Bryan Ruby

I finally got my introduction to Telerik Sitefinity! I was not only the moderator for a panel at last week's CMS Expo, but I also had a chance to attend a few of the many sessions being offered during the conference. One of the first sessions I attended was a presentation focused entirely on Telerik's Sitefinity CMS with Pat Harlow as the presenter for this flyover session.

Telerik Sitefinity CMS is a modern online business platform which adapts to any business requirement and works equally well for online marketers, developers and IT managers.  This session will cover different capabilities of the system – Mobile Web, Form builder, and built-in Ecommerce. Pat Harlow will also highlight the Module Builder and Sitefinity Thunder, which makes developers more productive than Santa’s elves. Join this session to see what’s coming up for the next Sitefinity releases!

For busy people, these sessions are productive and valuable by giving attendees a great overview of a vendor's CMS within a one hour time frame. Despite Telerik being a sponsor here at CMS Report, I never before sat down with their sales people to go over Sitefinity's features. Below are some of notes I took during the presentation as well as my "first" impressions of the Sitefinity CMS.

Jay Gilmore tweeted me this morning to be sure that I made a note of the latest version of MODX Revolution that was released a couple days ago. MODX Revolution 2.2.2 includes a number of important fixes, some performance improvements, and two new wizards to make it easier to create User and Resource Groups in the CMS.

If you're using MODX Revolution and have not upgraded to 2.2, you will find that it has been one of biggest releases for the MODX folks to date. There were also notable improvements and enhancements included in Revolution 2.2.1.

Some of the highlights in the MODX Revolution 2.2.2 release:

Although, I like to consider myself unbiased when I blog about content management systems, it is no secret that Drupal holds a special place in my heart. Drupal was one of the first CMSs I used that didn't "dead-end" me on a project I was required to support. Over the years, the Drupal community has treated me well, even during those times when I was very wrong in my judgment of Drupal. If Drupal was not a part of my world, I'm not sure I would even be blogging about content management systems. Drupal is the open source standard for which I judge other CMSs.

Agility recently announced an update to their Agility CMS which they've labeled under the "May 2012 Release" header. The Agility May 2012 Release offers a complete revamp of their digital asset management system, a whole new system for generating image galleries and thumbnails, and the ability to store and retrieve file and image assets in Agility's new Azure-based content delivery network.

In discussing the redesigned digital asset management system, Agility's Joey Varty blogged about the new features in this release and he highlighted what impressed him most.

You now have sections for Media (which matches the old "Documents" section), a new Image Galleries tab, and a Recycle Bin.

One of my favorite things is the new "Show As Grid" option, giving you thumbnails of all files and images in a folder.  Take a look at the new media selection dialog:
 

You'll notice that the selection dialog looks almost exactly like the Media page.  That's on purpose, of course, and your most recent folder and viewing styles are remembered by the system.

ImpressPages CMS has been updated to version 2.1 and I have to say I'm blown away with the new features included in this open source PHP-based CMS.  Last year, I told you that we all needed to keep an eye on this relatively new content management system. Almost from the start, ImpressPages contained some pretty impressive features including the ability to have most of its content administered directly in the website so you can see what the site looks like as you edit. ImpressPages calls this feature in-place editing. A year later and we continue to see some really cool stuff ImpressPages is doing with their CMS.

Yesterday, MODX Revolution 2.2.1 was released and this new version offers several small enhancements while addressing 85 issues with fixes. New in 2.2.1 is Sudo users. Sudo users is a setting on a user account that gives unrestricted access to the MODX install. This new feature lets site administrators maintain a user account that cannot get locked out of the site while creating access policies for other site administrators and users.

Life is treating Liferay very well these days. After only a few months since Liferay Portal 6.1 was introduced, this company witnessed half a million downloads of their 6.1 software. So what does Liferay decide to do next? How does this sound? Take Liferay through a multi-city roadshow so even more business users and organizations become aware of what Liferay has to offer.

Every year, I find it an honor when I'm asked by open source projects to announce that they have entered been accepted as mentoring organizations into Google's Summer of Code program. I'm a big advocate of college education and I also understand the importance of a summer job to keeping those college bills under control. Open source projects and the Google Summer of Code provides this opportinuty for upcoming software developers. The Summer of Code is a "global program sponsored by Google that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects".

Michael Assad, the CEO and a co-founder of Agility, must have been one busy man with a video camera during this year's SXSW. Michael was able to interview a number of leaders in the Web publishing industry including people working for such groups as Time Inc., Hearst, BBC, the New York Times, and Al Jazeera.

My two favorite interviews includes Michael's interview with Perry Solomon from Time Inc and his interview with Bill Adair from PolitiFact. One of my long standing criticisms of traditional media has been their lack of enthusiasm in embracing digital media. As a blogger, I tend to think that perhaps they "just don't get it" but such an argument would not be honest nor truthful. There are major players in the publishing industry that have known for decades that digital publishing needed to be a part of their business model. That iPad you're using wouldn't have been possible without the amount of brain storming provided years prior by these publishers.

Given one reason or another though, publishers until recently have been slow to deliver their content in the multiple formats and the mediums we prefer. As skilled as the publishing industry may be for delivering digital content their achilles heel has been unwillingness to take necessary risks. That's why this is great video footage from Michael as they show the print industry is now ready to fullly evolve and allow the digital publishing business take to be fully integrated with traditional print. At least that's what I take away from these videos.

I haven't done one these for awhile...a Moodle release announcement. Last year, we took Moodle off our Top 30 CMS Focus list so it isn't on my radar too often. But like so many great content applications out there, just because it isn't on our list doesn't mean you shouldn't still consider them for your CMS.