Content Management

As an online marketer, I used to work in different environments, but since joining Foliovision, I spend virtually all my time on our clients’ content management systems. Some days ago, I logged into a completely different CMS after a long time. It didn’t look bad at first glance, but spending just a few minutes working with this interface was enough to see the striking difference between this CMS and our own; this one was really medieval! I am a marketer, certainly not a hard-boiled developer, and for the first time, I’ve summarized my thoughts about what makes a good CMS. These are the pillars of success but also the risks involved.

I. Low initial costs

On May 8th, 9th, and 10th, you and I have the opportunity to attend 2012 CMS Expo which is held once a year in Chicago. This event is billed as as CMS "Learning & Business" conference showcasing some of the world's leading Content Management Systems and the people who power them. Whether the CMSs featured are proprietary or open source, focused on small business or enterprise, non-profit, government or commercial applications, there’s something for everyone at CMS Expo.  

Last year, CMS Report attended the conference for the first time and we were literally blown away with the diversity of people attending the conference. Lots of people like to focus on the software and design (and that's fine), but for me content management is also about people. CMS Expo has historically been the place for CMS leaders, CMS developers, site users, and business owners to meet all under one roof. CMS Expo offers a one-of-a-kind opportunity to learn about today's leading CMSs, and get to the truth about what works, from both a vendor and a user perspective. 

There are over a dozen content management systems that will be showcased at CMS Expo. The CMSs that we are aware of include; Joomla!, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Mura, MODX, TYPO3, Sitefinity, Wondercode, Hannon Hill (Cascade Server), Liferay, Pyro, Movable Type, and Cloud CMS. We're telling you this is the conference not only to learn more about your favorite CMS but also to possibly discover your next CMS that is right for your business.

If you plan to attend, do not forget to register for CMS Expo 2012. Registration grants you FULL ACCESS to all sessions, panels, keynotes and expo hall, so you won't miss a thing. Your ticket also includes breakfast & lunch each day, plus "endless" coffee (or tea), snacks and more, plus entry to all business & social networking events.

As with last year, CMS Report is a proud media sponsor for the 2012 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, the release of Joomla 2.5 on this day was expected.  Surpringly, knowing the release date seemed to make the wait longer. Without a doubt, Joomla.org will be a busy place the next few days. Joomla's marketing people tell me that Joomla! has been downloaded more than 28 million times and powers more than 1.6 million. Those are pretty significant numbers and this new version of Joomla! is expected to help continue the popularity of this open source CMS.

As I discussed in my previous articles, Joomla! for the first time includes multi-database functionality, beginning with Microsoft SQL. If you read the article, you also know that Joomla 2.5 also includes more than a dozen new features. You'll can also check out those features by going to https://www.joomla.org/core-features.html . But before you hop over to another site, you can find some additional details about Joomla 2.5 right now in this exclusive press release that we've acquired from sources secretly embedded in the Joomla! community.

The release of Joomla 2.5, a popular open source content management system, is expected to occur within the next few weeks. This release gives Joomla! fans a reason to celebrate and those new to the CMS a chance to consider Joomla! for thier next project. Like clockwork, the Joomla community is preparing the way by educating the masses on the new features and enhancements included in this version. I'm not an expert on the Joomla! development process, but I'm going to do my best here in summarizing the information that I've gathered so far on Joomla 2.5.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyke's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.

A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

Over the years, I have gone on record stating the importance in allowing users the ability to leave comments at this site anonymously. I have always recognized that there is a segment of the online community that likes to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave an online trail that can be traced back to personal online accounts. Despite all the trouble I've had with the spammers and bots, the benefits of anonymous comments was always worth it to me in hopes of reading that one life changing comment provided by someone who preferred to stay in the shadows.

This week, Joomla! 1.7 was officially released to the public. New features in this new version of the popular open source content management system include:

As expected, this week the Drupal development team released Drupal 7.3 and Drupal 7.4. 

Drupal 7.3, a maintenance release which fixes security vulnerabilities is now available for download.

Drupal 7.4 also fixes other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.