The use of content management systems in government is a personal and work interest of mine, so this is a panel that I'm looking forward to hear from the speakers. There is actually a lot of diversity in what governments need their CMS to do and I'm curious to see how well the panel handles that diversity. I'm expecting Tony White, Ars Logica, to be the moderator for this panel. 

Leaders from Featured CMSes will be on-hand during this panel discussion to participate in a live analysis of the CMSes, asking probing questions of each, to determine how their represented Content Management System (and supporting community and infrastructure) best meets the demands of today's governmental needs, whether at a municipal, state or federal level.

Represented on this panel are: Lee Middleton (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), Brian Colhounyan (TERMINALFOUR), Benjamin Mack (TYPO3), Ken Wasetis (Plone), Jeff Kline (Accrisoft), and Casey Neehouse (Umbraco). The following questions were asked either by the moderator, Tony White, or audience members. The panels' answers to these questions are paraphrased.  

What features in your CMS make it a good choice for government?

• Plone - Government is already actively using Plone. Plone can address complex and flexible workflow. Import/export capability for security purposes.
• TYPO3 - Addresses accessibility (Section 508 in US government).
• Umbraco - Lots of state agencies are switching to .Net CMS. Umbraco and Dotnetnuke are .Net CMS. Section 508 compliance. 
• Accrisoft - Local government is the specific client for this company...delivering a turnkey solution.
• TERMINALFOUR - The UN is a client. Multi-language is why the UN chose TERMINALFOUR for their CMS. 
• SilverStripe - SilverStripe sees government as partners and have built a very robust product that can be used by government.
• DotNetNuke - Microsoft has helped partner with DotNetNuke which has been a positive in introducing DNN and open source to all level of governments.
  

I'm sitting here in the first session of CMS Expo. I've chosen the track that included the TYPO3 Overview session because TYPO3 is one of the few content management systems at the conference I know little about. Yes, I've heard the name TYPO3 but that is about the CMS. Benni Mack, Release Manager for TYPO3 version 4.4, is speaking. I don't know if you can consider this blogging "live" but I'll update the past as the session goes on.

TYPO3 is a mature, enterprise-level, open-source content management system that has been actively developed for ten years. There are currently over 500,000 installations of TYPO3 worldwide. TYPO3 has over 4000 freely available extensions, has been translated into over 30 languages, and is actively being developed in a community of over 100,000 users. The TYPO3 package has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from Sourceforge and is used by enterprise-level organizations worldwide.

Notable remarks presented in this session:

• TYPO3 is marketed as "THE enterprise CMS in Europe". Forty percent of municipalities in the Netherlands use TYPO3. This CMS is really big in Europe. I hope to ask why they are having a difficult time breaking into the United States market.
• Element-based CMS that sits on PHP and runs on mySQL (and other databases).. Effective Image Manipulation, Flexible Content Elements (Drupal and other CMS users may know this as CCK).
• TYPO3 is completely community driven with backing. TYPO3 released under GPLv2 in 2003 and TYPO3 Association in Switzerland in 2004.
• TYPO3 has a core...with an extension system. Benni has a sign on his slide with "Warning: It's real open source". However, core is definately stable and most extensions work. Extensions can also be installed by one click from typoe3.org. Something we're finally seeing more and more in other open source CMS.
• Media assets handled in some in core, but there is a host of extensions that can handle the variety of multimedia as well as manage it.
• TYPO3 is good in "complicated setups" found in the enterprise. TYPO3 is good for long life cycles found in the enterprise. 

I asked the question on there thought about the limited size of the TYPO3 community here in the United States. Both speaker and an audience member says TYPO3 has started to really push their presence in the US in the past couple years. This CMS is just waiting for its moment to be seen as the platform choice for a larger Web site.

For the blogger, the most difficult day of the year has to be April Fools' Day. This is the day where jokes are played and stories are made  up. Computer geeks and CMS junkies easily get into the spirit of this celebrated day by pulling all kinds of online pranks. One of my fondest April Fools memories is from 2007 when the official Japanese and Russian Drupal sites migrated for a day from the Drupal CMS over to Joomla!. Good times, good times. The folks over at ocProducts have gotten into the 2011 April Fools spirit by announcing ocPortal 7 with HTML6.

I need your help! Please help me keep track of all the CMS related April Fools' stories that you find online.  Please feel free to add to my list by of content management pranks via a comment below or through Twitter. If you prefer to tweet the story instead I suggest we start using the Twitter hashtag: #aprilfoolscms.

List of Fake Content Management Stories on April Fools Day 2011

1. ocPortal - ocProducts announces ocPortal 7 with HTML6
2. Drupal - Announcing CertifiedToSUCK.com
3. TYPO3 - New paradigm for TYPO3 4.6 development
4. Drupal - Announcing the Drupal Retail Store
5. Joomla - Joomla Templates from YOOtheme
6. Real Story Group  - No more content management
7. Sharpened.net - The End of the Keyboard and Mouse
8. IBM developerWorks - Scrum Alliance 2.0
9. CMS Made Simple - Intuit Announces Acquisition of CMS Made Simple
10. Enano - Enano merges with Joomla!
11. EpiServer - EPiFAX 1.0 Released
12. Plone - Plone Announces New Release Naming Scheme Effective April 1

I received an email from someone that wanted me to talk about TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS. The suffix “LTS” stands for “Long Term Support”. For the first time a TYPO3 version will be maintained by the TYPO3 Core Team significantly longer than the usual release cycle would suggest. In 2010 TYPO3 has switched to a fixed 6-month release cycle which means up to now support for a version was only provided for 18 months (only three of the latest three versions actively maintained). The LTS versions will be supported for at least 3 years thus offering a good option for users that don’t need or don’t want to update every 6 months.

TYPO3 is used for a great variety of websites ranging from the smallest private homepage up to large multi-server, multi-language enterprise portals. Upgrading for everyone is reported to be easy, since the development team focused on maximum backwards compatibility with older releases. This provides a very easy and stable migration path to TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS.

Older features are still supported and the use of deprecated features can be easily tracked in a log file. If you're still stuck in the dark ages of the browser war, you'll also want to note that TYPO3 Version 4.5 LTS is the last release to support Internet Explorer 6 for the Backend.

New features and improvements found in TYPO3 Version 4.5 include:

• A fast and flexible pagetree based on, configurable Backend layout and rearranged editing forms for pages and content elements.
• The new LiveSearch box providing instant auto-completion. A similar technology empowers input fields to find connected records in a snap.
• The whole Backend gets an optical facelift. Icons, colors and the general arrangement of elements were streamlined. Many details were fixed to provide a more consistent appearance and workflow.
  

It's not too often that you see notices from the TYPO3 group on security issues related to their CMS framework. That's why their notice last week about various security issues with several third party TYPO3 extensions caught my attention.

Several vulnerabilities have been found in the following third party TYPO3 extensions:

• Virtual Civil Services (civserv)
• Modern Guestbook / Commenting system (ve_guestbook)
• CWT Community (cwt_community)
• FrontEnd MP3 Player (fe_mp3player)
• Search In Tables (fesearchintable)
• Content Search (gst_contentsearch)
• Multilingual Alias (multilingual_alias)
• Myth Repository (myth_repository)
• References database (t3references)

Further information on the security issues can be found at TYPO3.org.

There is a new version of TYPO3 available, version 4.2.  There are lots of usability and performance improvements in this latest package. 

The main focus of the new 4.2 version is improving usability, but there are also many enhancements for system administrators and developers. Including bug fixes, there are nearly 650 enhancements in TYPO3 4.2.

What is very interesting about this version of TYPO3 is that it is one of the first CMS that have dropped full support for PHP 4 in a stable release.  TYPO3 and a number of other Web projects took the "goPHP5" pledge earlier this year and we watched it happen.  To run TYPO3 you will want need to make sure you have PHP 5.2 or greater on your Web server. 

TYPO3 version 4.2 can be downloaded from TYPO3.org. Technical documentation and the release notes can be found at typo3.org/development/articles/release-notes-42.

Joomla!'s announcement from June 15, 2007 that began Joomla! is moving to ensure the future of the project by committing to compliance with the GNU/GPL license was a bit shocking to many accustomed to the Mambo proprietary extension licensing exception.

TypoScript is a declarative programming language that offers developers, administrators, and designers full control over the configuration of TYPO3 and its template engine. Only with a good command of TypoScript can you leverage the powerful capabilities of the TYPO3 engine, to customize and control all aspects of your TYPO3 sites. If you're serious about TYPO3 as your content platform, you need to master TypoScript.

A new "bugfix" for TYPO3 has been released. Some of the major fixes in TYPO3 4.0.3 are for:

• Internet Explorer 7 compatibility
• Some minor fixes to the Extension Manager
• Some small tweaks for PHP5 were made
• Some fixes for the Tools>User Admin Module “SU” mode
• A security enhancement prevents image access through thumbs.php.
• and much more...

The original TYPO3 announcement including links to release notes and downloads is available at TYPO3.org.

Wyatt Barnett in his Sitepoint article, "I've Never Met a Boxed CMS I Like" makes some very valid points about content management systems straight out of the box. Take note that he isn't just talking about commercial products but also open source systems. His first complaint about "boxed" CMS:

The first issue is that the very nature of a CMS is not easily boxable, without creating an application that tries to do everything for everyone and fails at doing most things particularly well. The tasks required for content management are generic, but every organization has a far different focus when it comes to how that content should be managed and how it thinks about that content. I have lost days of meetings trying to help subject matter experts understand that an article, according to this system, is really a page. Trying to make a generic application to handle this for all comers is a very, very tricky prospect.

Sadly, his post doesn't really offer a solution. I assume building your own CMS is the only alternative to the boxed version. But I have to ask, who really has the time? I think there are some obvious reasons you see so many capable software developers are using open source software such as Wordpress, TYPO3, e107, Alfresco, and Drupal for their Web presence.

"Ingo Renner has written a nice article about extension keys, maintaining them and pass them to others. Here is an extract of that article right from his blog."

Complete Story