July 2013

The Joomla! project recently released a new version of their flagship content management system, Joomla 3.1.4. This is a maintenance release with no security fixes. While most of the updates are technical and will likely only be of interest to developers and site maintainers, there are also a few user interface tweaks here and there. For example, this version will now show the Joomla username in the administrative area.

Specific feature enhancements for Joomla 3.1.4 include the following:

A couple years ago, my wife and I took advantage of the post-housing bubble low interest rates and upgraded to a larger home. We came across a pre-owned house built in 2006 that came with the price, size, and style that just screamed to us "buy me".  As a family, we carefully reviewed our finances and listed our pros and cons before making the purchase. My wife and I were excited to finally have a bathroom connected to the master bedroom. Our then young son was excited that he finally had a family room that offered him fun and adventure. Secretly though, what sold me on the house had nothing to do with these things. What impressed me most was that this house had a network distribution panel.

Samir Bhatt is the author of recently published Liferay Portal Performance Best Practices which provides guidance on how to build and define architecture of high performing Liferay based portal solutions. This is the second book after co-authoring Liferay Beginner’s Guide in 2012.

Samir Bhatt has over 12 years of IT including 4 years of Liferay Portal experience. In addition to authoring this book, Samir has also co-authored Liferay Beginner’s Guide. Samir is a Liferay certified trainer delivering training on Liferay Portals worldwide.

This week, Telerik released a new version of its web and mobile CMS, Sitefinity 6.1. Significant to the new Sitefinity 6.1 release is a new desktop application and lightweight digital asset management (DAM) components. The new DAM functionality is geared toward the business user who is constantly updating, changing and manipulating rich digital media assets. In addition to new lightweight DAM functionality, Sitefinity 6.1 continues to deliver as a leading Mobile CMS now with responsive navigation widgets enabling touch-friendly navigation for mobile devices using predefined CSS.

Over the years, we all have abbreviated DotNetNuke as DNN as we've discussed this open source .Net based content management system. It looks like the corporate folks upstairs have finally made this interchangeability official. DotNetNuke Corp will now be known as DNN.

A few months ago, CMS Australian enthusiast Said Salameh posted this excellent breakdown comparing the number of steps required to complete simple tasks between eight leading open source content management systems. He illustrates how simple things like editing a page or adding an article can take ten steps or more – far more than necessary. His post spawned a discussion on the Web Content Management group on LinkedIn drawing out frustrations from many in the industry about the complexity of content management systems – particularly open source systems.

Acquia, a Drupal solutions provider, announced today that it has received a second Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Authorization to Operate (ATO) for federal customers using Acquia Cloud. FISMA compliance provides a path for government agencies to develop next-generation digital experiences with Drupal that incorporate the web, mobile and social communities. 

Early this morning, I was one of two guests on the eZ Publish Show. The purpose of the episode was to discuss the future of content management system. I was joined by host Ivo Lukač of Netgen, and fellow guest Apoorv Durga from Real Story Group.