Bryan Ruby

The developers of mojoPortal have recently released a new version of their CMS, mojoPortal 2.3.5.8. Some of the new features include:

• A new Flickr Gallery feature
• A new User Sign In Module that can be put on a content page such as the home page
• A new scroller setting in the Feed Manager to enable a scrolling news ticker
• Some improvements to the List/Links feature including a new introduction that can be used to place html above the list and a new option for non-ajax paging
• Database authentication and LDAP - a new config setting for fallback to LDAP if database authentication fails. This allows scenarios where your internal users such as content authors can login with their LDAP credentials while still allowing public users to register and sign in with database credentials.
• A new option to disable CSS caching while designing by clicking a button that sets a cookie to disable it. The previous way of of disabling it from config still works but this new way may be more convenient. You will find the button under Administration > Advanced Tools > Designer Tools
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.4.2
• Updated Italian resources
• Bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the previous release including several fixes in the SQL CE data layer and the Firebird data layer.

The latest version of mojoPortal is available on the site's download page.

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:

Sheri Bigelow, Happiness Engineer at Automattic, gives tips on providing technical user support to WordPress bloggers. Her tips easily can crossover to other customer support tasks in the information technology field.

As some of you know, I'm very interested in how government and large organizations are using information systems, collaboration tools, and social media. This past weekend, I had a chance to read some of the trade magazines stacked under my desk and collecting dust. I came across a great article published in Government Computer News that discussed how emergency management is using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

The artice, written by Rutrell Yasin, lists five ways to use social media for better emergency response which include:

Yesterday, I received a press release from one of Liferay's marketing people. Instead of just publishing the press release, I thought I'd also include the part of the email that also introduces the product. This is a  good way for you to get an insider's look to how marketing relationships between a site such as CMS Report and the CMS companies are established. Kyle's introduction to the product actually peaked my interest into Liferay more than the press release and may help you consider Liferay as part of your enterprise solution.

Hi Bryan,

Liferay (makers of the Java open source portal that was recently voted a leader in Gartner's magic quadrant), has developed its own support issue tracker that is included in the Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Editions. Liferay used to use JIRA, but needed to make some tweaks to simplify the support process - so they built this using their own Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition.

Liferay is used by hundreds of thousands of developers; as Gartner reported in the report above, a "surprising amount" of enterprises ask Gartner about Liferay's portal.

Press release is below.

Thanks,

Kyle

Liferay Releases LESA to Enterprise Customers

Los Angeles, CA - November 30, 2010: Liferay, Inc., provider of the market’s fastest growing enterprise portal product, recently announced the availability of the Liferay Enterprise Support Application (LESA), a new multifaceted support issue tracker, designed to simplify and streamline the enterprise support experience for its customers. The web application, available through the Liferay Customer Portal, provides Liferay Enterprise Edition customers a clean and simple interface to improve interactions with the Liferay support team.

LESA features a simplified user interface that greatly improves the support experience for both developers and non-technical administrators. Customers will benefit from having one application that aggregates, organizes, and monitors disparate data and services in the support process. Customers can now search tickets by username, issue severity, due date, and other attributes. This will simplify how customers track open tickets and allows them an efficient escalation process. LESA’s ability to issue multiple assignees also improves productivity by permitting more people to work on a ticket at a given time.

“Customers who have tested LESA have been very pleased with the capabilities and have reported quicker and more accurate resolutions,” said Craig Kaneko, Liferay’s Director of Support and Subscription Services. “Customers report that usability and accessibility are much higher with LESA than what is available from other support systems, including those of the world’s largest software providers.”

Built entirely on Liferay Portal 6EE, LESA, is now available to all Enterprise Edition customers. For more information, please visit www.liferay.com. 

CMS Made Simple is the winner in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award category of the 2010 Open Source Awards. CMS Made Simple has won this Award for the first time in the past five years, having been a presence in the Award since 2007. Packt also announced  SilverStripe as first runner up with MODx in the second runners up position.

I had the privilege of sitting as a judge in this year's Open Source CMS Award category. My vote was a little different from the official award ranking where I would have placed mojoPortal, another 2010 award finalist, in a runnerup position.  I may have been the only judge that may have ranked mojoPortal in the top three positions. As I've done similarly in past years, in the near future I'll post how I judged the finalists in this category. However, it is now CMS Made Simple's well deserved moment and I won't take the spotlight away from them with my personal ramblings.

