The Joomla! community has released a new version of their CMS, Joomla 1.5.3.

The Joomla! community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5.3 [Vahi]. This release is earlier than scheduled in order to correct a database name validation error introduced in 1.5.2. It has been a month since Joomla! 1.5.2 was released on March 23, 2008. The goal is to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla! end user community containing the latest bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Latest bug fixes and enhancements in this release includes:

• Database name validation
• xHTML compliance fixes
• Help screen updates
• JFilterInput infinite loop fix
• PDF fixes for PHP 4
• Minor CSS and RTL issues

Additional information about Joomla 1.5.3 as well as goals for a future release can be found at Joomla.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.

Drupal and Wordpress,  were the only CMS applications that made it to the winner list in CNET's hosted Webware 100.

Over 1.9 million votes were cast for the 300 finalists this year. These finalists were selected (by Webware editors) from a pool of over 5000 qualifying nominees. But the 100 winners were selected by popular vote. These winning 100 products represent the best of the Web, according the people who use it.

Both Drupal and Wordpress were two of ten winners in the "Publishing and Photography" category.  The remaining eight winners in Webware's 100 publishing category were web services and didn't provide stand-alone applications you can install directly on your server.

Radiant 0.6.6 was released over the weekend, shortly after the release of Radiant 0.6.5.  Obviously, 0.6.6 of this built with Ruby on Rails CMS was released to fix some bugs in 0.6.5.  So instead of focusing on the bugs, let's focus on what is new in 0.6.5/6 since Radiant 0.6.4 was released in November 2006.

Since Radiant 0.6.4, the latest versions of the software introduced two major changes:

• Rails 2.0.2 included (0.6.4 used Rails 1.2.5)
• RSpec 1.1.4 is used in core and supported in extensions

ASP.Net based mojoPortal 2.2.5.3 was released.  This release is a minor upgrade with a few bugs fixed  Also FCKeditor , a rich text editor, was upgraded to 2.6 and mojoPortal is now using ExtJs 2.0.2

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Following the latest release of Drupal 6 in February 2008, Packt Publishing is pleased to announce an update to David Mercer’s best selling Drupal 4.7 book. Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 is as much of an overhaul of the original book as Drupal 6 is over Drupal 4.7.

Drupal is a hugely popular and widely celebrated open-source Content Management System that is day-by-day becoming the first choice of people for building blogs and other websites. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hillary Clinton, and many others utilize Drupal to fulfil their online requirements.

The updated book meets the booming demand for well presented, clear, concise, and above all practical information on how to move from establishing the need for a website all the way through to designing and building it like a pro, and finally successfully managing and maintaining it.

Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is a new book from Packt which is written as a practical step-by-step guide to building a website from scratch. Written by Hagen Graf, this book takes the reader through the tasks essential to create a Joomla! website as rapidly as possible.

Joomla! started as a fork from Mambo in 2005, when many of the original developers of the Mambo CMS moved to working on Joomla! It has rapidly grown in popularity and is a cutting Edge Content Management System and one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management systems in the world. It is used world-wide for anything from simple homepages to complicated corporate websites. It is easy to install, easy to manage and very reliable.

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.

"Here’s a fact: intranets don’t have to be crazy-complicated. Intranets are fundamentally about sharing simple information, which is not as hard as some people make it out to be. As simple as this is, most organizations either have no intranet, or a smattering of HTML pages someone threw together with Front Page that no one looks at."

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