Content Management

A couple weeks ago, I found on my doorstep Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1.  The book was sent to me by the book's publisher, Packt Publishing, in hopes that I would review the book on the Joomla! content management system here at CMSReport.com.  While I do not promise to review every book or Internet link that comes my way, I always appreciate the opportunity to do such reviews.  In this case, I was eager to review the book since I have lost track of the new features introduced in version 1.5 since Joomla!

A new version of the blogging application Serendipity is now at the beta stage, Serendipity 1.2 Beta 1.  The most significant changes in this new version of Serendipity is the authentication and session scheme for easier plug-in interaction.  Also support for theming/template authoring has been improved using Smartyfield.

The following is a list of some of the new enhancements according to the Serendipity 1.2-beta1 announcement since Serendipity 1.1:

• Templates for Backend (Entry Editor, Master Template) via Smarty
• New session/login system
• Improved database support for SQLite3 and PDO::Postgresql
• IPv6 support

During the past couple years I have recommended to people that they host their Drupal sites on a virtual private server (VPS) instead of a shared hosting plan.   While a large number of people do not have problems running Drupal under shared hosting plans, I have always felt that there are less headaches with using a VPS to host your sites.  For example, with a VPS I don't have to worry whether the shared hosting plan gives me the necessary MySQL privileges needed by Drupal (especially CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES and LOCK TABLES).  From time to time, you also hear from people with "Drupal friendly" shared hosting plans eventually find that their hosting company isn't so friendly toward their Drupal site.  Planet Drupal contributor, Clancy Ratliff, is one of the most recent  examples for having a host provider not really happy she is using Drupal.  So I often ask myself, is shared hosting for Drupal really worth the trouble?

I don't know if shared hosting is worth the trouble but a chain of events have brought me to giving shared hosting another chance for my Drupal sites.  Last month, I pushed my VPS so close to the bleeding edge that it became unstable.  While I was able to get my sites back online, the downtime clearly told me it was time to move my sites to a new server.  While most visitors observed a performance improvement  for my Drupal sites since the server migration, it's only now that I'm letting the cat out of the bag.  For the past week, CMSReport.com has been under a shared hosting plan and not a VPS.   I'm currently running my site using a budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy.

I don't know how long I'll keep my site on a shared hosting plan but I am currently enjoying a break from the work, worry, and experimentation that comes with administration of a VPS.  While I may go back to a VPS, I thought it would benefit some newbies and other Drupal users my experiences and thoughts on migrating my sites from a VPS back to a shared hosting plan.

This is a fantastic article found on ZDNet UK not only about open source content management systems but the issues that traditional publishers are now facing in either competing or adopting with today's Web CMS.  The article is written by Mike Barrett and is titled, "CMS evolution, publishing revolution?".  The author writes:

The message below was originally posted as a comment here at CMS Report. Unfortunately, the comment was posted while I was switching the site over to a new server and just before the Memorial weekend holiday here in the United States. I'm afraid very few people saw the comment so I thought it should get more attention by posting the comment onto the "front page".

The author has narrowed his choice of content management systems for his project down to Plone, Apache Lenya, and Nuxeo 5. I'm not a user of any of the CMS listed so hopefully if you're reading this post you can spend a few minutes helping him out.

If you had to choose only one of the three CMS based on his requirements for the project he describes below...which CMS (Plone, Apache Lenya, and Nuxeo 5) would you choose? Please leave your comments belows!

The official release of phpBB3 is almost near with the first release candidate now available. The following is a partial list of features that are new in this version phpBB that did not exist in 2.0.x.

• Attachments - Attachments in posts and Personal Mail, Automatic image thumbnails,Display attachments inline
• Unlimited Subforums - Create unlimited subforums, Display active topics of all subforums
• Custom BBCodes - Create your own BBCodes, Add buttons to posting screen
• Custom Profile Fields - Add new fields on user profiles, Display them at registration, Display them on the profile view

By golly, I have been so busy the past couple weeks that I didn't even had a chance to check out a beta of Wordpress 2.2.  Now it's too late for me because Wordpress 2.2 has been officially released.  Not only does this release include over 200 bug fixes, but it also has some new nifty features.

• WordPress Widgets allowing you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement the XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.

Plone 3 beta 3 was released on Wednesday of this week.  The announcement posted at Plone.org also invited users, administrators, and developers to help test the new software.  Plone 3, built on the Zope application server, is nearing a year of development .  By the time the final version of Plone 3 is released you should see the following new features included in the content management system.

• Full versioning, roll-back capabilities, in-place staging (ie. working copy support) and locking for all content.
• Inline editing of content using Ajax.
• Link integrity checking and automatic handling of moved or renamed content.

CMS Watch has a very good article on their site titled, "Question CMS Consolidation". The article serves as a reminder for IT and managers that, although technically feasible, an organization may not want to put everyone on the same content management system (CMS).  Why would an organization want to to consolidate their systems in the first place?  For those at top of the organization there may be some obvious reasons to unify the organization onto a single CMS.

Many organizations are looking at a portfolio of dozens of content management systems running somewhere on their network. From sheer tidiness alone, it’d be nice to have a shorter list. And such tidiness can have real benefits: better negotiating leverage with vendors, reduced overhead to manage contracts, reductions in the number of servers and hence in datacenter space (with attendant power and operational costs), and so on. Finally, increased demands for compliance and control are placing a premium on simplifying information management.

In my own organization, we have had both Internet and intranet servers since the mid 1990's supporting operations and administrators.  While we moved our Internet web servers onto a CMS a few years ago, it is only the past few months that many of our offices and departments have shifted their intranet from static pages to much more dynamic system.  As many of our field offices migrate their servers to utilizing newer Web 2.0 and collaboration applications, IT and management have a strong desire to consolidate those applications and servers.

CiviCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7: