Open Source

Joomla, the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system), announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6. Users will be able to download the latest version effective this evening from the Joomla website. Designed to offer enhanced site control and a more polished user experience, Joomla 1.6 delivers a variety of new tools to improve website management and access, a more robust organizational structure for content control, and various other user-experience improvements throughout the software.

“With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click extension updates and multi-language functionality, Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool to develop a web presence,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit created to provide organization, legal, and financial support to the Joomla project. “This has been accomplished through the tireless feedback and work on 1.6 by the thousands of members of the Joomla community over the past year.”

Joomla’s ease-of-use and extensibility has made it the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the industry today (it has been downloaded more than 22 million times). It is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s and many more.

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

• New Access Control System – Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.
• Unlimited Depth Organizational Model – Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.
• One-Click Extension Updates – Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.
• Semantic XHTML Layouts – Provides a better baseline for content presentation.
• Multi-language Functionality – Allows site builders to implement a multi-language site.

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This makes it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing.

“The current Joomla Platform provides developers with the tools they need to rapidly build the Web of the future,” said Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla production leadership team. “Although 1.6 is being released today, the Joomla production team is not resting on its laurels. We’re hard at work developing even more powerful Joomla features for the future, such as new search capabilities and new ways to leverage website content.”

Visit https://www.joomla.org/ to download Joomla 1.6 today.

What a great year 2010 was for content management. Open source CMS projects seemed to have grown up this year while proprietary systems appeared to continue in their evolution. While social publishing systems may not have conquered the traditional content management system, the CMS definitely took notice by integrating as many social media features developers could come up with.

Below are the top ten stories of 2010 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list were ranked by the number of views per month since the articles first appeared at CMS Report. 

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010

1. Someone does another Drupal vs Joomla comparison
2. Open Source versus the Enterprise Solution
3. Ten Content Migration Tools to SharePoint Platform
4. Drupal themes go nuclear with Fusion
5. SilverStripe CMS becomes the first Microsoft Certified open source web app
6. Denial of Service on an Apache server
7. Guidelight Business Solutions video of DrupalConSF 2010
8. Sharepoint 2010 vs WCM Platforms
9. We Hear You: Our spam filtering needs to be improved
10. The MODx Revolution 2.0 Interviev

As you can see, stories on Drupal, Joomla!, Sharepoint, SilverStripe, and MODx brought a lot of visitors to the site. Not all the stories listed above would have been one of the ten I would have personally picked, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking. I personally, don't like "versus" articles yet readers seemed to flock those articles. Unfortunately quality of writing doesn't appear to always matter as there were some very well written articles we posted in 2010 that didn't make this list.

The year 2011 will undoubtedly bring change and new stories to the world of content management systems. I think the year will also be a year of decision for the direction we take CMSReport.com. I feel as if this site of ours is stuck somewhere between our roots as a niche blog and a potentially popular CMS news site. I'm hoping we make some changes in the new year that all our readers can appreciate and value.

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of its second promotional video:

How about a *real* multi-language solution?

In this video, recorded in March 2010, Philippe Cloutier, a Tiki consultant, talks about the multilingual features and capabilities of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. He explains the differences between the Tiki multilingual approach and other wiki systems.

Cloutier is a long-time Tiki contributor and programmer. In this video, he discusses the fully integrated multilingual platform that Tiki offers as well as his vision for the future of translation and mutli-lingual wikis.

In addition to facilitating page content translation, the core Tiki interface is available in over 45 languages. These translations are contributed by members of the Tiki Community.

The video can also be viewed below.

Let me start by clarifying a few things:

1) I work for a CMS vendor, for an enterprise CMS.

2) I am also a big fan of open source.

Yet, I am attempting to write this article with all bias aside; with all generalizations thrown out the window. Without feeling like I am trying to justify this article, I think it is also worth mentioning that the CMS vendor that I work for produces a product that I would avidly use even if I didn’t work for them.

Every vendor, whether they are enterprise or open source do research on their competition. Although the internal information that these vendors have are usually pretty good, there is not a lot of thorough comparisons readily available on the net. When I look on the web, all I see are generalizations. I want to get rid of this, drop biased opinions and give you the hard, honest truth. Sure, I can only talk from my experience, and I have not used every CMS under the sun, but I have had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of using a diverse range; enough, I would say to be able to stoke the fires. To back this up if someone asked me:

• What is the best photo editing software? I would give an honest answer of Photoshop. But Paint.net is free and so is Gimp, I hear you say. Although expensive, it is the best tool for the job.
• What is the best Media Player? I would say VLC! But Microsoft had dedicated teams to build Windows Media Player, I hear you say! Doesn’t matter, VLC is free and the best tool for the job.
• What is the best Developer Environment? I would say Visual Studio? But I don’t use .net, I hear you say! Great, because you should choose the best tool for YOUR job…..the whole point I am trying to get across with this article.
• What is the best FTP Client? I would say FileZilla!
• What is the best browser? There is no ONE tool for the job.

I think it is important to first define what the two systems are in order to be able to thoroughly compare the two options.

• Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. The public is allows to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology.
• Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of its owner. The purchaser, or licensee, is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, but restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.

From a high level perspective you could argue that both have advantages and disadvantages. It is only when you analyze the functionality of the two systems when the decision on what way to go is made that much easier.

Birmingham, UK. 19 November 2010 - Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2010 Open Source Awards. Hall of Fame CMS is a category introduced to the Award last year, which features a competition between the previous winners of the Open Source CMS Award; Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress.

