Content Management

Maidenhead, UK, 13th August 2009 – SDL Tridion, leader in Web Content Management (WCM) and part of SDL, leader in Global Information Management (GIM), today announces that Butlins’ new website has resulted in significant net benefits, notably a 21% increase in web traffic.  Working with Building Blocks to implement SDL Tridion’s content management platform, combined with a site re-design, has provided Butlins with a significantly more robust online environment.  Butlins can now take new, competitive offers to market quicker, increase the frequency of such offers, handle the subsequent spike in online traffic, and ultimately convert more sales.

Chris Cagle asked me to talk about his newly launched GetSimple CMS which is geared toward small-business use. I suppose I must be a sucker in talking and promoting new CMS projects as I get a lot of these type of requests. I know there are folks from the enterprise content management perspective that wish I wouldn't because a brand spanking new CMS isn't something they would ever consider. However, there is always a place for these niche applications.

I was just thinking the other day how nice it would be to find a list of places for free stock images that could be used to spice up things at my sites. Then comes along this article at Mashable, 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog. I love it when things work out this way.

After five years of development, the MODx CMS has finally went to version 1.0. Late last week, the project leaders for MODx made the following announcement:

To say we're excited about this release would be a bit of an understatement. Far, far more than just a new Manager theme and some bugfixes here and there, Evolution 1.0.0 represents a ton of work by a lot of people. Our classic code base is no where close to outdated or obsolete, on the contrary it just took a huge leap forward and sets the stage for continuing development and improvements to our classic code base.

Boatloads of bugfixes and feature requests aside, our 1.0 release focuses on a few key areas. The international communities deserve a huge "thank you" for all their hard work in getting their languages updated, too

MODx Evolution is actually one of two branches of development for the CMS. The release based on legacy code-MODx Evolution-has existed since 2004. There is also a completely rewritten MODx Revolution release that will occur in late 2009. In fact the release candidate for MODx Revolution is due later this summer.

Some of the new features and changes in MODX 1.0 Evolution include:

• Many updates to Manager and Installer language translations
• Now handles RSS, Word, Excel, XML, HTML, CSS, JS, PDF and plain documents with custom icons in the Site Tree
• Remove legacy code no longer needed
  

The last significant version of MiaCMS was released this week. As I wrote several weeks ago, except for bug fixes and security updates, MiaCMS 4.9 will be the last version to be released by the developers. The MiaCMS core developers will now begin focusing all new development efforts on the Aliro platform.

I think the MiaCMS developers' attention toward the Aliro platform is a good strategic move. The developers likely recognized that the space for a content management system with Mambo roots was a little crowded. When I reviewed MiaCMS last year, I couldn't help but think it was going to be an uphill battle for MiaCMS.

This week, Matt Jacobs announced the availability of Movable Type 4.3. Jacobs calls Movable Type 4.3 "snappy" and states that this release "makes composing, publishing, and searching in Movable Type easier than ever".

Version 4.3 of this social publishing platform includes the following new features and improvements:

• Smarter Search and Pagination - Several new ways to drill down your search (author, category and date), which lays the groundwork for the ability to paginate your index and archives. The ability to paginate comments, which will dramatically improve publish times on prolific comment threads.
• Entry Asset Manager - Movable Type has been improved by the way it handles assets like photos, which means it's much easier to make slideshows and editing entries that use assets.
• Summary Object Framework - This is Movable Type's first step in dramatically improving performance for larger installations.
  

The folks over at Geeklog have announced that their blogging application now supports PostgreSQL. Geeklog's move is similar to other open source projects that have recently diversified their support for more additional database management systems.

One would think it should not be so difficult to find information about the upcoming SharePoint 2010 and the features it will include. I have been especially interested in SharePoint and its inclusion of CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). CMIS is an interoperability specification that will allow for compliant clients (such as Joomla! and Drupal) and repositories (such as SharePoint and Alfresco) to interoperate and share content across information silos. For the past few months, I've been keeping my eyes and ears open for any details on the status of Microsoft Sharepoint incorporating CMIS. Sadly, there is little information to be found.

Although Microsoft announced their support for CMIS in September 2008, there has been little word from Microsoft on when we'll see CMIS available for SharePoint users and whether CMIS will be incorporated into SharePoint 2010. Arbindo Chattopadhyay on his MSDN blog recently discussed the benefits of CMIS, but he was very tight lipped whether we'll be seeing CMIS in SharePoint 2010. In fact he doesn't think we'll be hearing much about CMIS in SharePoint until CMIS is out of draft form.

Sometimes it only takes the right soundtrack for a tutorial on a Web content management system to get your attention. This six and a half minute tutorial on how to set up a website with Php-Fusion is one of them.

The Blog Herald has posted an interesting piece on an unannounced change in WordPress 2.8. Basically, Wordpress no longer notifies other servers of your updated articles at the same time you post those articles.