Yesterday, Joomla developers announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.3. The newest Joomla CMS overhauls its approach to security, enables microdata for the first time and replaces MooTools-based JavaScript with jQuery equivalents. These new features make Joomla 3.3 the most secure, searchable and fastest-loading Joomla CMS yet.
WordPress 3.9 has been released with a number of refinements that WordPress hopes you'll "love". The changes and new features are solid but perhaps not as many as we've come to expect given past WordPress point releases. Some of the new features that can be found in WordPress 3.9 include improvements in the media editing experience, gallery previews, and live editing of widgets and headers.
Given the flurry of product announcements this week, my desk is stacked high with press releases and requests for review. The most notable of these recent announcements are for ImpressPages 4.0, Jahia 7, and Umbraco 7.1. Each of these content management systems deserve their own review. However, this is a Friday and time isn't on my side. So, I thought at the least there would be value in mentioning the release of these products and give you the option to follow up on your own for additional information.
A few days ago, I received an advance copy DPCI's press release announcing that DPCI has contributed an open source module to integrate Drupal with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. As far as I can tell, the Drupal 7 module is currently a sandbox project but I assume it will eventually be released as a full module once the code is worked out.
As many of you know, I recently sold my shares in Agility – the web CMS company that I co-founded. Over the last three months, I have been experimenting with new technologies as I formulate the next step in my career.
As a first project, I decided to build a new website for a product that my wife’s company developed – the ClearBlue Ionizer. ClearBlue is a new technology for purifying water in pools and spas that drastically reduces the amount of chemicals required.
Years ago, I quickly discovered there was great public interest in comparisons of open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. When you throw WordPress into the mix and you can attract an even greater audience. Despite how much traffic such headlines draw people in, CMS Report has been pretty selective when we provide or point to such articles. There is some uncertainty whether there is genuine value being provided in feature comparison articles which is why I've shied away from them in recent years.
Well, this certainly wasn't on my radar. Gábor Hojtsy, Drupal 6 lead maintainer, announced that starting March 1, 2014 support for PHP 4 in Drupal 6 will end. I wasn't surprise to hear about Drupal developers dropping support for PHP 4. Instead, I was in shock to hear that Drupal didn't drop support for this ancient version of PHP sooner.
Over the weekend, I spent some much needed time doing some maintenance work for my wife's photography site which runs on WordPress. One of the concerns I had with the release and automatic update of WordPress 3.8 is how it might impact the Photocrati theme package my wife uses for the site. So far, I haven't found any issues related to the WordPress 3.8 upgrade. I am a little concern we may have an issue with the Photocrati gallery not allowing her to add additional photos to a current gallery, but as far as I can tell this is a separate issue.
A couple years ago, if you would have asked me what I thought about Joomla! I would have told you I think they've lost their way. Their community of developers seemed to be searching on how best to innovate and take risks with a well established stable content management system. I feared that the open source group was stuck looking back and that all we could expect was dull incremental changes to their CMS. Despite the fear, I knew better. Open source communities have a way of reevaluating their priorities and creating spectacular results where you least expect them to do so.