With this award, WordPress has gone from winning the Open Source CMS Award last year to winning the Hall of Fame CMS category, reserved for the biggest projects in the Content Management Framework industry.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg told Packt, “On behalf of the entire WordPress community I'm honored to accept this award, it's a great recognition of all the hard work and effort we've invested into WordPress. We envision a day when every man, woman, and child will be able to have an effortless beautiful website powered by Free software."

CMS Made Simple is the winner in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award category of the 2010 Open Source Awards. CMS Made Simple has won this Award for the first time in the past five years, having been a presence in the Award since 2007. Packt also announced  SilverStripe as first runner up with MODx in the second runners up position.

I had the privilege of sitting as a judge in this year's Open Source CMS Award category. My vote was a little different from the official award ranking where I would have placed mojoPortal, another 2010 award finalist, in a runnerup position.  I may have been the only judge that may have ranked mojoPortal in the top three positions. As I've done similarly in past years, in the near future I'll post how I judged the finalists in this category. However, it is now CMS Made Simple's well deserved moment and I won't take the spotlight away from them with my personal ramblings.

Attached below is the official press release I received from Packt Publishing announcing CMS Made Simple as the winner of the Open Source CMS Award. Congratulations to all those involved int he development and support of this great open source CMS.

Yesterday, I received an email from SilverStripe Co-Founder, Sigurd Magnusson. For all the years I have been corresponding with Sigurd, I don't think I've ever seen him as excited as he was this time in breaking the news. SilverStripe, a web development company delivering open source content management systems (CMS) has achieved Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2 for version 2.4.0 of their flagship product, SilverStripe CMS. This is a world first, as the software is the only truly open source web application to achieve certification on the Windows platform.

What is a little different about this story is that it is not only SilverStripe's press relations people making a big deal about this story. Microsoft is making a big deal about the accomplishments of SilverStripe. Andrew Gordan, Microsoft's New Zealand’s Platform Strategy Manager writes:

A large amount of the innovation in the software world is happening on the web and in the cloud, and in addition to that, we are seeing increased awareness and acceptance of open source software on the Microsoft Windows platforms.

Microsoft's Certified for Windows programs are well known for indicating software and hardware products that have been thoroughly tested to work well on Microsoft Windows and as of today, SilverStripe CMS is the first Open Source web application to complete the comprehensive testing necessary to achieve "Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2" status.

In his own blog post, Sigurd mentions that the certification for SilverStripe has been a long but rewarding road. A large proportion of the SilverStirpe's  community and clients use Microsoft servers, databases, and other technology. Over the past three years there an effort has been made for the SilverStripe CMS to work with Microsoft's operating system, web servers, and SQL Server database product.

Packt Publishing announced that Pimcore has won the Most Promising Open Source Project Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Most Promising Open Source Project Award  is a revamped category for the Award this year, featuring Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, the founding member of Pimcore. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects. The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community.” Added Marc Delisle, system administrator and one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

While Pimcore occupied the top spot in the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category, TomatoCMS came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by social networking software package BuddyPress.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has five more categories left, including the Open Source Graphics Software category, for which results will be announced from November 16th through to November 19th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit Packt's Open Source Awards site.

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of Tiki 6. This version of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware represents hundreds of hours of work by dozens of members of the Tiki Community. Nearly 50 developers contributed more than 1,500 code changes for this release.

In addition to countless tweaks and updates, Tiki 6 includes several new, key features:

• Extensive re-work and improvements to the Tiki blog, comments, spreadsheets and tracker features
• Batch functions (via cron jobs)
• Introduction of re-Captcha
• Expanded support of ccLite community currencies
• Integration with social networks such as Facebook
• Improved WYSIWYG support

Tiki 6 has been designated as the Long Term Support (LTS) version, replacing Tiki 3 LTS. Tiki 3 will reach end of life when Tiki 7.1 will be released (planned for April 2011). See the Project Roadmap for details.

To download Tiki, see https://tiki.org/download. Refer to the Tiki 6 release notes for additional information.

We are very pleased to present you X3, the new Xoops Engine for the next generation of XOOPS powered web application development.

This new Xoops Engine was long time in coming. During that time, we went through different phases of trials and errors, but we believe that we finally have the best combination of features and technologies to strategically position XOOPS as one of the top Web Application Platform solutions.

The new Xoops Engine has been re-designed from the ground up to take advantages of third-party frameworks like Zend Framework and Smarty 3.

Why did we rewrite XOOPS?

XOOPS is one of the most successful Open Source CMS and portal solutions, constantly placing in top places in various competitions, and receiving various awards. But it is showing signs of aging, that would require major rewrites of the Core.

In order to keep us focused on creating a flexible and extensible development engine for developers and a high performance application platform for end users, the development team has decided to use industry-standard frameworks. By doing so, we can focus our limited resources on aspects that make XOOPS unique and special, while leaving standard functionality to be addressed by off-the-shelf frameworks. This way we can take advantage of latest internet developments already included in those frameworks - it's like getting suddenly a whole new team of some of the best and brightest PHP and RIA programmers joining XOOPS!

After much research, we've selected a couple of frameworks at this stage:

PHP: Zend Framework
Template: Smarty 3
JavaScript: jQuery

Meanwhile the multi-engine mechanism of the Xoops Engine will ensure the possibility of adopting other excellent frameworks in the future, like Yii Framework, Dojo Toolkit, etc.