June 2009

Radiant 0.8.0 Released

Radiant 0.8.0 was released. While not that exciting of a release, at least it gives me something to talk about with regards to the Radiant CMS.

Radiant 0.8.0 “Asterism” features a brand new and more compliant caching mechanism based on Rack::Cache, and numerous bugfixes and small enhancements. Also included are:

  • An extensive integration suite using Cucumber and Webrat
  • Rails 2.3.2 (previously 2.1.2)
  • Highline 1.5.1
  • Haml 2.0.9

Additional development news can be found about Radiant CMS on their blog.

Quoting IT: Content management systems and hype

"We frequently counsel customers not to default to SharePoint (or Google, Oracle, IBM, et. al.) just because there's a lot of awareness of that package in the marketplace. Awareness is a marketing concept that cannot convey how a product will fit for you, architecturally, functionally, and financially."

-Tony Byrne, Analyst, CMS Watch, "Is Drupal Over-hyped?", June 11, 2009.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and the Enterprise

Perhaps Mozilla is finally seeing the light. There is a story circulating around that Mozilla will be providing better tools to deploy and manage Firefox within the enterprise. According to a PC World article that sources Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla Corp:

Through the program, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customizations for the browser -- such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals, he said.

University lecture on Drupal

Kieran Lal, Acquia, recently had the opportunity to give a presentation on Drupal in front of an information system's course at San Francisco State College. It's a good video for anyone that wants to learn everything they possibly can about Drupal and given only one hour to do so. I would have loved to seen more questions and answers on the video as Kieran is one of those people that responds very well when people present him with good questions and good ideas.

After the Deadline: Contextual Spell Checking

Logo for After the DeadlineRaphael Mudge sent us an email on his latest project, After the Deadline.

I'm a computer scientist working to fill a gap in current CMS feature sets.  It isn't a new social or wireless feature.  I'm working to bring spelling, style, and grammar checking to web applications.  The technology is available for WordPress and the Open Source TinyMCE editor.

After the Deadline is an exciting plugin that adds a much needed feature often missing in most CMS rich text editors. After the Deadline currently supports plugins for TinyMCE and Wordpress. Some additional bullet points behind the plugin include: 

  • Corrects spelling with 90% accuracy
  • Checks 1,500 words for misuse
  • Finds grammar errors
  • Improves writing style
  • All plugins are licensed under the LGPL

AAMC's MedEdPORTAL running on CoreMedia CMS

CoreMedia LogoCoreMedia announced today that the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has launched a sophisticated interactive content portal powered by CoreMedia’s CMS that harnesses the power of social media. The name of AAMC's new site is MedEdPortal.

“AAMC’s desire to create an interactive medical community that facilitates the exchange of educational content is a project that CoreMedia was excited about and well suited to enable,” said René Hermes, VP Marketing of CoreMedia. “The combination of our market leading CMS and extensible social software features made CoreMedia the obvious choice for AAMC.”

AAMC’s MedEdPORTAL is a free online peer-reviewed publication service provided in partnership with the American Dental Education Association (ADEA). MedEdPORTAL was designed to promote educational collaboration by facilitating the open exchange of peer-reviewed teaching resources such as tutorials, virtual patients, simulation cases, lab guides, videos, podcasts, and assessment tools. While MedEdPORTAL's primary audience includes medical professionals, health educators and learners around the globe, it is also freely accessible to the general public.