Attached below is the official press release I received from Packt Publishing announcing CMS Made Simple as the winner of the Open Source CMS Award. Congratulations to all those involved int he development and support of this great open source CMS.

Yesterday, I received an email from SilverStripe Co-Founder, Sigurd Magnusson. For all the years I have been corresponding with Sigurd, I don't think I've ever seen him as excited as he was this time in breaking the news. SilverStripe, a web development company delivering open source content management systems (CMS) has achieved Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2 for version 2.4.0 of their flagship product, SilverStripe CMS. This is a world first, as the software is the only truly open source web application to achieve certification on the Windows platform.

What is a little different about this story is that it is not only SilverStripe's press relations people making a big deal about this story. Microsoft is making a big deal about the accomplishments of SilverStripe. Andrew Gordan, Microsoft's New Zealand’s Platform Strategy Manager writes:

A large amount of the innovation in the software world is happening on the web and in the cloud, and in addition to that, we are seeing increased awareness and acceptance of open source software on the Microsoft Windows platforms.

Microsoft's Certified for Windows programs are well known for indicating software and hardware products that have been thoroughly tested to work well on Microsoft Windows and as of today, SilverStripe CMS is the first Open Source web application to complete the comprehensive testing necessary to achieve "Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2" status.

In his own blog post, Sigurd mentions that the certification for SilverStripe has been a long but rewarding road. A large proportion of the SilverStirpe's  community and clients use Microsoft servers, databases, and other technology. Over the past three years there an effort has been made for the SilverStripe CMS to work with Microsoft's operating system, web servers, and SQL Server database product.

Packt Publishing announced that Pimcore has won the Most Promising Open Source Project Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Most Promising Open Source Project Award  is a revamped category for the Award this year, featuring Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, the founding member of Pimcore. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects. The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community.” Added Marc Delisle, system administrator and one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

While Pimcore occupied the top spot in the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category, TomatoCMS came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by social networking software package BuddyPress.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has five more categories left, including the Open Source Graphics Software category, for which results will be announced from November 16th through to November 19th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit Packt's Open Source Awards site.

This is a very cool product from salsaDev which takes us one step closer to the Semantic Web. The salsaAPI 2.0 helps turn unstructured text into smart content. The video below explains it much better than I or even the press release I've attached below. My thanks to Stéphane Croisier (Jahia and also a salsaDev Board Member) for recommending that I take a look at this product.

SalsaAPI 2.0: the next-generation content intelligence engine

Geneva, November 10, 2010 – salsaDev SA is happy to announce it just closed its Series A Financing round exceeding $1 Mio, with institutional and private investors. salsaDev is simultaneously releasing its new product, salsaAPI 2.0 (api.salsadev.com), leveraging the 2nd generation of its flagship technology. salsaAPI automates text analysis and semantic indexing on large volumes of information, helping organizations reach the next level of content intelligence.

The salsaAPI 2.0 offers a powerful RESTful API to index various sources of raw content, automatically enrich it with additional metadata and match it with texts of similar meanings. The product combines a comprehensive set of features into one single offering, including text analysis, intelligent search & discovery and content mining. As opposed to several competitors, the product can be used online or onsite and can be easily embedded within any 3rd party sites or applications.

A couple weeks ago, one of Magnolia's press people gave me a sneak preview of a case study for how the Magnolia CMS was being used by one of their partners in redesigning the recruitment website of the United States Navy, Navy.com. I was given the opportunity to write a story about the redesign before the case study was published online. It was a great opportunity I was being offered but I just wasn't able to find the time in my schedule to write the story.

So it is only fitting, that I at least talk about this case study on the Navy's use of the Magnolia content management system on Veteran's Day. The recent Navy.com was redesigned to be more interactive, more responsive to user needs, and better integrated with social media communities nurtured by the U.S. Navy. Additionally, the site needed to support the Navy’s recently launched new brand, “America’s Navy. A Global Force For Good™”.

As mentioned in the case study, integrators spent six months researching and evaluating open source content management systems. Their evaluation was platform-agnostic; they considered Java, PHP and Python solutions in their research. Key evaluation criteria were:

• Easy to learn and easy to use for content authors
• Short learning curve for designers and developers
• Easy to integrate with custom business objects
• Compliant with Web standards and accessibility guidelines
• Scalable and robust

Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition, together with the Magnolia STK and Blossom module, met all of these criteria. Navy.com is now running on Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition with Magnolia STK and Blossom, Magnolia's instant Spring integration. The infrastructure supporting this site includes an Apache Web Server, Tomcat Application Server, MySQL Database, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.