CMS Made Simple Cookbook

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Submitted by nikhita on

CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook is a new book from Packt that will help readers build new modules and tags, and use the built-in capabilities of CMS Made Simple to their fullest. Written by Samuel Goldstein, the book is a practical guide with over 70 simple yet unbelievably effective recipes to extend CMS Made Simple.

CMS Made Simple, an open source content management system, allows for faster and easier management of website content. This CMS is scalable for small businesses to large corporations.

CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook starts off by showing the reader the basic differences between the various kinds of tags and modules in the CMS Made Simple environment, and to which purposes each is best fit. Readers will not only learn the basics of creating tags and modules, but will also explore the underlying APIs that they will use to solve real-world website problems . It offers developers an amazing wealth of knowledge in approachable, bite-sized recipes.

List of Fake Content Management Stories from April Fools Day 2011

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Submitted by Bryan on

For the blogger, the most difficult day of the year has to be April Fools' Day. This is the day where jokes are played and stories are made  up. Computer geeks and CMS junkies easily get into the spirit of this celebrated day by pulling all kinds of online pranks. One of my fondest April Fools memories is from 2007 when the official Japanese and Russian Drupal sites migrated for a day from the Drupal CMS over to Joomla!. Good times, good times. The folks over at ocProducts have gotten into the 2011 April Fools spirit by announcing ocPortal 7 with HTML6.

I need your help! Please help me keep track of all the CMS related April Fools' stories that you find online.  Please feel free to add to my list by of content management pranks via a comment below or through Twitter. If you prefer to tweet the story instead I suggest we start using the Twitter hashtag: #aprilfoolscms.

List of Fake Content Management Stories on April Fools Day 2011

  1. ocPortal - ocProducts announces ocPortal 7 with HTML6
  2. Drupal - Announcing CertifiedToSUCK.com
  3. TYPO3 - New paradigm for TYPO3 4.6 development
  4. Drupal - Announcing the Drupal Retail Store
  5. Joomla - Joomla Templates from YOOtheme
  6. Real Story Group  - No more content management
  7. Sharpened.net - The End of the Keyboard and Mouse
  8. IBM developerWorks - Scrum Alliance 2.0
  9. CMS Made Simple - Intuit Announces Acquisition of CMS Made Simple
  10. Enano - Enano merges with Joomla!
  11. EpiServer - EPiFAX 1.0 Released
  12. Plone - Plone Announces New Release Naming Scheme Effective April 1

Judging Five Open Source Content Management Systems

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Submitted by Bryan on

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.

CMS Made Simple Wins the 2010 Open Source CMS Award

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Submitted by Bryan on

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.

CMS Made Simple 1.9 is available and ready

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Submitted by Bryan on

Earlier this week, the CMSMS Development team released another milestone version of CMS Made Simple. CMS Made Simple 1.9 is a feature version with focus on flexibility and maintaining ease of use.

Significant additions and improvements in CMSMS 1.9 include:

  • Smart/Friendly URLs - Complete Freedom in URLs now customizable in any way preferred. The News Module also allows for the customizing of URLs.
  • The MenuManager module has been greatly improved with an eye on performance.
  • Features, Features and more Features
    • You can now add a description to Global Content Blocks (GCB).
    • Developers can disable the WYSIWYG editor on each individual GCB to remove the risk that it may mess up some formatting.
    • A new option to 'run' a User Defined Tag from within the admin. This allows site developers to create a UDT that maybe does some database cleanups or queries, and to run it from within the admin console rather than having to create a dummy hidden page on the sites frontend.
    • A new preference allows displaying either the menu text, or the page title in the content list.
    • The sitedown functionality has been improved. now you can display a 'Site Down' message to site visitors while logged in administrators can still see the site.
    • The behavior of the {content_image} and the thumbnail and image properties of each page has been improved.
  • jQuery Replaces script.aculo.us
  • New Administrative theme

For additional details regarding CMS Made Simple 1.9 you can view the release announcement at CMSMadeSimple.org. CMSMS 1.9 is available at the site's download page.

Testing popular CMS and blogging systems

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Submitted by ABresk on

For a long time I’ve been really interested in performance aspects of content management systems and smarter blogging systems. This is the reason for my decision to test some of the popular systems on a workbench and to get some technical information about these systems.

The test was quite simple. I installed the packages on my sandbox server and added a function (cip-bench()) to the installation. Then I ran the index page with the default template and configuration. The data I got from the test was limited on the raw index page after the installation. I picked up 5 aspects for the test:

  • The first one was the memory usage of the system
  • The execution time
  • Executed database queries
  • How many database tables exist
  • And the last parameter shows how many files are required.

It is interesting to see how different some CMS solve their tasks. I was surprised of some results for example 399 database queries of contenido.

To sum up this test I was impressed by chyrp. It’s delivered with an elegant backend and I think it has got a lot of potential to become more popular and famous. The memory usage of wordpress seems to be improved in contrast to previous versions.

