Content Management

A few months ago, CMS Australian enthusiast Said Salameh posted this excellent breakdown comparing the number of steps required to complete simple tasks between eight leading open source content management systems. He illustrates how simple things like editing a page or adding an article can take ten steps or more – far more than necessary. His post spawned a discussion on the Web Content Management group on LinkedIn drawing out frustrations from many in the industry about the complexity of content management systems – particularly open source systems.

Early this morning, I was one of two guests on the eZ Publish Show. The purpose of the episode was to discuss the future of content management system. I was joined by host Ivo Lukač of Netgen, and fellow guest Apoorv Durga from Real Story Group.

Magnolia International announced today the release of Magnolia CMS 5.0, the new generation of its open Java content management system (CMS). Magnolia 5 features a mobile-inspired, HTML5 user interface that is intended to be as easy to use on the desktop as it is on a smartphone. With Magnolia 5, full CMS functionality if provided for both desktop and tablet computers.

On my "to-do list" is a mention of the availability of my In the Spotlight segment online as well as the rest of the May 2013 CMS-Connected show. One of the nice things about participating on this show with hosts Tyler Pyburn and Scott Liewehr is the chance to get to spread my wings to new CMS territory. Specific to this show, I had the opportunity to review Bridgeline Digital's iAPPS Product Suite for the very first time. Once I had a chance to get a demo and do some homework, I found I was quite impressed with this content management platform.

Those of you who have been in the content management industry a while will remember the CMS Watch report. I’m not sure when I first heard of it, but I think it was at an AIIM conference in 2005. I remember thinking that if we could just get Agility into that report, we would have it made. Looking back, it’s amazing to see how many of the systems that ranked well in 2005 are either gone or no longer relevant.

A few years later, I saw an article on CMS Wire that Ektron had made it into the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I realized that it was going to be hard to complete with this level of recognition, no matter how superior Agility is.

Today, developers announced the availability of Movable Type 5.2.6 and 5.15. The Movable Type 5.2.6 release offers fixes for bugs found after the release of version 5.2.3 and features four brand new functions. At the same time, Movable Type 5.15 also have been released. This update also includes fixes for bugs found in Movable Type EZ versions 5.2.4 and 5.2.5.

The new features that can be found in Movable Type 5.2.6 include:

Elxis 4.1 "Poseidon" was published and is available for download from Elxis.org web site. The most important about Elxis 4.1 is that, for the first time, provides a friendly to mobile phones and tablets version of the web site.

If a handheld device is detected Elxis generates a mobile version of the requested page instead of the standard one for desktop computers. Another cool addition on the 4.1 release is the CSS and Javascript minifier. Elxis unifies and compresses CSS and JS files generating pages that loads faster, consuming less bandwidth, and having a smaller HTML head section.

Sometimes timing is everything and some would argue that I should have written this story weeks ago. Earlier this month, Rivet Logic announced the launch of Crafter Software Corporation, which offers commercial support and licenses for the Crafter CMS open source project (previously known as Crafter Rivet). I didn't jump on the story and CMS Report is probably one of the few CMS news sites that didn't talk about the Crafter Rivet spin off into Crafter Software. The honest truth, I just didn't want to rehash the press release on the day the announcement was made without offering some additional perspective of my own.

Acquia announced significant growth in revenue and bookings as the company’s open source solutions are becoming more widely adopted. Acquia’s year-over-year revenue grew by 108 percent in 2012. According to the Boston Business Journal, this puts Acquia's revenue for 2012 at $45.3 million. Momentum continued in the first quarter of 2013, as Acquia’s bookings increased 52 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012 and more than 15 percent over the quarter prior.

Given our open source roots as well as our broad definition of a CMS, we thought this would be a good time to revisit Moodle by mentioning that Moodle 2.5 was released last week. This is the first release under their new May/November release schedule. With version 2.5, the Moodle community has managed to address 705 issues through code contributions from 112 developers.

Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites that we like to call a learning content management system (LCMS or LMS). Moodle 2.5 includes three significant features: