The problem I have with top ten lists is that inevitably there is a story that should have made the list but didn't. Last week, I posted CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2011 and wished I could have included additional stories. The articles listed were ranked by popularity based by how many times viewed and the rate that they were viewed through the year. Popular stories do not always signify well written articles and they aren't always an indication of my personal favorites.

In case you missed these stories the first time around, below are ten additional content management articles we published in 2011. Every article deserves a second chance to be highlighted or tweeted again.

• Book Club: MODX The Official Guide
• Open Source CMS, Market Share Report, and White Elephants
• Review of Drupal's Building Blocks
• Judging Five Open Source Content Management Systems
• Book Club: Pro Drupal 7 Development
• DotNetNuke 6 Released (Screenshots included)
• List of Fake Content Management Stories from April Fools Day 2011
• Drupal 7 has been officially released 
• Moodle 2.1 Released
• More than an Introduction to Accrisoft
  

At this moment, I have a tall stack of unread books related to content management systems sitting in front me. Publishers and authors apparently like my review style because new books continue to be sent my way. However, reading a book from cover to cover for a review (the last one being six months ago) takes time and I just haven't been able to keep up with the required reading. So with admission that I haven't read every page of these books, I've decided to at least start posting mini-reviews of select books and hoping that this move is still a win-win-win for publishers, authors and readers.

So in Oprah style, welcome to CMS Report's Book Club. The first book of this new series is Bob Ray's MODX: The Official Guide. This is the first book published by MODX Press and represents how much the MODX community recognizes the need to get quality CMS books about their projects into the hands of developers and users. I've had a couple conversations with MODX's Jay Gilmore and have witnessed the huge effort and level of support taking place to get this book published.

Becoming a publisher is no easy task but we felt no-one else was going to do it as well as we will at this stage. We have at least 3 other books including one that is nearly complete in the works for release over the next 3 quarters from MODX Press. The first one is the hardest. [Gilmore]

Everett Griffiths recently wrote a comparison between WordPress and MODx over at TipsFor.US. In the article he walks the reader through various CMS comparison factors such as installation, templating, menus, plugins, architecture, custom content, security, and support. This comparison specifically focuses on WordPress 3.1 and MODx Revolution.

Everett writes:

There are a lot of Content Management Systems (CMS’s) out there, so I wanted to give a blow-by-blow analysis comparing two of them: MODx and WordPress. I feel oddly qualified to do so: Brian and I just authored a book on WordPress plugin plugin development (WordPress 3 Plugin Development), and I am a MODx Solution Partner who was invited to speak at the MODxpo conference in Dallas last year. I’ve used both flavors of MODx (Evolution and Revolution) and WordPress while building somewhere around 50 web sites over the past couple years, and I like both systems. I have even contributed a couple plugins for both systems (e.g. Custom Content Type Manager for WordPress). So after the urging of some friends and colleagues (like Kris), I’m organizing my techno-ramblings into a coherent article.

This articles is a fair comparison between WordPress and MODx.  If you're interested in reading the details of the article you should read the original article, WordPress vs. MODx, at the TipsFor.US site.

What a great year 2010 was for content management. Open source CMS projects seemed to have grown up this year while proprietary systems appeared to continue in their evolution. While social publishing systems may not have conquered the traditional content management system, the CMS definitely took notice by integrating as many social media features developers could come up with.

Below are the top ten stories of 2010 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list were ranked by the number of views per month since the articles first appeared at CMS Report. 

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010

1. Someone does another Drupal vs Joomla comparison
2. Open Source versus the Enterprise Solution
3. Ten Content Migration Tools to SharePoint Platform
4. Drupal themes go nuclear with Fusion
5. SilverStripe CMS becomes the first Microsoft Certified open source web app
6. Denial of Service on an Apache server
7. Guidelight Business Solutions video of DrupalConSF 2010
8. Sharepoint 2010 vs WCM Platforms
9. We Hear You: Our spam filtering needs to be improved
10. The MODx Revolution 2.0 Interviev

As you can see, stories on Drupal, Joomla!, Sharepoint, SilverStripe, and MODx brought a lot of visitors to the site. Not all the stories listed above would have been one of the ten I would have personally picked, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking. I personally, don't like "versus" articles yet readers seemed to flock those articles. Unfortunately quality of writing doesn't appear to always matter as there were some very well written articles we posted in 2010 that didn't make this list.

The year 2011 will undoubtedly bring change and new stories to the world of content management systems. I think the year will also be a year of decision for the direction we take CMSReport.com. I feel as if this site of ours is stuck somewhere between our roots as a niche blog and a potentially popular CMS news site. I'm hoping we make some changes in the new year that all our readers can appreciate and value.

As yesterday's press release mentioned, MODx Revolution 2.0.5 has been publicy released.  I thought I would briefly focus on some of the specific changes in this minor release update from the MODx team. Over 175 issues and improvements were addressed in Revolution 2.0.5.

Some of the highlights of Revolution 2.0.5 include:

• Form Customization Revamped
• New Access Policy Templates
• Tighter, more stable code with regards to multiple contexts and filemanager_path settings
• Many xPDO (a newly adopted standard for database persistence in PHP) improvements and fixes
• A number of user interface (UI) fixes, such as Resource Tree enhancements, more phpthumb options, drag/drop improvements
• Fixed issues with APC, WinCache, eAccelerator and other caching systems
• Tightened Security against XSS (cross-site scripting) by adding sanity checks on data transmission
• Fixed issues with radio TVs, resourcelist TV, and other rare TV conflicts

The MODx team recommends that you read Upgrading to Revolution 2.0.5 before upgrading, especially if you use Form Customization, have a Custom Access Policy, or use the extension_packages setting. Revolution 2.0.5 can be downloaded from the MODx CMS website.

Jay Gilmore wrote to us the other day. Jay wanted to make sure we were aware that MODx 2.0.2 was released last Friday. Lots of bug fixes and improvements in this one that you might just notice a performance improvement. You can check out Jay's announcement below or at the MODx site.

MODx Revolution 2.0.2 Brings a Little More Speed and Lots of Little Fixes

MODx Revolution 2.0 was officially released nearly 2 months ago and many of you have made the switch from MODx Evolution and others have added it to their toolset. This means many more people using Revolution on a daily basis and this also has given it a real-world workout on production sites. This happily resulted in finding things that needed fixing or improving.

The Revolution 2.0.2 release contains over 80 bugfixes or improvements and here are the highlights:

• More optimizations to the Manager to improve usability and speed, including faster load times.
• Manager tree now remembers where you were on refresh so you don't have to keep clicking the tree.
• Improved Rich Text Editor support, especially in multi-context environments.
• Improvements Package Management so installing add-ons works correctly and smoothly in most environments.
• Improvements to image thumbnails and thumbnail caching in the MODx Browser.
• Template Variables using @bindings now work as they should.
• Added the ability to tab to the next editable field in System Settings (and other autosaving grids)
• Fixed issue where fields revert to original values after save¹

Revolution is only getting better, so download it now to try it or update your existing Revolution sites.

In late July, MODx Revolution 2.0 was released. Before the project's release, I interviewed though email Ryan Thrash, CEO and co-founder of the MODx project, as well as Jay Gilmore. In a joint response, they graciously answered some of my questions about MODx. Below are my questions and their responses from our MODx interview.

CMS Report - The release of 2.0 is a new beginning for MODx...where does MODx go from here?

MODx - MODx Revolution represents a sharp inflection point in our history. We have a lot of very positive announcements to make in the coming weeks, but here’s a high level overview:

• MODX, LLC, is a new company we’ve formed to stand behind the core products and to continue to foster the ongoing development of the software and the MODx ecosystem in general.
• We’re hiring both from within the community and bringing in outside expertise to make sure we have a viable and sustainable business. We’re 1000% focused on accelerating MODx adoption, awareness and continuing to rise as one of the top Open Source content management platforms today. 2011 should be an unbelievable year for MODx uptake.
• We’re looking for qualified developers, consultants and agencies to partner with MODx. They’ll be recognized as MODx experts and Solutions Partners, prominently displayed on our website and outbound marketing efforts, officially launching no later than early 2011. We get a good volume of leads through the website and these will all go to Partners, which is just the tip of the iceberg of benefits from partnering with MODx.
• Similarly, we’ll be launching commercial support services to meet the demand we’ve seen from businesses in the community. We have great offerings to talk about with regard to this later.
• We’re relaunching and totally revamping our websit to better focus on and to serve more stakeholders including end users (at our new modx.com URL). We’ll have dedicated community and developer sections to make learning about MODx easier.

What this all means is that there’s now going to be an organization to hold to account for MODx. We’ve done what we think is a good job as stewards since founding the project, and we’ll have dedicated time and resources to do an even better job going forward.

This past week, the MODx Team released an update of their MODx Evolution CMS, version 1.0.3. This update is a security, bugfix and enhancement release.

The MODx Team considers Evolution 1.0.3 a mandatory update for all MODx Evolution users as it closes some potential vectors that could lead to security compromises with prior MODx releases.

MODx Evolution 1.0.3 also offers more than 45 bugfixes including fixes for IE8 compatibility and the Manager Datepicker and more than 20 enhancements or improvements including adding Templates and TVs capability for custom installer builds, a better organized context menu, core add-on and language updates—all to make the MODx experience better for developers and users.

According to Jay Gilmore, MODx Marketing and Community Development, the "key messages are users should upgrade and the expression of our commitment to the classic codebase".

MODx is a flexible, extensible Open Source web content management platform. It gives developers complete control of critical website infrastructure. MODx is available in more than 20 languages, is supported by a rapidly growing army of geeks already 23,000 strong, and runs hundreds of thousands of websites on the Internet today. MODx was the winner of Packt Publishing’s Most Promising Open Source CMS (2007) and was found tying for 2nd for Best Overall PHP CMS (2009).