Yesterday, I received an email from SilverStripe Co-Founder, Sigurd Magnusson. For all the years I have been corresponding with Sigurd, I don't think I've ever seen him as excited as he was this time in breaking the news. SilverStripe, a web development company delivering open source content management systems (CMS) has achieved Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2 for version 2.4.0 of their flagship product, SilverStripe CMS. This is a world first, as the software is the only truly open source web application to achieve certification on the Windows platform.

What is a little different about this story is that it is not only SilverStripe's press relations people making a big deal about this story. Microsoft is making a big deal about the accomplishments of SilverStripe. Andrew Gordan, Microsoft's New Zealand’s Platform Strategy Manager writes:

A large amount of the innovation in the software world is happening on the web and in the cloud, and in addition to that, we are seeing increased awareness and acceptance of open source software on the Microsoft Windows platforms.

Microsoft's Certified for Windows programs are well known for indicating software and hardware products that have been thoroughly tested to work well on Microsoft Windows and as of today, SilverStripe CMS is the first Open Source web application to complete the comprehensive testing necessary to achieve "Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2" status.

In his own blog post, Sigurd mentions that the certification for SilverStripe has been a long but rewarding road. A large proportion of the SilverStirpe's  community and clients use Microsoft servers, databases, and other technology. Over the past three years there an effort has been made for the SilverStripe CMS to work with Microsoft's operating system, web servers, and SQL Server database product.

Packt Publishing announced that Pimcore has won the Most Promising Open Source Project Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Most Promising Open Source Project Award  is a revamped category for the Award this year, featuring Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, the founding member of Pimcore. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects. The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community.” Added Marc Delisle, system administrator and one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

While Pimcore occupied the top spot in the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category, TomatoCMS came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by social networking software package BuddyPress.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has five more categories left, including the Open Source Graphics Software category, for which results will be announced from November 16th through to November 19th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit Packt's Open Source Awards site.

This is a very cool product from salsaDev which takes us one step closer to the Semantic Web. The salsaAPI 2.0 helps turn unstructured text into smart content. The video below explains it much better than I or even the press release I've attached below. My thanks to Stéphane Croisier (Jahia and also a salsaDev Board Member) for recommending that I take a look at this product.

SalsaAPI 2.0: the next-generation content intelligence engine

Geneva, November 10, 2010 – salsaDev SA is happy to announce it just closed its Series A Financing round exceeding $1 Mio, with institutional and private investors. salsaDev is simultaneously releasing its new product, salsaAPI 2.0 (api.salsadev.com), leveraging the 2nd generation of its flagship technology. salsaAPI automates text analysis and semantic indexing on large volumes of information, helping organizations reach the next level of content intelligence.

The salsaAPI 2.0 offers a powerful RESTful API to index various sources of raw content, automatically enrich it with additional metadata and match it with texts of similar meanings. The product combines a comprehensive set of features into one single offering, including text analysis, intelligent search & discovery and content mining. As opposed to several competitors, the product can be used online or onsite and can be easily embedded within any 3rd party sites or applications.

The XOOPS Development Team is pleased to announce that a new stable version of the Top 5 Finalist of 2010 Packt Open Source CMS - XOOPS 2.5.0 Final is available for download.

The XOOPS 2.5.0 release is a major redesign of the System Module which has been AJAX-ed with jQuery. Some of the new features are truly amazing, like the visual placement of blocks, and we're sure that the System Admins will love them

Other major improvements/additions include:

• Help System for Admin and modules
• MySQL Dump in Maintenance
• New Redirect messaging
• Column sorting in tables
• Smarty plugin for icon pack
• Smarty plugin for breadcrumb navigation
• jQuery plugins for display popup or manage drag & drop
• File Manager (Plugin)
• Maintenance with Cache Clean-up, and Tables Maintenance
• Visual module ordering with drag & drop
• Visual block placement with drag & drop
• Refactor all PHP code for use XOOPS API
• Use template in the same way that front user, admin side for module can call a main template define in xoops_version.php
• Allow override of template in admin theme like frontend if we set template in ADMIN_THEME
• Manage editor for blocks, comments and for all module if module developper want to use it activate or deactivate system section
• Choose number of line for admin section
• Display or hide tips

For more info and download please click here

A couple weeks ago, one of Magnolia's press people gave me a sneak preview of a case study for how the Magnolia CMS was being used by one of their partners in redesigning the recruitment website of the United States Navy, Navy.com. I was given the opportunity to write a story about the redesign before the case study was published online. It was a great opportunity I was being offered but I just wasn't able to find the time in my schedule to write the story.

So it is only fitting, that I at least talk about this case study on the Navy's use of the Magnolia content management system on Veteran's Day. The recent Navy.com was redesigned to be more interactive, more responsive to user needs, and better integrated with social media communities nurtured by the U.S. Navy. Additionally, the site needed to support the Navy’s recently launched new brand, “America’s Navy. A Global Force For Good™”.

As mentioned in the case study, integrators spent six months researching and evaluating open source content management systems. Their evaluation was platform-agnostic; they considered Java, PHP and Python solutions in their research. Key evaluation criteria were:

• Easy to learn and easy to use for content authors
• Short learning curve for designers and developers
• Easy to integrate with custom business objects
• Compliant with Web standards and accessibility guidelines
• Scalable and robust

Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition, together with the Magnolia STK and Blossom module, met all of these criteria. Navy.com is now running on Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition with Magnolia STK and Blossom, Magnolia's instant Spring integration. The infrastructure supporting this site includes an Apache Web Server, Tomcat Application Server, MySQL Database, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

If you have ever worked for a large organization, you should easily relate to this Dilbert cartoon. As the IT guy trying to make everyone happy at work, I've spent the last year making sure everyone that needs two monitors gets two monitors. It's not an easy task in an era of tight budgets and cycle replacements but we're getting there...

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of Tiki 6. This version of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware represents hundreds of hours of work by dozens of members of the Tiki Community. Nearly 50 developers contributed more than 1,500 code changes for this release.

In addition to countless tweaks and updates, Tiki 6 includes several new, key features:

• Extensive re-work and improvements to the Tiki blog, comments, spreadsheets and tracker features
• Batch functions (via cron jobs)
• Introduction of re-Captcha
• Expanded support of ccLite community currencies
• Integration with social networks such as Facebook
• Improved WYSIWYG support

Tiki 6 has been designated as the Long Term Support (LTS) version, replacing Tiki 3 LTS. Tiki 3 will reach end of life when Tiki 7.1 will be released (planned for April 2011). See the Project Roadmap for details.

To download Tiki, see https://tiki.org/download. Refer to the Tiki 6 release notes for additional information.

Earlier this week, the CMSMS Development team released another milestone version of CMS Made Simple. CMS Made Simple 1.9 is a feature version with focus on flexibility and maintaining ease of use.

Significant additions and improvements in CMSMS 1.9 include: