Web design company pingVision won six Telly Awards for this 57 second spot answering the question, "What is Drupal?". The Telly Awards honor the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions, and work created for the Web. This is the 30th year for the Telly Awards.
During the past couple months I've had a number of email exchanges from Chris and Allen regarding their PHP based CMS, ocPortal. Their company recently relaunched ocPortal under an open source license in hopes of growing their user base. Both gentleman are very enthusiastic about ocPortal and have a strong desire to see more community involvement with their CMS.
In one of those emails, Chris had something to say about ocPortal's move to open source.
I've been following you on Twitter for a while and it was good to see you commenting on my blog post recently. I'd like to see if we can work with you to get some more ocPortal coverage on CMS report - we've got a lot to say and offer, and everyone who comments on our product gives really glowing reviews. I really want to get our project out of the obscurity it's always suffered; it's always a downer to read about things other groups do if we've done it already and not had news of it leave our community. From my personal perspective I feel we should really be up with the most popular CMS's, as we are ahead of them in about every category except community size. We started out commercial but are now OSS - I think in our initial years people weren't motivated to advocate us much because of that.
In a few other emails from Chris, he also discussed some of the frustrations with getting open source ocPortal some attention while the IT media is often focused on the bigger open source projects. How does a small project compete against the bigger CMS projects such as Drupal, Joomla!, and Wordpress? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know ocPortal deserves a chance.
In the coming months we'll focus on ocPortal for some of our stories. The next time our CMS Focus page gets a refresh, you can expect ocPortal to be in our Top 30 list. That also means you can expect a CMS or two that we're less enthusiastic about off the list.
I had to reach a month back to find an email from Robert discussing e-Spirit's content management system, FirstSpirit. I actually haven't had time to respond to his email asking me how best to introduce his product to me and CMS Report. I plan on emailing Robert in a couple days (let's not forget I'm on a tech break). Until then here are the talking points for FirstSpirit.
Barrie North has a problem. He can't stop talking about his favorite content management system, Joomla!. So last year, he decided to write his own Joomla book titled appropriately, Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide. The problem is that people like North are never willing to let that be enough. As Joomla! 1.5 continues to evolve since its initial release so too has North's offerings. Two weeks ago North's publisher, Prentice Hall, sent me a second edition of Joomla! 1.5 as well a new video from their LiveLessons series, Fundamentals of Joomla!. Unlike last year, I decided to actually review the book as well as watch the video.
Let me first say, I'm a reluctant book reviewer. There is nothing that weighs on a person's busy day than having publishers send me a steady stream of content management related books for review. Eventually, those technical books begin stacking up on my desk and secretly I know half of those books aren't worth my time or your money. Luckily for all of us, North's Joomla 1.5 book and Fundamentals of Joomla! video are well worth the purchase. I can't help but give two thumbs up to both North's updated Joomla! 1.5 book and new video.
Two providers of integrated solutions: ocPortal, an open-source Content Management System, and Bitnami, which makes "stacks" for easy installation of web applications, have partnered to release a "stack" for ocPortal 4.1.10. Jointly developed/tested by both companies, users of almost any background can now easily download and run ocPortal on the "big three" operating systems, Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Although I'm not a big BlackBerry fan, I can't help but think having the Open Source Wordpress for BlackBerry application on the device would be pretty cool. This application for writing, managing, and editing your blog works whether your blog is found at Wordpress.com or self-hosted.
BlackBerry operating system OS requirements are OS 4.2.1 or newer. In other words, Wordpress for BlackBerry should work on any of the newer BlackBerry smartphones including the 8700, Pearl, Curve, Bold, and Storm.
The BlackBerry application is currently in beta.
There is a real fear out there. A fear involving companies commercially supporting open source software and neglecting the "free" community version of their software. Fortunately for us, when looking for proof of this fear Alfresco is in the wrong direction to look. Alfresco Community Edition 3.2 brings so many new capabilities and improvements to the table that you can almost see the enterprise content management landscape brighten up.
A couple days ago, Acquia moved Acquia Search out of beta and made it available commercially available through their Acquia Network service. Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The technology supporting Acquia Search is based on the the Open Source Lucene and Solr distributions from the Apache project. While a free search module is already available in Drupal, as well as Acquia Drupal, Acquia Search is significantly different and geared toward the enterprise. Smaller but high traffic websites would also benefit from Acquia Search.
CMS Report has been beta testing Acquia Search for the past four months and we've had nothing but a positive experience with the service. In fact I feel as a beta tester I somehow didn't do my job since I didn't have any issues to report to Acquia. However, Acquia did acquire various usage statistics, email exchanges, and surveys from us that they still benefited from CMSReport.com's participation in the beta program. Since I know only enough about Drupal to be dangerous, if I can't break it then Acquia must be on the right track with this product.
If you've visited CMS Report lately, you likely noticed that we're sporting a new look and feel. Over the years, I've used various Drupal themes and many of those themes were made available for free at Drupal.org. For the past couple years, I used RoopleTheme's LiteJazz. LiteJazz spoiled me. The theme was so well designed that I don't recall having to do the usual hacks to the templates or CSS styles to make it a good fit for CMSReport.com. Thanks RoopleTheme!
Today, I'm using the Extreme Updates. The free theme is designed by Template World and ported to Drupal by 3rdWorld. In my opinion, the Extreme Updates theme has a few flaws in its design that I'm needing to fix. You'll have to be patient with me because I'm not much of a designer. Luckily, the theme utilizes the impressive Genesis package, a start theme for Drupal 6. This is the very first time I've used a Genesis theme but I'm just as impressed with Genesis as I was when I first used Zen, another starter theme for Drupal.
This time around when considering a new theme, I also did something I've never done before. I considered spending money for a theme. In the past, CMSReport.com has never generated the revenue I needed to justify hiring a Drupal service company to design a theme for my site. However, something interesting has happened in the Drupal community, a number of design companies have started to design and sell themes geared toward the smaller Drupal sites like mine.
The availability of quality themes by such companies as community favorite TopNotchThemes shows just how much the Drupal ecosystem has matured over the years. Doesn't it seem just like yesterday when the biggest complaint about Drupal was that there were no good themes available? The future for Drupal theme development looks very bright. My understanding is that there are a number of changes in Drupal 7 that will make the web designers very happy. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see in 2010 the quantity of available Drupal themes reach toward the same numbers that we've seen for Wordpress and Joomla!.
Changing to a new theme also marks the beginning of my desire to move CMSReport.com into some new directions. I want this site to have a more professional and community feel to it. I'm personally tired of reading mostly my own posts here and I think it's time to get a lot more author's involved. These changes will be progressive over the coming months, but won't be settled until the arrival of Drupal 7. As has been since Drupal 4.6, I've always geared the features in my sites to allow for a quick upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. Similar to the past, you just might see this site running a beta or release candidate of Drupal 7 by the end of the year.