There are reasons why I have been mentioning SilverStripe quite a bit here at CMS Report. In case you haven't noticed, the New Zealand based company has been making a lot of effort this year to expand their global reach.  Recently, SilverStripe put Sigurd Magnusson, their Sales and Marketing Director, on a sort of world tour to let everyone know more about the open source SilverStripe CMS. This week the latest news from the company is the launch of their Global Partner Program.

SilverStripe has today significantly expanded its global reach. From today, its corporate headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand, is complemented by partnerships with established companies in 8 locations throughout the US, UK, Europe, and Australia.

The Partner Program gives customers access to professional SilverStripe skills and knowledge across the globe. Today's milestone will allow businesses around the world to get local professional SilverStripe support and services. Additionally, the Partner Program will accelerate market adoption and awareness of SilverStripe globally.

Customers across the world can now visit https://www.silverstripe.com/partners/ to find a local SilverStripe partner who can help implement their SilverStripe solution.

For a couple weeks, I've been aware that SilverStripe was about to announce the launch of their partner program. The goal of the partner program is to help expand support and enthusiasm for the SilverStripe CMS. I was asked to say something nice about the CMS in their press release announcing the partner program.

Geeklog, an open source blogging application, just went into its first beta. This release incorporates some of the work done in projects implemented during the 2008 Google Summer of Code.

New features and improvement you can expect in Geeklog 1.6.0 Beta 1 include:

There has been a huge transformation this year at WhiteHouse.gov. Blogs, RSS feeds, and connections to social networking sites are being fully utilized at the President's website. Those of us that have worked in information technology positions for the federal government have experienced first hand just how slow bureaucracies can be in taking advantage of newer technologies. From my perspective, it is almost surreal to see references to Web 2.0 from a website for an office that once didn't allow the President of the United States to send emails or even use a smart phone.

Lots of news this week regarding the open source SilverStripe CMS.  It is extremely unusual for CMS Report to post something on SilverStripe as well as something on comment spam twice in one week.  Yet, my two favorite companies, Silverstripe Ltd and Mollom, are going to have me do just that because of today's announcement that they've partnered together to help SilverStripe site owners block comment spam on their sites.

I'm a big fan of Elgg, a free and open source social software that allows you to build your own social networks.  So it is with great surprise to me that I haven't really covered a lot of news about Elgg here at CMSReport.com.  Take a look at a recent post by Dave Tosh for some examples of the latest Elgg powered sites on the Web.  If that's not enough for you to judge how well Elgg can run social media sites...than Dave has more examples of Elgg sites to show you.

This month marks a new milestone for CMS Report, the blog, news, and aggregated website turned three years old.  When I wrote the first post, I wasn't quite sure where I wanted to take the site, but I knew my enthusiasm for Web content management systems would get me wherever I needed to go.  Three years later, CMSReport.com has seen over 1,700 original articles posted at the site.  Pleasing to me, not all of these posts were written by me as I have always appreciated the contributions of content by others here at the site.

Work is currently underway to provide an extension so that SilverStripe can run on Microsoft SQL Server 2008.  The SilverStripe module allowing for this connection to the SQL Server is currently still being developed, but the alpha version according to Sigurd Magnusson does work.

Like a lot of people, I too wonder what will happen to the MySQL, Java, and hardware once Sun is integrated into Oracle.  I have opinions but those opinions alone aren't worth a hill of NetBeans.  Luckily, people like Gavin Clarke know what they're talking about.  Clarke has written an excellent article at The Register titled,  Sun and Oracle: end of a beautiful dream.