May 2013

Elxis 4.1 "Poseidon" was published and is available for download from Elxis.org web site. The most important about Elxis 4.1 is that, for the first time, provides a friendly to mobile phones and tablets version of the web site.

If a handheld device is detected Elxis generates a mobile version of the requested page instead of the standard one for desktop computers. Another cool addition on the 4.1 release is the CSS and Javascript minifier. Elxis unifies and compresses CSS and JS files generating pages that loads faster, consuming less bandwidth, and having a smaller HTML head section.

Sometimes timing is everything and some would argue that I should have written this story weeks ago. Earlier this month, Rivet Logic announced the launch of Crafter Software Corporation, which offers commercial support and licenses for the Crafter CMS open source project (previously known as Crafter Rivet). I didn't jump on the story and CMS Report is probably one of the few CMS news sites that didn't talk about the Crafter Rivet spin off into Crafter Software. The honest truth, I just didn't want to rehash the press release on the day the announcement was made without offering some additional perspective of my own.

Acquia announced significant growth in revenue and bookings as the company’s open source solutions are becoming more widely adopted. Acquia’s year-over-year revenue grew by 108 percent in 2012. According to the Boston Business Journal, this puts Acquia's revenue for 2012 at $45.3 million. Momentum continued in the first quarter of 2013, as Acquia’s bookings increased 52 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012 and more than 15 percent over the quarter prior.

Given our open source roots as well as our broad definition of a CMS, we thought this would be a good time to revisit Moodle by mentioning that Moodle 2.5 was released last week. This is the first release under their new May/November release schedule. With version 2.5, the Moodle community has managed to address 705 issues through code contributions from 112 developers.

Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites that we like to call a learning content management system (LCMS or LMS). Moodle 2.5 includes three significant features:

"The last thing you want your IT department to be is a joke because you waited too long to make changes. The easiest thing in the world to do is to play it safe, but it's probably not the best strategy for your professional development or the bottom line of your organization. You have to push new technologies that are going to propel your company forward or you risk being the IT equivalent of a company that waited too long to move to the next generation of technology."

- Ron Miller, "What your IT department could learn from Sony's disruption", CITEworld, May 17, 2013.

At the 2013 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference I have the privilege of moderating a panel focused on the Cloud. That's actually a broad topic, but I think it's a topic that is increasingly becoming well understood by the CMS community. Last year, I moderated a similar panel and, in my opinion, we spent way too much time trying to define the Cloud.

dotCMS, an open source, Java-based content management system, is proud to announce the release of v2.3 – which continues to add features that address real world challenges faced by content managers, web developers and java developers in the modern enterprise.

"So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a "Facebook friend," but I can tell you that a "Facebook friend" is better than nothing."

- Paul Miller, I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet, The Verge, May 1, 2013.

I've been pitching one of Canada’s largest and most interesting brands for about 5 years now. It’s one of those dream customers that every CEO has. They are the perfect fit for our unique mix of capabilities and I was fully convinced that with a little patience, we would be given the chance to prove it to them. My systematic, persistent relationship building and follow-ups finally paid off early this year when a they emailed me an RFP for a new CMS.

I became giddy as I read through it as it basically described the features of Agility in minute detail.