Packt is pleased to announce Drupal Intranets With Open Atrium, a new book which introduces readers the power of Open Atrium using practical examples of an Open Atrium Intranet. Written by Tracy Smith, this book provides precise steps to set up a web server on a Windows or Macintosh computer and install Drupal with the Open Atrium distribution.
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Testing popular CMS and blogging systems
For a long time I’ve been really interested in performance aspects of content management systems and smarter blogging systems. This is the reason for my decision to test some of the popular systems on a workbench and to get some technical information about these systems.
The test was quite simple. I installed the packages on my sandbox server and added a function (cip-bench()) to the installation. Then I ran the index page with the default template and configuration. The data I got from the test was limited on the raw index page after the installation. I picked up 5 aspects for the test:
- The first one was the memory usage of the system
- The execution time
- Executed database queries
- How many database tables exist
- And the last parameter shows how many files are required.
It is interesting to see how different some CMS solve their tasks. I was surprised of some results for example 399 database queries of contenido.
To sum up this test I was impressed by chyrp. It’s delivered with an elegant backend and I think it has got a lot of potential to become more popular and famous. The memory usage of wordpress seems to be improved in contrast to previous versions.
Blog
| name | memory | avg time | queries | tables | required files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| chyrp | 5.556 MB | 0.3 – 0.5 | 7-10 | 8 | 63 |
| geeklog | 6.97 MB | 0.6 – 0.7 | 59 | 50 | 38 |
| serendipity | 6.773 MB | 0.5 – 0.55 | 11 | 21 | 48 |
| textpattern | 2.823 MB | 0.2 – 0.3 | 21 | 17 | 12 |
| wordpress | 12.044 MB | 0.4 – 0.6 | 15 | 11 | 73 |
CMS
| name | memory | avg time | queries | tables | required files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cmsmadesimple | 7.543 MB | 1.1 – 1.48 | 38 – 52 | 52 | 92 |
| contenido | 9.562 MB | 0.6 – 0.9 | 254 – 265 (399) | 76 | 123 |
| impressCMS | 10.938 MB | 0.5 – 0.6 | 53-55 | 57 | 139 |
| joomla | 6.289 MB | 0.7 – 0.8 | 7 – 11 | 33 | 127 |
The release of WordPress 3.0
In case you haven't heard, WordPress 3.0 was released last week. This is probably the first time I've been behind in blogging about the official release of a new major version of WordPress. However, since I told you all about WordPress 3.0 coming soon a couple weeks ago, I felt there wasn't a need to rush and tell you to go get WordPress 3.0 and try out all it's new features including taxonomy and multiuser integration. Instead, I spent this past week seeing how others reacted to WordPress 3.0.
As a fan of open source content management systems, its been rather pleasing to see some of the larger technology publications spend more time talking about applications like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. For the tech press, WordPress 3.0 was no exception with some of the major players such as Computerworld, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all making sure they spin out an article reviewing this latest version of WordPress.
What may surprise you though, is that open source CMS is just not an interest of computer geeks. Slowly but surely, open source CMS is the talk of business folks too. For example, both Fast Company and BusinessWeek made sure that they included articles this past week on WordPress 3.0. In the Fast Company article, Francine Hardaway writes some classic things to why business should pay attention to WordPress. Some of my favorite lines from her article, "6 Reasons Small Businesses need WordPress":
- "WordPress can do anything you need it to do, and for a small business, that's a gift usually reserved for expensive sites."
- "Plug-ins for WordPress are the business-to-business version of apps for the iPhone."
- "WordPress no longer looks like a blog. For small businesses who wouldn't know a blog from a bag of potato chips, WordPress is a website, otherwise known as a content management system."
These are all some fantastic words from Hardaway and I think they show that applications such as WordPress are making a significant impact in the business world. I wouldn't call WordPress an ECM, but it most definately walks and talks like a CMS for the small business folks. If you haven't taken a look at WordPress in quite awhile, I'd encourage you to take a new look at this application.
Below is the summary video from the WordPress folks introducing you to WordPress 3.0. Enjoy.
Movable Type 5 features social publishing
Six Apart announced the release of Movable Type 5 this week. Traditionally a blogging application, Movable Type 5 brings new features into the Web application that evolves it into a more rounded social publishing system. This release includes two versions:
- Movable Type 5.01 - commercial license
- Movable Type Open Source 5.01 - open source license
The goal of Movable Type 5 is to give businesses, organizations and individuals a single, unified software package with integrated website and blog capabilities. It's been enhanced for the easy creation, administration and management of websites and blogs - all from a single user dashboard.
Here are some of the new and improved features in MT5:
- A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.
- A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.
- Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.
About CMSReport.com
Welcome to CMS Report!
For sponsorship and advertising opportunities please see our Advertising at CMSReport.com page.
CMSReport.com was founded in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers have a deep desire to visit online news site where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch. The primary focus of this site is Web content management systems (CMS) as well as on the people that are involved developing and using content management solutions. CMS Report has a healthy interest in opinions and stories that involve open source and proprietary CMS solutions.
Most of the activity here at CMS Report involves informing readers of the latest happenings in the world of content management systems followed by discussion (comments). We currently provide the information we do through three sources:
- Original content written by contributing authors
- Aggregated news feeds (RSS/Syndicated news)
- Comments from visitors
- Selected Press Releases
Have a story idea that you would like to see posted here at CMS Report? See our Submit Story page for details. In brief, all you need to do is register an account here at CMS Report. Any stories or links you submit will need to be reviewed by the editor before we publish it on the site. More than likely, you will see your article or link posted within a day or two after you have submitted it to us.
CMS Topics:
"Snappy" Movable Type 4.3 is Available
This week, Matt Jacobs announced the availability of Movable Type 4.3. Jacobs calls Movable Type 4.3 "snappy" and states that this release "makes composing, publishing, and searching in Movable Type easier than ever".
Version 4.3 of this social publishing platform includes the following new features and improvements:
- Smarter Search and Pagination - Several new ways to drill down your search (author, category and date), which lays the groundwork for the ability to paginate your index and archives. The ability to paginate comments, which will dramatically improve publish times on prolific comment threads.
- Entry Asset Manager - Movable Type has been improved by the way it handles assets like photos, which means it's much easier to make slideshows and editing entries that use assets.
- Summary Object Framework - This is Movable Type's first step in dramatically improving performance for larger installations.
Cool App: Wordpress for BlackBerry
Although I'm not a big BlackBerry fan, I can't help but think having the Open Source Wordpress for BlackBerry application on the device would be pretty cool. This application for writing, managing, and editing your blog works whether your blog is found at Wordpress.com or self-hosted.
BlackBerry operating system OS requirements are OS 4.2.1 or newer. In other words, Wordpress for BlackBerry should work on any of the newer BlackBerry smartphones including the 8700, Pearl, Curve, Bold, and Storm.
The BlackBerry application is currently in beta.
Introducing Wordpress 2.8 Video
From Wordpress.TV:
Frontier: Web Site Development And CMS
Never before in the history of human communication has it been so low a barrier and possible for writers and publishers to get their ideas out into the world. Technical barriers for stepping out into the Web world on your own require acquiring the know-how (or hiring and working with someone who has the knowledge) to handle some coding language and technical issues such as site hosting, as well as writing, editing and publishing.
Features to expect in Geeklog 1.6
Geeklog, an open source blogging application, just went into its first beta. This release incorporates some of the work done in projects implemented during the 2008 Google Summer of Code.
New features and improvement you can expect in Geeklog 1.6.0 Beta 1 include:
- Site migration support and easier plugin installation, by Matt West
- Improved search, by Sami Barakat
- Comment moderation and editable comments, by Jared Wenerd
- A new plugin to produce proper sitemap.xml files, by mystral-kk
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
The Geeklog beta is available for download at the projects official site.
Drupal 6 Social Networking: Communicating with Users
Our users can communicate with one another, which is great, but quite often as an administrator the need may arise for us to communicate with a user or users on our site. It may be to remind them about the web site or to inform active users about new changes to the site, which they may not have been made aware of.
In this tutorial, you will learn:
SiteGround started a company blog
SiteGround web hosting company recently announced the start of its company blog. The blog will open new opportunities for a closer interaction with the customers and will provide ideas for further improvement of the customer service delivered by the company.
The company blog opens the floor for sharing ideas and stimulates more friendly and personal communication with customers. It also reveals the human face behind www.siteground.com – who are the people behind the scenes and what are SiteGround values, beliefs, and corporate culture. The SiteGround Blog Team also promises to provide their readers with interesting insights behind the scenes of the web hosting business.
Wordpress remains top blog platform
Royal Pingdom completed a survey looking at the top blog platforms of the top 100 blogs. This survey mirrors other studies that I've read showing that Wordpress is king of the blog platform.
We found that Wordpress is the most-used platform among self-hosted
blogs, which perhaps isn’t a huge surprise. It has more than twice as
many blogs in the top 100 as Movable Type, the blog platform that came
in second place.
- Wordpress is used by 27 blogs in the top 100.
- Movable Type is used by 12 blogs in the top 100.
- Only 8 of the top 100 blogs use a custom-made blog platform.
- Drupal is the only general-purpose CMS with any presence worth mentioning, with 4 blogs in the top 100.
Royal Pingdom also takes a look at the role of blog services and blogging networks in the top 100 blogs. I personally prefer to run my own Web applications instead of relying on a blogging service. I have nothing against the blogging services, it is just that I like to be in control. Also, there is always a question of who really owns the content of your blog when using a blog service. If you use a blog service, be sure you always read the "terms of use". After reading the fine print, you might be surprised who really has the final say on your blog.
Improvise with Wordpress 2.7
Earlier today, Matthew Mullenweg announced the official release of Wordpress 2.7. This new version of Wordpress is a dandy with significant improvements made to the Wordpress administrative interface and dashboard. The choices you now have to customizing our blogging workflow is almost endless.
While we could start reading off from the changelogs for all the new features in Wordpress 2.7, It's probably just as easy to show you the video.
You can download the latest version of Wordpress from the download page at Wordpress.org.
Top CMS in the top 100 blog sites
CMS Wire recent took a look at Technorati's Top 100 blog sites and determined which CMS the sites were using most. They concluded, not surprisingly, that Wordpress was the most popular CMS with 34% of the top sites using the blogging application.
Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second [16%], and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.
Probably more interesting, is that full-fledged CMS barely made a dent in the top 100 list.
Wider scope Web CMS technologies are not used much by the top blogs. Drupal scores 5 sites, with Plone used by 1. Other popular Web CMS platforms are conspicuous only by their absence.
CMS Wire isn't saying that CMS are not good for blogging. I think what CMS Wire is observing is that when users want to only blog...they prefer to keep it simple. Why use a CMS with more features than they possibly can use when something like Wordpress or Movable Type can do the job? At least that is what I get from the article.
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