Bryan Ruby

A few days ago, the Liferay product and engineering teams announced the release of Liferay Portal 6.1 CE. Last fall, during the Liferay West Coast Symposium, CMS Report was able to get a sneak peak of the features that Liferay Portal 6.1 had to offer. We were impressed then and we're even more impressed now with the changes that have been made since then.

Liferay Portal ships with broad product capabilities and provides more function than you would expect from a traditional portal. Besides having the capability as a web platform, Liferay Portal is also capable of supporting content and document management (including Microsoft office integration). Additional capabilities include:

• Web Publishing and Shared Workspaces
• Enterprise Collaboration
• Social Networking and Mashups
• Identity Management

Liferay issues their portal software under two licenses, an open source community edition and an enterprise edition. The Liferay community edition we're talking about in this article is specifically designated as Liferay 6.1 CE GA1.  In addition to the numerous bugs that have been fixed since 6.0 GA4, many new features and improvements have gone into this release.

The release of Joomla 2.5, a popular open source content management system, is expected to occur within the next few weeks. This release gives Joomla! fans a reason to celebrate and those new to the CMS a chance to consider Joomla! for thier next project. Like clockwork, the Joomla community is preparing the way by educating the masses on the new features and enhancements included in this version. I'm not an expert on the Joomla! development process, but I'm going to do my best here in summarizing the information that I've gathered so far on Joomla 2.5.

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
  

A reader of CMS Report asked me to give the latest version of Foswiki some love and attention to this open source "enterprise wiki" with an article. Not a problem as this is why I'm here!

Eight months in the making, Foswiki 1.1.4 comes with some new features and more than 160 crunched bugs relative to the previous release. Here are some highlights of new features and enhancements included in this package:

When I read the stories we post here at CMS Report, I am reminded how quickly the CMS market continues to evolve and mature. Every year, I worry that there is nothing "new" to write about in this information system niche only to have the developer, user, or owner of a CMS push another new story idea toward my screen. This time around when looking for the top ten content management stories of the year, I concluded we didn't have ten great CMS stories for 2011. Instead, I found more than two dozen great CMS stories for 2011.

Below are the top ten stories of 2011 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list are ranked based on the rate they were viewed since they first appeared at CMSReport.com.

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2011

1. The 2011 Open Source Awards
2. Google+ first week of use review
3. 10 New Content Management Systems via CMS Focus
4. Another new term: Social Content Management
5. CMS Expo 2011 Series
6. Liferay Marketplace and Liferay Portal 6.1
7. CMS Redefined: Cloud. Mobile. Social
8. CMS Report upgrades to Drupal 7
9. DotNetNuke, Drupal, Liferay, and SharePoint in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals
10. CMS in the Fast Lane: Joomla! 1.7
    

As a former meteorologist, I think it goes without saying that by default I will talk about any content management system with "cumulus" in the name. In this case, I'm talking about CumulusClips, a video sharing CMS officially out of Beta and released a stable version (v.1.1).

If you are in need of sharing videos but a little uneasy with allowing someone else manage those videos then perhaps CumulusClips is your answer. Requirements for hosting CumulusClips aren't too difficult to meet although you'll want plenty of memory for all that video encoding you'll need to do for new videos uploads.

The 1994 Knight-Ridder video I attached at the bottom of this post  is a fantastic reminder that the tablet predates the iPad and Android tablet by many decades. During the "hypermedia" era of the late 1980's, I can recall taking a "tech of the future" class where my professor discussed in similar detail what a tablet might look like in the future. He described a day where students would be sitting under trees reading not from paper books but utilizing exactly what we know today as the digital tablet. 

 Believe it or not though, the origins of the tablet computer date back to the 19th century.

A new version of mojoPortal is out and about. The developers consider  the release of mojoPortal 2.3.7.5 a "significant release with lots of new goodness". New features and improvements in this version include Windows Llive Writer support, IOS 5 support, and forum enhancements.

The following is a more detailed list of improvements in mojoPortal 2.3.7.5:

• Improvements to Windows Live Writer support. A completely new implementation of metaweblog api with new support for Creating and Editing CMS pages in addition to Blog posts.
• Support for Windows Azure AppFabric cache and new guidance for hosting mojoPortal on Windows Azure.
• New button in Add/Edit Pages (aka PageTree.aspx) to resort child pages of the selected page alphabetically.
• IOS 5 support for rich text editors: Use of WYSIWYG editors CKeditor and TinyMCE is now possible in IOS 5 devices.
• Default roles for new root level pages has been promoted from a web,.config setting to site settings.
• New permission for Roles That Are Allowed To Set Page Level Skins (when page level skins are enabled).
• File Dialog used in the editors now shows meaningful messages when a user's file system quotas prevent upload
• Updated to jQuery 1.7.1 and jQueryUI 1.8.16 when using the Google CDN.
• Webstore improvements: 1) There is a new provider model for OrderCompletedEventHandlers that allows developers to plugin custom code that will be executed after payment clears on an order. 2) It is now possible to checkout in webstore with a zero balance.
• Forum improvements: 1) New setting to copy the posting user on the notifications. 2) New setting to suppress email notifications when a user edits an existing post. 3) New setting to limit the timespan in which a user may edit his post.

mojoPortal 2.3.7.5 is available now on mojoPortal's download page. Information on this page was provided via the official announcement.

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyke's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.