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).
"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. This year, I'm hoping we're past the "what is it" phase and spend much more time talking about real problems, real benefits, and the challenges the content management industry may be facing by moving toward a Cloud solution.
"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 guess I shouldn't be too surprised. The custom CMS discussion has reared it’s ugly head a few times this year. Ron Miller asked his Fierce audience “why would companies still be building a custom CMS” as recently as this past February, which also spawned a discussion on CMS Connected the same month. For us, this is the third time this year we've come up against this most ethereal of competitors. The first was in a pitch in March with a local ad agency who insists that a custom CMS is the most efficient way to go. That was followed by an ongoing discussion with one of our long-time customers about whether they would renew this year in the wake of building an internal development team.
A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content-types.
Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...
On my to-do list for quite some time has been wanting to talk briefly about some of the new features included in the latest release of Agility CMS. You may recall that CMS Report migrated over to Agility's Magazine Publishing Suite last Fall. So, keeping up to date on new features added to Agility CMS is not only a news story but also something of personal interest to me.
If I learned anything from my open source vs. proprietary CMS post, comparing CMS’s based on the method used to code them is no longer that relevant. Following the great discussion that was triggered convinced me that comparing along this dimension no longer contributes much to the CMS selection process.
The other thing I learned was that being cheeky, while good for attention, probably isn’t the most forthcoming way to educate the readers of this great publication. So this time around, I promise to be more thorough and objective! Hopefully we’ll get some insights from the community again as well!
For the past few years, CMS Report has generally not posted CMS announcements which only contained bug fixes and no new additional features. So, it's been rare for us to post the "point" release announcements for Drupal as Drupal only introduces significant new features in the new full version of Drupal (such as the forthcoming Drupal 8). However, Drupal 7.22 contains a lot of minor changes so we thought it was worth talking about. Drupal 7.22 was actually released a week ago, but I didn't have time to upgrade any of my Drupal sites until this week nor look at what was actually fixed.
