dotcms

Yes, it's that time of year again. Packt Publishing recently announced the five finalists in each of the categories of its 2009 Open Source CMS Award. The Voting for the winners in each of the five categories ends on October 30, 2009.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges with the top three CMS and overall winners in each category to be announced on November 9, 2009.

This year, I will be participating as a judge for the Overall Open Source CMS Award. I have the honor of sharing the judging panel with John Resig of jQuery fame, Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, and Karen Coombs from Web Services at the University of Houston Libraries. I'm especially excited to be working with Deane Barker, a fellow Sioux Falls resident. Over the years, Deane and I have had some great discussions on content management systems. It will be interesting to find out whether we will be agreeing with each other or not on which CMS should be considered the top CMS for the Overall category.

Previous winners in the Overall category have included Drupal (2007, 2008) and  Joomla! (2006) as the overall winner. Previous winners of the Overall category are not eligible for the Overall category in 2009 as Packt Publishing apparently wanted to prevent the Overall category of being dominated by past winners. The good news is that both Drupal and Joomla are eligible to compete in the new Hall of Fame category and are also finalists in the Best Open Source PHP CMS category.

A new version of dotCMS 1.6.5 has been released.  This new version of dotCMS includes nearly 300 improvements and fixes.  Highlights include:

• Widgets!
  
  • Demo widgets include: Google Maps, Video Players RSS Feeds, Photo Galleries, Social Networking sharing tools and news feeds.

• Enterprise Ready
  
  • Deploy dotCMS on JBoss App servers.
  • dotCMS can now be built as a .war file.

• Major Performance Improvements
  
  • Velocity Files cached in memory across cluster for speedier parsing.
  • User Cache reduces back-end/administrative load.
    

Packt Publishing announced the winner of their 2008 Best Open Source Other CMS Award and it is Plone.

Packt is delighted to exclusively reveal the first category winner of the 2008 Open Source CMS Award as Plone. Run[ning] on the Zope application server, Plone wins the Best Other Open Source CMS Award and receives $2,000. Also recognized by the judges were dotCMS and DotNetNuke who finished second and third respectively, both picking up $500.

Although I'm not a Plone user, I've been quietly rooting for Plone to come out on top as the best non-PHP content management system.  This looks to be Plone's moment to shine.

I thought it was interesting that the judges praised "the ecosystem that is developing around Python and Zope is encouraging" for which supports Python.  While Python is one of the few languages I still work with, I've heard from other users over the years that they are hesitant to use Plone since they also would need to learn more about Zope.  In some ways, this award is a validation by the judges that running Plone on the Zone application server is a positive and not a negative.

I'm also happy to see dotCMS and DotNetNuke were recognized.  I've talked about DotNetNuke for some time and recently started covering the progress of dotCMS.

A new version of dotCMS, an open-source J2EE enterprise class web content management system, was released this week. dotCMS 1.5 incorporates web content management with CRM, eCommunication tools and ecommerce.

New features introduced in dotCMS 1.5 include:

• Content "Triggers" using JBoss Rules to allow rule based user segmentation by usage.
• Business Intelligence Reports - Integrated with Jasper Reports and iReports allow detailed and customized reporting on site usage, transactions and content activity.
• Improvements to User Search Segmentation, Permissions and Management.
• Revamped Campaign/Communication Manager.

Since dotCMS is a "new" CMS that we're focusing on, I'm needing to add some content. This was announced a couple weeks ago, but still worthy of posting if you're trying to catch up like we are on what dotCMS is all about.

dotCMS 1.5.1 released – Open Source CMS, Web CRM and eCommerce - Dotmarketing released dotCMS 1.5.1 today which provides over a 150 fixes and improvements to a feature rich, open-source J2EE enterprise class web content management system.

New features included in this version of dotCMS are: