Open Source

Boston – June 1, 2011. Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform company, released a new version of Nuxeo Document Management and Nuxeo Enterprise Platform today. Nuxeo DM 5.4.2 offers a host of usability and social features to make the user experience even smoother and more streamlined. Key contributions highlight the value of community involvement in the strategy of continuous innovation for the Nuxeo platform.

The release of Nuxeo DM 5.4.2 and its underlying platform, Nuxeo EP, demonstrates execution on a vision of ongoing innovation, community engagement, and open standards support, delivered to content management application architects and developers. Driven by community feedback, many of the new features and enhancements improve usability of the application, using state-of-the-art technologies and standards, such as OpenSocial, OAuth, HTML5, WebDAV, and CMIS.

The new WSS connector was contributed by Nuxeo partner Gagnavarslan, an ECM solution provider in Iceland. The Nuxeo and Gagnavarslan teams collaborated to integrate this new component after passing the Nuxeo QA process. With this connector, the Nuxeo repository can be mapped as a drive under MS Windows or Mac OS X. "We are building a range of ECM services based on Nuxeo, and our clients need a smooth desktop integration into an existing Microsoft Windows infrastructure," said Jónas Sigurðsson, Development Manager at Gagnavarslan in Iceland. “Our group of developers in Kiev reverse engineered the existing WSS protocol to support Windows 7, Windows XP and the latest MS Office versions directly in Nuxeo EP. We support the open source paradigm and are happy to contribute our work back to the Nuxeo community."

OpenCms 8 is now ready and available for download! OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions. This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 8 contains a greatly improved user interface for content managers and numerous other enhancements.

Major new features in OpenCms 8

• The "Advanced Direct Edit" mode allows to create page content by drag & drop.
• The new sitemap editor allows to create new pages and rearrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
• A multiple file enabled upload dialog all based on HTML replaced the old "Upload Applet".
• The new "Content Subscription Engine" allows to inform users when important documents have changed.
• The XML content editor now support elements.
• The new publish dialog supports session based selection of content as well as add/remove of individual resources.
• Extended support for creation of content for mobile devices with the tag.
• A central "Shared Folder" has been added that is available from all sites for sharing content.
• JPA support has been added to the database layer, so there's support for 10+ additional databases.
  

One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).

Version 7.5.4 of OpenCms is now ready and available for download.

OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions.

This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 7.5.4 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of issues that persisted in the 7.5.3 version. Some new features have been added as well.

Main fixed issues and improvements in OpenCms 7.5.4

• Fixed issue 1717: DB deadlock if OpenCms hits db.pool.default.maxActive when db.pool.default.whenExhaustedAction=block
• Fixed issue 1900: Performance Patch for OpenCms
• Fixed issue 1901: Workplace login page security issue
• Fixed issue 1909: Internet Explorer crashes after saving structured XML content with image added from gallery into HTML field
• Fixed issue 1942: Publish scheduled jobs are missing after server restart
• Fixed issue 1945: Avoid reflected XSS on some authenticated resources (provided by Michele Orru)
• Fixed issue 1949: Database size does not decrease after (completely) deleting resources
• Fixed issue when creating a new user or editing an existing user using an Oracle database
• Fixed issue using delete and lock resource when called without path parameter
• Fixed issue in galleries: Broken layout with long item file names or titles
• Fixed premature publish thread interruption within CmsShell
• FCKEditor compatible with Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4
• Added new optional CmsShell start parameter to load additional commands

 Please check out the release notes for further details of the changes in this release.

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer for Wordpress, recently posted on a WordPress developer's blog the plans for WordPress 3.2.  Below are some of the changes and features Jaquith says will be on this new version of WordPress that caught my eye. My personal comments gave been added to the side.

San Francisco, CA and Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Hippo, a leading vendor of open source Enterprise Content Management Software, has launched version 7.5 of its Content Management System, Hippo CMS.

Hippo CMS 7.5 is an enterprise-class open source software product designed to empower your audience. Consumers of Web content are now coming to expect context-enriched experiences that use location, presence, language, behavior, social attributes and other environmental information to anticipate their needs.

But Web content management solutions haven’t changed to meet this expectation. They still focus on pushing content out to static Web sites, and expect their customers to optimize their Web content based on a slow iteration of publish, test, review, re-design.

What if you could easily open your entire content repository to new channels as they emerge? What if you could optimize your content in real-time so that no matter how your customer engages – their experience is as good as it can possibly be? What if you could empower your audience to engage with your business on their terms?

With Hippo – the answer is “now you can”.

This week, the Wordpress core developers released WordPress Version 3.1.This release took a little longer than CMS Report had first anticipated, but we see it as a sign that today's WordPress is much more complex than it used to be when it was considered only a tool for blogging. In fact, Matt Mullenweg in his Wordpress 3.1. announcement  seemed to recognize this continued evolution of WordPress as a content management system.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

New features in WordPress 3.1 that would be of interest to content authors and site managers include:

• A "lightning fasy" redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages
• An admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages
• A streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels intended to improve the user experience for new bloggers.
• A refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options

For WordPress developers, additional new features that may interest them in this latest version of WordPress include:

• A new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts
• New CMS capabilities:
  • archive pages for custom content types
  • a new Network Admin
  • an overhaul of the import and export system
  • the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries

WordPress 3.1 is available for download from WordPress.org or you can update from within the dashboard within your current version of WordPress.

The Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware project has released Tiki 6.2. This release includes fixes and updates only. Tiki encourages all sites to upgrade to this latest release. Tiki Community members have made over 240 code contributions for this release. Review the release notes and https://dev.tiki.org/tiki6 for complete information about this release.

Active development continues on the 6.x branch, which will become the LTS (long term support) version, following the release of Tiki 7 (planned for April, 2011). Please see https://dev.tiki.org/Version+lifecycle for more information.

You can download Tiki 6.2 (and all Tiki releases) from https://tiki.org/download.

"In a space currently dominated by proprietary technologies, managing the long-term preservation, provenance, and accessibility of digital content is often downplayed or ignored."

- Cheryl McKinnon, CMO of Nuxeo, From information overload to Dark Ages 2.0?, OpenSource.com, October 29, 2010.

Last fall, I once again had the privilege of participating as a member of the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Open Source Awards. For the 2010 event, I participated by voting for the category of Open Source CMS Awards. In that award, the winner was declared by the panel to be CMS Made Simple, with SilverStripe as first runner up followed by MODx as second runner up.

I received a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. Each of the judges on the panel, selects and ranks their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors including performance, usability, size and support from community, accessibility, ease of configuration, customization, scalability and security.

It has been my history to be transparent to all with how I rank each CMS as my vote will have some differences to those of the panel. This time around, I find myself hesitant and under personal protest with me providing information on how I ranked the five content management systems.

I question whether we're doing any good by declaring one CMS as better than another CMS. Dean Barker discussed on his blog some time ago this same uneasy feeling you get when you judge a CMS without having some reference to real world requirements. None of these content management systems would I consider losers and all of them remain worthy of future consideration. Yet, I'm disturbed that people will look at the numbers and interpret the results in a ways I never intended my rankings to be used.

My rankings for the Five Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. SilverStripe
2. mojoPortal
3. MODx
4. XOOPS and CMS Made Simple (Tie)

I'm not a firm believer in ties when it comes to ranking content management systems. Yet, this year I did just that for XOOPS and CMS Made Simple. All five content management systems that were reviewed I would consider as a candidate for a future project. None of the CMS would I consider a "last place" CMS so I refused to do so. It is also important to note that neither Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress competed in this ranking as previous winners in this category duke it out in the Hall of Fame category.