Content Management

A few months ago, I posted that I use Akismet in both Drupal and Wordpress. Akismet is a spam filtering service that can be used in content management systems via plug-ins and modules. The Akismet plugin ships with Wordpress 2, but some setup is required.

Just saw a post from Joe Audette that mojoPortal.com has a new look. A Jasmin Savard created the new theme (skin). We agree with Audette, the old theme was showing its age and we wish mojoPortal the best of luck on its new look.

mojoPortal is one of the few non-PHP CMS that we keep on our radar scope. mojoPortal is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac.

Packt Publishing announced the top five content management systems (CMS) nominated for their Open Source Content Management System Award. The top CMS eligible for the award in alphabetical order (not in order by most nominations) are:

Serendipity's own Garvin has some helpful hints. While only those using the blogging application Serendipity will likely only have interest in this post, I thought I would post it up front anyway. There have not been a huge amount of real news from the various blogging applications except for a couple exceptions. Regardless, I like to promote blogging applications as much as I can.

I'm working on an ecommerce site using osCommerce to enable the shopping cart functionality for my client's online store. This is the first time I've used osCommerce so I'm still working on improving my comfort level with the application. osCommerce is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. According to the osCommerce site:

Given that this site, CMS Report, is less than six months old...I am truly amazed with the number of visitors the site receives in a day. While the number of visitors may be small compared to other well known sites, this is the first time I've had a site of my own that has drawn some attention. What a cool experience this has been!

I was flattered to see Drupal blogger, Greg Knaddison, mention CMS Report in one of his posts. Mr. Knaddison could have chosen for discussion so many other Drupal sites but for whatever reason he likes what he sees here. However, as postive as his message was for CMS Report, he also indicated through his post that the current mix of original content and aggregated news isn't for him.

With a tip of the hat to CMSReport. CMS report aggregates lots of content about all CMS, but they also have some original content. I'd prefer more of the latter and less of the former, but that's just me.

While CMS Report still needs to evolve and mature, its purpose was defined from the beginning. The primary mission of the site is to inform readers of the latest happenings in the world of content management systems. Now how that job gets done is another matter and readers have preferences.

Mambo 4.6 is expected to be release soon. While interest in the content management system has diminished over the past year (due to increased interest in Joomla) the open source project and community still remains active. Mambo is by no means a dead project.

With Mambo 4.6 currently available as a release candidate the folks at MamboServer report the following as the most significant new features and enhancements you can expect in the new release:

Last month, it was announced that Drupal will have an installer included in the next major release of Drupal. The installer will not only automate the creation of the required Drupal database tables for you, but should also allow for the creation of "install profiles".

However, this patch is more than just usability: it supports "install profiles" so that anyone can create a distribution out of Drupal core, contributed modules, and themes. This will begin a new era in Drupal's life. Without a doubt, there will be a Drupal for blogger distribution, and a forum distribution is already in the works. Also, new installations of Drupal will only contain database tables for the modules you've actually enabled.

While the announcement of this installer was last month, I really have not had much time to actually check how the installer will actually work. While I would expect the installer to work as easily as installers in other content management systems, I've learned over the years to not count my chickens before they hatch. Today, someone has posted a very good article on what Drupal users can expect in the next major update of their application.

TYPO3 4.0.1 was released to address some bugs as well as make some slight improvements over last April's 4.0 release. The Enterprise content management system contains the following new features and improvements in 4.0.1:

A sleepless night for Earl Miles late last week provided the Drupal community a replacement to his Dashboard module. Earl Miles announced a successor to Dashboard at his site, Angry Donuts. The new module is the Panels module and I expect we'll be seeing it used a lot by Drupal's users, especially newcomers of Drupal and those less inclined to dig into the PHP code.

Dashboard the previous module, allowed Drupal developers an easy way to implement "simple" two-column layouts of content (called nodes in Drupal) that are not sidebars. While you can put blocks about anywhere in Drupal, the core doesn't offer an easy way to put content outside the "main body". While dashboard overcame the "single column" for content obstacle, it required knowledge of PHP to implement.