Blog

name memory avg time queries tables required files
chyrp 5.556 MB 0.3 – 0.5 7-10 8 63
geeklog 6.97 MB 0.6 – 0.7 59 50 38
serendipity 6.773 MB 0.5 – 0.55 11 21 48
textpattern 2.823 MB 0.2 – 0.3 21 17 12
wordpress 12.044 MB 0.4 – 0.6 15 11 73

CMS

name memory avg time queries tables required files
cmsmadesimple 7.543 MB 1.1 – 1.48 38 – 52 52 92
contenido 9.562 MB 0.6 – 0.9 254 – 265 (399) 76 123
impressCMS 10.938 MB 0.5 – 0.6 53-55 57 139
joomla 6.289 MB 0.7 – 0.8 7 – 11 33 127

7 Simple CMS Solutions for Quick Website Creation

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Submitted by webby on

WebmasterFormat.com:  Best Simple Content Management Systems - There are a lot of CMS solutions available that seem to do everything except your laundry. While these more complex CMS solutions are exactly what some webmasters need, they can just easily be way to much. Fortunately, there are also a lot of really simply CMS solutions as well. These solutions are perfect for people that don't want to deal with the high learning curve that is necessary with some other solutions.

Finalists in Packt's 2010 Open Source Awards announced

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Submitted by Bryan on

Packt Publishing recently announced the finalists in each of the categories for their 2010 Open Awards. While award categories for content management systems are still included, this year Packt is also adding additional flavors of open source projects to be judged. The new award categories include awards for most promising open source project, e-commerce applications, graphics software, and JavaScript libraries.

The Voting for the winners in each of the categories ends on November 5, 2010.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges in each category to be announced on November 15, 2010.

This year, I will once again be participating as a judge for the Open Source CMS Award. I'll be in good company on this panel and have been a long time admirer of the work done by OpenSourceCMS's Scott Goodwin and CMS Wire's Dee-Ann LeBlanc. Karen Koombs, librarywebchic.net, is a new name to me and I'm looking forward to getting to know her better via this panel. There is always some controversy in these type awards on whether those projects awarded are really "the best" in their category. I plan to give my perspective on these awards in a separate blog post.

The following projects make up the finalist of the 2010 Open Source Awards:

Open Source CMS Award

Every Content Management System (CMS) that is based on one of the Open Source licenses is eligible to participate for this category. Vote for your favorite Open Source CMS here.

Finalists:

Hall of Fame CMS

This category is reserved for those CMSes that have won the Overall Open Source CMS Award at least once in the past. Vote for your favorite Hall of Fame CMS here.

Finalists

Most Promising Open Source Project

This category is for all Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010. Vote for your favorite Most Promising Open Source Project here.

Finalists

CMS Made Simple hosts its annual "Geek Moot" conference Sep 15th - 17th in Amsterdam

CMS Made Simple© “Geek Moot” Conference

CMS Made Simple hosts its annual conference, “Geek Moot”, in Amsterdam September 15th – 17th

PHILADELPHIA – CMS Made Simple© (“CMSMS”), an open source content management system, is hosting its annual international conference, “Geek Moot”, scheduled to take place September 15 through 17, 2010, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Geek Moot is the official international conference for the CMS Made Simple content management system platform. CMS Made Simple founder Ted Kulp will be presenting “The State of CMS Made Simple” on September 16th; also celebrating the recent milestone achieved of generating 1 million downloads.

Attendees of this conference will consist of CMS Made Simple users of all expertise, including technology firms, marketing and advertising agencies, web designers, developers, and other users and fans of the platform.           

September 15th, the first day of activities, will be filled with pre-conference educational workshops discussing various topics facilitated by experts in their respective fields. These topics will consist of “Advanced Design Integration, “Instant Modules”, SEO & CMS Made Simple”, “A Beginner’s Walkthrough of CMS Made Simple”, “jQuery”, and “CMS Made Simple Extensions”.

September 16th & 17th are going to be information-packed conference days, full of sessions discussing topics such as the much-anticipated launch of version 2.0, current and future marketing efforts, e-commerce, mobile, modules and development, front-end users, flash video, along with time for Q&A with members of the development team.

Registration for Geek Moot Amsterdam is only €150. All attendees will be able to attend two full days of sessions and lunch will be provided. Register at http://geekmoot2010.eventbrite.com/. All workshops are priced individually.

To learn more about “Geek Moot” Amsterdam 2010, please visit http://geekmoot.com/2010/.

CMS Made Simple Hits 1 Million Downloads

Content management system to celebrate at its annual “Geek Moot” conference in Amsterdam in September

PHILADELPHIA – The developers of CMS Made Simple© (“CMSMS”), an open source content management system, announced that it just hit one million downloads as of August 12, 2010. The content management system (CMS) will celebrate this milestone at its annual conference, “Geek Moot,” scheduled to take place September 15 through 17, 2010, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The CMS Made Simple website, which was recently redesigned with an enhanced user-interface, will soon launch an Alpha version of the much anticipated 2.0 version of the platform.

“We are pleased to see how fast new users have adapted to utilizing the updated platform,” said Ted Kulp, creator of CMS Made Simple. “One of the biggest challenges we previously had was that a portion of the audience associated the platform with having the ability to only create simple websites because of its name. However, the reason behind the name is that the platform is much simpler to use compared to almost all of the open source content management systems currently on the market.”

CMS Made Simple is also great for end-users. Having an extremely user-friendly admin panel, CMSMS distinguishes itself from most other platforms in the market by making it very easy to update, create and modify content without having any technical knowledge of how the backend of a website works.

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