The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.

The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:

Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:

• Inventory management
• Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
• Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
• Shopping cart functionality

While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.

"AMS is a highly modified version of the News 1.2 for Xoops, and adds a huge amount of features to give the webmasters a lot more control over their content while still maintaining an easy to understand and use interface. AMS is highly scalable, and is geared towards performance, and as such is well suited to large article repositories that attract high amounts of users."

Complete Story

"XOOPS is changing its look, thus, with the support of the Design Team, we decided to launch a Theme Contest to choose 3 new designs to be released with the next major XOOPS release and beyond. The contest is open to all : individual, group, or web agency (professional or not).

Now is your opportunity to take mouse and keyboard in hand and create the new XOOPS look"

Complete Story

Yes, Wordpress and XOOPS are two completely separate projects, but they do have at least one thing in common. Both Web applications were updated this past week to adddress known security vulnerabilties.

Recently posted at XOOPS.org was a how-to for optimizing XOOPS on your server.

Optimizing Xoops, its modules and your server - Sometimes, people are telling that Xoops is rather slow and it can be true but there are ways to improve things.

Instant Zero is in charge to maintain some websites using Xoops, so we decided to share with you our knowledge in this domain and we hope that you will find it useful.

In this article, and in 5 points, you are going to see what you can do for your site.

Editor's Note: As of this writing an XOOPS post on two community initiatives is showing more HTML code than text. Since I'm not sure when they'll get the code/editor/content thing straigten up, I've placed an editied post below.

The XOOPS Foundation is very proud to announce the support of two very inspiring community initiatives: the recently opened XOOPSDOCS.org and the brand new XOOPSADDONS.org!

"The XOOPS development team is pleased to announce the release of XOOPS 2.0.17.1.

This is merely a bugfix release. Some main changes include:

• Bugfix for login problems with some IE browsers caused by session_regenerate_id on some PHP versions;
• Improvement on uploader mimetype check"

Complete Story

This site will allow you to contact the XOOPS Foundation directly: in order to request support for XOOPS related projects (liaison, conferences, exhibitions, publicity, documentation, representation, and more). It will also allow you to donate to future XOOPS Foundation projects, to allow the continued support to the Community & Project.