Content Management

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.

Yesterday, The Joomla! Project and Community announced the availability of Joomla CMS 3.2.0 Stable. Since the release of 3.1.5, over 1085 commits have been made to the code base with 50 different people contributing to commits. But this release has a lot more than just bug fixes and includes a host of long awaited features for the open source content management system.

Some of the new features in Joomla 3.2 include:

While Drupal 8 has been been under development for two and a half years, I haven't talked much about it. I learned long ago that it doesn't do much good to talk about an upcoming release of a CMS until the software crosses over from what most of us would consider "vaporware."

The month of August starts out with a bang for WordPress fans. We knew given Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word speech that it was only a matter of time when WordPress 3.6 would be released. Starting yesterday afternoon, site administrators such as my wife (it runs in the family) were quickly greeted with a notification that the WordPress update is available.

Yesterday's launch gives WordPress sites the availability of a new blog-centric theme (Twenty Thirteen), "bullet-proof" autosave and post locking, a revamped revision browser, native support for audio and video embeds, and improved integration with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.

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:

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.

But ‘keyword domains’ are less important according to a comprehensive analysis of factors that correlate with ranking highly in Google US searches in 2013

Web pages that rank higher in Google searches tend to have more Google+ plus ones and Facebook shares. While having a relevant keyword in the web site domain name or web address now seems less closely linked with high rankings according to new research. And while pages with higher quality content rank better, top brand web pages apparently continue to automatically rank in top positions without obeying the same rules as other sites.

Acquia announced significant growth in revenue and bookings as the company’s open source solutions are becoming more widely adopted. Acquia’s year-over-year revenue grew by 108 percent in 2012. According to the Boston Business Journal, this puts Acquia's revenue for 2012 at $45.3 million. Momentum continued in the first quarter of 2013, as Acquia’s bookings increased 52 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012 and more than 15 percent over the quarter prior.

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.

Tags are not just for articles but is also integrated tagging into other areas of the Joomla core that made sense. Extension developers will be happy to note that tagging in Joomla 3.1 also provides the necessary API changes to integrate Tags with extensions.  Extension developers will also have the ability to develop innovative ways to use tagging beyond what is in the core CMS.

For the past few years, CMS Report has generally not posted CMS announcements for new releases 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 until now. 

Some of the many "minor" changes in Drupal 7.22 include: