consider Drupal's modules as the park's attractions you're wanting to ride. With this line of thinking, I easily recommend that you let Earl and Lynette Miles' book, Drupal's Building Blocks, be your valuable tourist guide into the wonderful world of Drupal. I only review a few books each year and this is a book I gladly invested my time reading.

Drupal's Building Blocks is a tutorial, reference, and cookbook for some of Drupal's most valuable modules including CCK (Content Construction Kit), Views, and Panels. The primary purpose of this book is to give you the quickest route to mastering the modules as quickly as you can in order to help you create more powerful, flexible, usable, and manageable Web sites. The audience for this book isn't only for Web developers or designers, but also site administrators, content architects, and consultants. There is some code in this book, but what is there isn't the scary code you often find in a developer's library.

Although I've worked with Drupal for more than half a decade, I am still among the newbies who struggle with how best to use Drupal's contributed modules. I've built several sites using CCK and Views but I've always ran into hurdles that keep me from fully discovering what these modules can do for me and my sites. This book will provide you the information you need to realize the full potential of these modules. Anybody who has seen Drupal, CCK, Views, and Panels mature over the years can't help but read this book and enjoy not only the author's technical expertise but also the author's cultural and historical understanding for how the module came to be in Drupal. 

In the first chapter of the book, "Introducing CCK and Nodes", there is a section titled "Quest for the Grail: How CCK Was Born". This section alone reads like an adventure story that starts by talking about the challenges site administrators originally had with Drupal needing to acquire development skills just to control the form content would take in Drupal. The story continues with Drupal 4.4 and how a contributed module named Flexinode gave non-developers the ability to create new content types yet limitations remained. I was reminded that with Drupal 4.7 CCK became Flexinode's replacement and with each successive release of Drupal the module continues to improve. For someone like me who started with Drupal 4.6 and watched Drupal 5, 6, and now 7 evolve this book spoke to my inner geek. I simply found this book to be good bridge to the more technical aspects of CCK, Views and Panels.

ImpressPages CMS 1.0.8 gives more freedom and ability to be the master of your website. Copy a table from any other resource (MS Word, MS Excel, other website, etc.) and see how it automatically adapts to your website’s style. Forget 3rd party tools to have fully functional contact or registration form on your website; just drag&drop a widget for that. Create unique content administration area with only a few lines of code.

Here's a list of most important updates and fixes:

• Added table widget
• Additional contact form fields: select box, checkbox, radio buttons
• Saved or not saved status of the page
• You can move ip_config.php in upper directory for safety (above public_html, htdocs, etc.)
• Automatic check for a new version
• MagicQuotes ON support
• Autologin option in user module

"Enterprise collaboration projects are almost always risky propositions. Storing and sharing information, potentially across departments and across the world, holds unquantifiable rewards for the business. Yet, if these rewards can't be realized by individuals, then the project risks failure."

- Matthew Sarrel, Tapping the Positive from Social Networks for Enterprise Collaboration, eWeek, November 15, 2010

San Francisco, CA and Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Hippo, a leading vendor of open source Enterprise Content Management Software, has launched version 7.5 of its Content Management System, Hippo CMS.

Hippo CMS 7.5 is an enterprise-class open source software product designed to empower your audience. Consumers of Web content are now coming to expect context-enriched experiences that use location, presence, language, behavior, social attributes and other environmental information to anticipate their needs.

But Web content management solutions haven’t changed to meet this expectation. They still focus on pushing content out to static Web sites, and expect their customers to optimize their Web content based on a slow iteration of publish, test, review, re-design.

What if you could easily open your entire content repository to new channels as they emerge? What if you could optimize your content in real-time so that no matter how your customer engages – their experience is as good as it can possibly be? What if you could empower your audience to engage with your business on their terms?

With Hippo – the answer is “now you can”.

DotNetNuke Corp., the company behind the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platform for Microsoft .NET, announced its intention to shift the primary core development language for its award-winning DotNetNuke core platform from Visual Basic (VB.NET) to C#. The first official release of the DotNetNuke platform available in C# will be Version 6.0 which will be publicly available for users of the DotNetNuke Community, Professional, and Enterprise Editions in Q2 2011, with the first Community Technology Preview available in early March.

News Highlights

• In recent years there has been a much greater emphasis on the C# language in the .NET ecosystem in terms of innovation, tooling, and examples. In switching to C#, DotNetNuke Corporation believes its developer community and install base will benefit from greater access to development resources, source code examples, and enterprise acceptance.
• A Community Technology Preview will be available in early March which will provide the opportunity for users and developers to get early access to the recently converted C# platform. Community participation and feedback will play a vital role in ensuring a high quality final release. 
• The .NET Framework provides design-time, compile-time, and run-time support for multiple programming languages. As a result, the DotNetNuke API will preserve full compatibility through this transition. This means that all platform extensions will continue to be fully compatible with the C# DotNetNuke 6.0 core. 
• DotNetNuke extensions developers, commercial or otherwise, will not be negatively impacted by the change as they will continue to be able to develop and deploy custom extensions in their preferred software development language including VB.NET or C#.
• DotNetNuke is the fastest growingopen source web CMS ever on .NET with over 1,100 subscription customers, 33,000 Snowcovered customers, 400 percent year-over-year growth, and more than 600,000 production web sites worldwide. Connect with us online: Twitter.com/dnncorp(company) or Twitter.com/dnnsc(Snowcovered marketplace); DotNetNuke blogs; and the DotNetNuke Community LinkedIn Group.

“As a long-time Visual Basic developer, I have personally witnessed the gradual shift in the .NET developer market as C# has become the dominant choice for the enterprise," said Shaun Walker, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of DotNetNuke Corp. "After extensive technical and business analysis, I believe the time is right for DotNetNuke to make the move to C#. I believe this migration will accelerate the adoption and deployment of the DotNetNuke Web Content Management Platform and make our product more attractive to a wider audience.”

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces a new study of the top five reasons off-the-shelf CMS and social intranet software offer clear advantages over custom-built solutions. The study demonstrates that the functionality and availability of off-the-shelf software makes in-house development obsolete in terms of total cost of ownership, security and associated risks.

This week, the Wordpress core developers released WordPress Version 3.1.This release took a little longer than CMS Report had first anticipated, but we see it as a sign that today's WordPress is much more complex than it used to be when it was considered only a tool for blogging. In fact, Matt Mullenweg in his Wordpress 3.1. announcement  seemed to recognize this continued evolution of WordPress as a content management system.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

New features in WordPress 3.1 that would be of interest to content authors and site managers include:

• A "lightning fasy" redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages
• An admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages
• A streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels intended to improve the user experience for new bloggers.
• A refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options

For WordPress developers, additional new features that may interest them in this latest version of WordPress include:

• A new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts
• New CMS capabilities:
  • archive pages for custom content types
  • a new Network Admin
  • an overhaul of the import and export system
  • the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries

WordPress 3.1 is available for download from WordPress.org or you can update from within the dashboard within your current version of WordPress.

The SilverStripe open source community recently posted their roadmap to SilverStripe CMS v3.0. Version 3.0 represents a major year-long development project and is expected to be a substantial improvement over the current v2.4.x series. With an aggressive schedule, a stable version of SilverStripe CMS v3.0 is expected to be available by the end of 2011.

The roadmap introduces three major goals of SilverStripe CMS v3.0:

• Better technical platform. Sapphire, the underlying programming framework, will evolve from an integral part of SilverStripe CMS, into a product that can stand on its own feet. In forming this delineation, improvements will be made throughout the core, including the ORM, data integrity, templating language, and performance. Sapphire v3.0 will consequently enable developers to make richer and more complex web applications and websites.
• Better user experience for content authors. A refresh of the content authoring environment will bring even better usability and productivity. The interface will transition to jQuery, making the system capable of much greater customization. Managing images, embedding videos, and previewing work in progress will all be made easier. Images and documents will be able to versioned and secured in the same way pages can currently be.
• Improved support for the social and mobile web. SilverStripe's existing templating language and support for web services already provide a foundation for the two top themes in the web currently: social media and mobile devices. With SilverStripe CMS v3.0, the developers intend to improve the core to make development for both easier and richer.

SilverStripe's Business Relationship Manager, Sigurd Magnusson, sent CMS Report an email about this new roadmap for version 3.0 and how developers can help get involved. "Note at this stage", said Magnusson, "the main thing we want people to do, is join our development mailing list so they people can be involved in the decisions and contribute to the development of this new major release, due late 2011". The official mailing list for the development of SilverStripe CMS 3.0 can be found at Google Groups.

Those interested in additional information regarding SilverStripe CMS v3.0 are encouraged to take a look at the SilverStripe 3.0 Planning page. A video recording of the  first public presentation on SilverStripe CMS v3.0 is posted below the fold and slides from the meeting are also available.