Content Management

The Nucleus CMS core development team has released Nucleus CMS v3.5. Although Nucleus CMS contains a lot of bug fixes, it's the new features that will catch your attention.

Highlights of the new features in this release include two new plugins in the core system:

Barb Mosher has written a great summary at CMS Wire on Google's new Sites API which allows content owners to move content in and out Google Sites. As Mosher points out, this new API and some additional tools will allow content owners to "pull stuff out of SharePoint and place it into Google Sites" which is sure to bring "real heat between Redmond and Mountain View" in their quest for customers.

Until now, content and data inside Google Sites stayed inside Google Sites. And there was no easy way to migrate additional content and data into it. With the introduction of the Google Sites Data API, that has changed.

The API support almost all of the functionality currently available within Google Sites including:

• Retrieve, create, modify, and delete pages and content.
• Upload/download attachments.
• Review the revision history across a site.
• Display recent user activity.

Which brings us to the point. With these new capabilities, you can now not only move data out of Google Sites, but you can move data into Google Sites and possibly out of other similar applications, like SharePoint.

Whether Google Sites and the new API will be a threat to Microsoft and SharePoint is questionable. But, once again I think these type of events emphasize that those content management systems that get the most attention from us these days are those applications that open up and work with other third party applications.

There is a reason why such topics as CMIS, open source, and API are in the spotlight with folks interested in content management. No one really wants to be stuck with a vendor that doesn't play well with others. It just strategically isn't a good idea to have your content controlled by a single vendor, so why do it? I suppose I'm rhetorically asking that question to both customers and vendors. 

Yes, it's that time of year again. Packt Publishing recently announced the five finalists in each of the categories of its 2009 Open Source CMS Award. The Voting for the winners in each of the five categories ends on October 30, 2009.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges with the top three CMS and overall winners in each category to be announced on November 9, 2009.

This year, I will be participating as a judge for the Overall Open Source CMS Award. I have the honor of sharing the judging panel with John Resig of jQuery fame, Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, and Karen Coombs from Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries. I'm especially excited to be working with Deane Barker, a fellow Sioux Falls resident. Over the years, Deane and I have had some great discussions on content management systems. It will be interesting to find out whether we will be agreeing with each other or not on which CMS should be considered the top CMS for the Overall category.

Previous winners in the Overall category have included Drupal (2007, 2008) and  Joomla! (2006) as the overall winner. Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall category in 2009 as Packt Publishing apparently wanted to prevent the Overall category of being dominated by past winners. The good news is that both Drupal and Joomla are eligible to compete in the new Hall of Fame category and are also finalists in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category.

During the past few weeks, I have been quietly updating CMS Report's CMS Focus page. CMS Focus is a list of the top 30 Web applications representing what I see as the Web applications of today and tomorrow which interest me the most. In a world where niche CMS news sites try to cover it all for their readers, I feel one of the strengths of CMSReport.com is limiting our focus on a certain number of CMS. The CMS on this list are applications I recommend site owners first look at before moving into the deeper waters of content management and social software.

Wordpress users have been encouraged to update to to the latest version of Wordpress, currently at 2.8.4. It appears there is a nasty worm going around attacking Wordpress sites.

Several weeks ago, I mentioned the Wordpress for BlackBerry client which allows you to submit articles to your WordPress blog remotely. Recently, CMS Report, was pointed to a Joomla! client for the iPhone, the J Admin Mobile! application.

Similar to Wordpress for BlackBerry, J Admin Mobile! (JAM!) allows you to manage many of the core features of your Joomla! 1.5 site remotely. We can only conclude that the smarter and more Web capable our phones become the more established this trend of moving the CMS client over to mobile devices will become.

JAM! 1.4.0 was recently submitted to the Apple App store with the developers expecting to see the updated version available soon. Some of the new features in JAM! 1.4.0 include:

• Inserting images into articles
• Adding users
• Ability to change the user type (Registered, Author, etc)
  

Although you wouldn't expect an application with the version number of 2.3.1.5 to contain anything but bug fixes, in the world of mojoPortal almost every release contains new features for the CMS. mojoPortal 2.3.1.5 is no different with a number of changes centered around rich text editors (WYSIWYG). TinyMCE has replaced FCKeditor as mojoPortal's primary text editor.

TinyMCE Editor Rises To The Top

For a long time now the FCKeditor has been the best editor available out of the box in mojoPortal. It was the only one with the ability to browse and upload images and files, it was the only one with integration for our Content Template System and Content Style System, and it was the only one with a spelling checker. Not anymore! I had not upgraded the Tiny MCE editor in a long time, I had tried to once and it broke and I was busy so I reverted to the working version. But recently we've been having some issues with FCKeditor so I decided to give the Tiny MCE upgrade another try.

Joe Audette, mojoPortal developer, writes that FCKeditor fans shouldn't feel like they're being left behind. mojoPortal also supports the CKEditor. The makers of FCKeditor realizing that the code base for their RTE was more than six years old and needing improvements began CKEditor as its replacement. CKEditor focuses on features such as accessibility and performance improvements that weren't quite there for FCKeditor.

Besides changes for TinyMCE and CKEditor, mojoPortal 2.3.1.5 also includes these enhancements:

• New Permissions Tab in site settings
• NeatUpload 1.3.18 upgrade
• The DOCTYPE changed to Html 5 for included skins
• The default 90 days allowed to comment on a new post post can be changed
• Removed Site Office
• New translations include Hebrew and Polish. The German translation has been updated.
  

Although Plone 3.3 is a minor release in the Plone 3 series, it does offer several refinements. Highlights of the 3.3 release include the ability to localize navigation, tabs, sitemaps and searches within folders. According to an announcement by Steve McMahon "this makes it much easier to develop autonomous sub-sites within a Plone site". The new Lineage add-on provides management facilities to exploit the new feature.

Some additional new features and refinements include:

Kentico CMS 4.1 for ASP.Net was recently released. Kentico, the software vendor, announced that this version of the CMS contains a new enterprise-class search engine and several usability improvements.

The new search engine is based on the Lucene.NET search engine which is already known to provide excellent performance and search results. The new Smart Engine can be used side-by-side with existing SQL-based search engine. The main features of Kentico's search engine includes: