Content Management

A new version of dotCMS 1.6.5 has been released.  This new version of dotCMS includes nearly 300 improvements and fixes.  Highlights include:

For the second straight year, Packt Publishing has announced Drupal as the recipient of its Overall Open Source CMS Award.  Drupal was also the winner this year in the award category for Best PHP Open Source CMS.

Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.

Joomla! also placed second in the Overall category followed by DotNetNuke for third position.

SilverStripe was announced as the winner of Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.

SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project receive $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up.

Packt Publishing notes that SilverStripe's core team is heavily involved in not only their product but also with SilverStripe's users.

It received universal approval from the judges for its features and was praised as an excellent option for companies who want a powerful open source website that is professionally created and well supported. The judges were complimentary about SilverStripe’s scalability, use of Ajax, its healthy community and the impressive levels of input on the forums from its developers.

I had the honor of being one of the judges on the panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.  My vote also went for SilverStripe followed by ImpressCMS for second place and CMS Made Simple for third place.  Since I wasn't sure how the other judges on the panel were going to vote, I'm always a little nervous of being too far off from the consensus.  Needless to say, I feel validated.  In a few days, I'll throw my notes online for how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category.

Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing's 2008 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS.

The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.

Packt Publishing announced the winner of their 2008 Best Open Source Other CMS Award and it is Plone.

Packt is delighted to exclusively reveal the first category winner of the 2008 Open Source CMS Award as Plone. Run[ning] on the Zope application server, Plone wins the Best Other Open Source CMS Award and receives $2,000. Also recognized by the judges were dotCMS and DotNetNuke who finished second and third respectively, both picking up $500.

CMS Critic posted a good interview of Drupal Founder, Dries Buytaert.  During the past couple months, Dries and a few other open source project leaders have graciously offered to me their time for an interview.  Unfortunately, I've been so busy that I've delayed the interviews until I have the time to do it right. 

We were very pleased to have a chance to interview Dries Buytaert, founder of the legendary Drupal content management system. He shares his thoughts on its success, future and how it came to be in this intriguing and indepth discussion. We had so many questions, that we are only publishing part one while he works on the second half.

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There is a new version of mojoPortal that has been released, version 2.2.7.6.  Besides bug fixes, there are some new features contained in this release, including:

• a new Content Rating system
• Feed Manager improvements
• a new option in Site Statistics to show a graph of new site member registrations

To download mojoPortal, check out their download page.

Drupal 6.5 and Drupal 5.11 were released yesterday.  These new versions of Drupal are maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities.  If you take a look at the release notes, you'll find that Drupal's core developers and security teams have been hard at work improving this open source content management system.  With all the hard work done for you, it only makes sense to upgrade your Drupal site today (yes, we're running Drupal 6.5).

Details and download links can be found at Drupal.org.  

Good news for sites that make a little money by allowing advertising on their pages.  Though, personally I've seen a drop in online ad revenue despite not doing too bad with the number of visitors I'm getting.

Despite an economic turndown, online advertising--and search in particular--is managing to keep its market intact, according to reports on Tuesday by an industry trade group and Wall Street analyst. 

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I began running this website on Drupal 6 shortly after the official release.  Before then, I periodically installed development versions of Drupal 6 on the production server during the weekends so others could judge the progress that was being made.  During this period, I made the claim that I didn't really need any contributed modules to run my site on Drupal 6.

As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity.

It could have been a bold statement that I made at the beginning of the year.  Although Drupal 6 interest has finally overtaken Drupal 5, there still are a number of popular modules still under the designation of release candidate, beta, and even alpha.  My site has shown that you don't have to always wait for contributed modules to upgrade a site to the latest version of Drupal.  However, my statement was a lie. By the time Earl Miles released Views 2.0 Beta 1, I found I didn't want to live without my essential modules for very long.

The following are a list of contributed Drupal modules that I wouldn't want to do without here at CMSReport.com.  I am neither the first word nor the last word of which modules you should be running for your Drupal site.  In fact, by coincidence, Kathleen Murtagh has just written a similar list of contributed modules that should be considered.  Some of the modules on my list are still going through their development phase and you'll have to assess the risk of using the modules on your own sites.  Personally, I like to take the risk for my hobby sites such as these, but I am more cautious when using development code for sites managed at my day job.  Whichever modules you choose, be sure to thank the developers that have made your site possible. 

Contributed modules used at CMSReport.com

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