This week we added three Web applications to our CMS Focus top 30 list.  The CMSs and ECMs listed in CMS Focus are not necessarily the most popular in content management and are not meant to meet everyone's requirements for a CMS. Instead the content management systems that make up this top 30 are what I consider content management "game changers" or "attention getters". New to CMS Focus are the following CMS/ECM: EPiServer, Umbraco, and an unknown CMS called Omeka.

My thanks to all those that made their suggestions to me via Twitter. Besides the three CMS that made the top 30 list, we had enough tweets to call our attention to Enano, Coremedia, Alterian, OpenCMS, SDL Tridion, Jahia, and Nuxeo. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of these additional CMSs making their way onto CMS Focus in the near future.

In order to make room the new entries, we dropped three Web applications out of CMS Focus and into our "Hall of Fame". These applications were Gallery (2006-2010), Frog CMS (2009-2010), and SMF (2006 - 2009). All three applications are fine pieces of softweare for what they are designed to do and are still be worth a look. However, our focus continues to shift to more complete information systems and retirement to the hall of fame were long overdue for these applications.

Now that Gallery 3.0 is in the beta phase of its software development, I feel it's safe to talk about the new features users can expect out of this open source web-based photo album organizer. Now I realize that Gallery is not a full content management system, but I also know there are plenty of people out there that think they need a CMS when perhaps what they really need is something a little simpler. For those that want to build a site to display and share their photography I recommend a look at Menalto's Gallery.

The philosophy behind Gallery 3 development is to make the web application easy and fun to customize with a big focus on usability. The developers have made every effort to make it much easier for the casual developer to hack on the product and do some really cool things with the software. The emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks quick and easy.

New features and enhancements in Gallery 3 include:

• Support for upgrading to further releases
• Full HTTPS support
• Use the EXIF caption (information provided by your digital camera) as the photo description
  

The developers of Gallery, an online photo-album organizer, have officially announced the start of Gallery 3.  I have to say they have a very aggressive release date for the release of version 3.0.

Those of you that have been paying attention know that something is going on! At the Gallery Sprint a few weeks ago, we made a lot of decisions and got the ball rolling on a complete rewrite which we've decided to call Gallery 3. Development of new features on Gallery 2 has been frozen, Gallery 1 is now a completely separate project "Jallery", and the Gallery team is now busy at work on Gallery 3. It's definitely not ready to run on your website yet but we've set the ambitious goal of having a 3.0 release by February 1, 2009 and are on track to meet that goal.

Feature requirements for Gallery 3.0 can be found on the Gallery wiki page.

Gallery 2.3, an open source "photo album organizer", has been released. Lot of new features in this version of the Gallery 2.x branch.  Some of the new features and enchancements include:

• Slideshow module now uses PicLens to provide a rich, full screen slideshow.
• Comment module now offers spam moderation and Akismet support.
• New email notification module allowing users to configure events they wish to get notified for.
• Support for SQLite 3.x as a database backend.
• New SnapGalaxy module for prints from snapgalaxy.com.
• New Jpegtran module to support rotation and cropping of jpeg images.
• New database backup features.
• Themes can now override module template files.
• Performance and stability improvements.
• User interface improvements.
• Security improvements resulting from internal and external audits.

I know I'm a week behind about this, but I just came across the link via Gadgetopia:  Open-source PHP applications that changed the world.  The CMS related applications that were determined world changers are listed below.

• PHP-Nuke - 1999
• eZ Publish - 2000
• osCommerce - 2000
• phpBB - 2000
• Gallery - 2001
• Drupal - 2001
• MediaWiki - 2002
• WordPress - 2003
• Joomla! - 2005
• Magento eCommerce - 2007

When you split the list into three sections, you get the feeling that PHP-Nuke, ezPublish, and osCommerce have been around for a very long time.  More importantly, you begin to think that it is time for Gallery, Drupal, and MediaWiki to either be seen as mature applications or for those applications to finally grow up.

Gallery 2.2.2, a Web application for managing your photos, was released this week.  No new features have been added but over 30 bug fixes were included in this stability release.  Some highlights are:

• Fixed WebDAV for OS X / GNOME clients - Items are now recognized as images
• Fixed fallback theme / theme reset functionality
• Fixed PHP error in fetchWebPage() on too many redirects
• Fixed rewrite rule for embedded core.DownloadItem
• Fixed Upgrade Code for IBM DB2 / MS SQL Server

Check Gallery's download page for the latest version of Gallery.  The original announcement of Gallery 2.2.2's release can be found by clicking here.

With the first release of two release candidates, Gallery 2.2 will be arriving before you know it. Some of the new features in Gallery 2.2 will include:

• Downloadable Plugins
• Added support for themes to display dynamic albums.
• Watermarking changes
• New themes: Carbon and Ajaxian
• New WebDAV module to mount Gallery as network device on your computer. This allows you to easily manage your Gallery with any WebDAV client like Windows Explorer.
• New module to send Ecards.
• New Digibug module for prints from digibug.com.
• Added support for Flash Video and Windows ASF video.
• Photo auto-rotation based on camera sensors or on settings from other applications.

You can download the release candidate from the Gallery 2 Download Page. More information about Gallery 2.2 RC 1 can be found on Gallery's original announcement.

"Gallery 1.5.5 is now available for download. This is primarily a bug fix release, fixing a handful of bugs reported by users and some discovered by our testing team. Even though this release contains no security fixes, we recommend that all users of Gallery 1.5.4 and earlier upgrade to this release to be as bug free as possible."

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The folks at Gallery, an online photo album organizer, are working hard developing the newest version of Gallery in the 1.x line...Gallery 1.6. Gallery 1.6 is currently at Alpha 2 which means that the software is intended for testing purposes and not for use on production servers. If your confused with what I just said then I recommend you wait installing Gallery 1.6 until it has been fully released.

The two primary goals for this new version of Gallery were HTML 4.01 compliance and easier visual customization. Because so many of the code changes were centered around the visualization, it is unlikely that your previous 1.x themes and styles for Gallery are fully compatible with Gallery 1.6. For a highlight of changes and new features as well as download links in Gallery, check out the official announcement located on the application's home site.

The current development schedule calls for Gallery 1.6 to be released at the end of November, 2006. In in the Spring of 2007, Gallery 1.7 will be released and it will likely be the last actively developed version in the Gallery 1.x series to be released. After Gallery 1.7 is released the developers are expected to support it for one year which gives procrastinators the time the need to finally adopt Gallery 2.

"In January of this year we set up a separate forum category for 3rd party modules and themes, in July we added a Gallery 2 Demo Sites showcase, and the list on the user contributions page on the Codex (our official documentation site) has been steadly growing since it went live over a year ago. Gallery just wouldn't be what it is without the hard work of users just like you. Thanks! Related to your hard work, we have some fun things up our sleeves for you to look forward to in the next couple of months: your plugins and themes downloadable from inside of Gallery 2.2, a theme competition, and maybe a surprise or two :).

The most recent contribution we would like to highlight is Joe7's Gallery Theme Demo. It's a very neat site that let's you apply various Gallery 2 Themes, Image Frames, and Color Packs to one Gallery install to see how they might look on your site before downloading them. Thanks Joe7!"

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