Content Management

This week, Joomla! 1.7 was officially released to the public. New features in this new version of the popular open source content management system include:

Hippo is pleased to announce its ongoing commitment to a passionate and loyal developer community by focusing almost the entirety of its new release of Hippo CMS Version 7.6 on new developer and architect focused features. Hippo's Java Web Content Management system is setting new standards for how web content can be managed and delivered.

"Nesta, Wordpress and Drupal produce great blogs. However, we are making new-media newspapers, next-gen magazines, and hyperlocal, pulse-finding micro streams. We can’t save journalism without demanding more from our CMS."

-Erik Hinton, "The Twilight of the CMS", TPM, July 11, 2011.

We're excited to announce the immediate availability of Escher CMS 0.9.2. This release is the culmination of sixth months of development, and it significantly enhances Escher CMS with several new features and capabilities.

Here are the highlights:

MotoCMS, one of the leading Flash CMS and Flash CMS templates providers, announced today  the release of Moto CMS New Version 1.5. With each release the system becomes more advanced and user-friendly. The new release 1.5 significantly improves the system functionality, and also adds some innovations that have no analogs on the market.

The existing Moto CMS users may easily update their control panels to the higher version.

Well, what's new in this major release? Let's find out...

• An ability to stretch websites has been added (the option is available for Flash templates that support this function).
• HTML Widget has been added (the innovation that allows you to paste HTML code over any page of your Flash website).
• An ability to embed YouTube videos in the Media Library and organize them into video galleries has been added.
  

As expected, this week the Drupal development team released Drupal 7.3 and Drupal 7.4. 

Drupal 7.3, a maintenance release which fixes security vulnerabilities is now available for download.

Drupal 7.4 also fixes other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Jahia, provider of Java based open source CMS solutions, today announced that the United Nations Population Fund  (UNFPA) has selected Jahia CMS and partner Quoin to provide comprehensive support for UNFPA's international websites. The following is an interview with Brad Kain, Quoin co-founder and President.

Background Information: UNFPA is the United Nations Population Fund, an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programs to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect. The three core areas of their work - reproductive health, gender equality and population and development strategies - are inextricably related. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality, migration and more, influence every aspect of human, social and economic development. Reproductive health and women's empowerment powerfully affect, and are affected by, population trends. For each core area, UNFPA created large databases.

The Project

Interviewer: Hi Brad. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us to discuss your latest win of the UNFPA content management project with Jahia CMS.  Tell us about the UNFPA website project.

Brad Kain: UNFPA is a leader in digital media within the UN, offices throughout the world with a global website, 7 regional portals and over 100 country websites.

Interviewer: So what does the integration project look like? How does this fit with Jahia’s mission and what can these sites achieve with assistance from Jahia CMS?

Brad Kain: Quoin recently won a three-year contract with the United Nations Population Fund (www.unfpa.org) to provide Jahia CMS support and site development. We will work with this global mission-driven client to redesign the organization, regional, and country web sites. Our onshore/offshore team is looking forward to providing rapid and effective development support as the UNFPA focuses on the use of social media to engage visitors.

Accrisoft. A few months ago, I knew little about Accrisoft or their flagship product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS. In early May, CMS Report met with the company for the first time and it was a great opportunity for me to get to know them better. Accrisoft is a company that anybody who is somebody in the content management business definitely needs to get to know better.

It's not that often I become quickly enthralled with a company and their products. Yet, for the past couple months I can't help but think of the first demo I saw of Accrisoft's CMS. It wasn't just the genius simplicity of their blue/green user interface for users and developers that I'm obsessing about either. It is the fact that Accrisoft convinced me it's not only users that need to rethink how websites are managed, but also the many site owners and developers that incorrectly think they don't need a company like Accrisoft.

Accrisoft is a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) Web applications and they definitely made a big splash at last Spring's 2011 CMS Expo. During the expo, I was able to meet up with Accrisoft's CEO, Jeff Kline, as well as their chief technology officer, Mark Zeitler. It wasn't just their product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS, that won me over that day but also their enthusiasm and  technical vision of what the future holds for web content management.

If Accrisoft isn't on your radar it is time to put it there. For the last five years I've focused most of my attention on CMSs that individuals and organizations are more likely to manage and host themselves. Quite frankly, a portion of my DNA is old-school IT and I've stubbornly been unyielding to any notion of running a content management system in the cloud. I've always wanted to maintain as much control as I could on the servers that host my CMS. Control of your IT assets is a good thing, isn't it? The talk of the cloud is just slick marketing talk, isn't it? Accrisoft, as well as Acquia, have persuaded me to believe that it makes perfect business and technical sense to utilize SaaS CMS.

LOS ANGELES, CA – Liferay, provider of the world’s leading enterprise-class open source portal, today announced its plans to further improve ease of integration with third-party ECM document repositories via full CMIS compatibility in its upcoming release of Liferay Portal EE 6.1.

CMIS is an industry standard that unifies ECM and DM repositories and enables easy integration for a wide range of repository types. Liferay introduced CMIS compatibility in Liferay Portal EE 6.0 to its out-of-the-box Document Library. Full compatibility in 6.1 EE will allow users to pull in data from multiple CMIS-compatible data repositories, including vendor-specific products like SharePoint and Documentum.

Lots of changes are starting to take place here at CMS Report. We're now running on a new version of the Drupal content management system!

Over the weekend, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade CMSReport.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. It's hard for me to believe that it has been almost half a year since Drupal 7 was released. This was a frustrating upgrade for me as I've traditionally upgraded CMS Report shortly after any new release of Drupal is out. In fact, I have sometimes upgraded a site before the release is official. As a content management system, my five-year hate-love relationship with Drupal is still going on strong.

Despite the usual learning curve associated with a major Drupal upgrade, I ran into two additional problems I've never had to face with this site. First, the CMSReport.com of today is a much more complex site to run, maintain, and upgrade then it was in 2008. With the number of readers and sponsors this site now sees, I just don't have the luxury of blowing up the site and say "oh well" lets start again. Secondly, the selection of premium or contributed themes available for Drupal 7 just plain sucks (there, I said it). I must have spent half of my upgrade time just searching for and then tweaking a Drupal 7 theme. People often complain about the lag time between a Drupal release and the availability of third-party modules. In my opinion, it is the lack of theme development going on with Drupal that is the real problem with Drupal upgrades.