Bryan Ruby

CMS Wire's Barb Mosher reported about a forum posting by a Google Employee explaining why PageRank has been dropped from the Google Webmaster Tools. Barb writes:

Do you constantly watch the Google toolbar in your browser to see if your Google PageRank has changed? Do you worry constantly about why your rank is less than that of a competitor? Well, there may not be any reason to worry any longer.

Google has dropped PageRank data from Webmaster Tools.

Google has for some time discussed that PageRank is a very small factor among many factors that they look at for placing a particular indexed page on a search results page. Dropping PageRank from the Webmaster Tools appears to be just one more step in moving PageRank away from everyone's attention.

We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. :-)

I have observed that indeed PageRank doesn't matter for placement on Google's search pages. I've seen CMSReport.com's front page ranked from as low as "3" to as high as "7" over the years. Although the page rank has varied over time, the placement of my web pages on the search pages have stayed about the same. Relevancy of the page to the search terms being used seems to have a much greater impact on how well your site ranks with the search engine. Additional details on why Google doesn't see PageRank as a good measurement for a site can be found on one of their Webmaster FAQ.

First Open Source Software to Obtain U.S. Department of Defense 5015.02 Records Management Certification

A new version of Radiant, a Ruby on Rails content management systems, is coming soon. Radiant 0.9.0 has just been released as a release candidate.

In this release the interface for the CMS has been updated to make Radiant more stylish and compact. Apart from the stylistic changes, there are a few other significant changes to the user interface worth mentioning:

I do my best to keep my two IT world's separated. One of those worlds of course is my obsession with content management systems which includes this blog and numerous discussions with almost anyone interested in CMS. The second world is my IT position as a federal employee for a small government field office. In order to avoid conflicts of interest, rarely do I allow those two worlds to cross one another. You'll find very little mention on this blog of my work for the federal government. At the same time, very few people in my agency are even aware of my CMS side hobby.

Earlier this week, Lullabot's Jeff Robbins posted an article about his company giving Drupal on-site training to employees within the Department of Commerce. In his post Jeff discusses the interest those employees have in Drupal as well as mentioning that the door continues to widen for Drupal in the federal government.

We had a great week of on-site training at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC last week. They've already launched recovery.commerce.gov in Drupal and they're currently in the process of rebuilding Commerce.gov as a Drupal site. We spent the week with their team making sure that they understood not only how to build and present a Drupal site, but also the benefits of the Drupal community. They're a smart bunch and it's always fun to watch the synapses sparking as people realize all of the ways that they can snap together Drupal's pieces to create interesting web functionality.

There seems to be quite a buzz around Drupal in the government and as the Commerce team walked around the building with Drupal books under their arms, they got lots of comments from people in other bureaus, saying, "Oh! Drupal! We're thinking about using Drupal." Word is starting to get around about Drupal as a great platform for government websites.

Jeff Robbins is correct in saying that until recently, there was a lot of hesitation to using open source CMS such as Drupal for government portals and content delivery. I know earlier this decade my agency's Webmaster had considered using Drupal before deciding to build the agency's own CMS in-house. During this time period Drupal 4.5 was available but while my interest in information systems was growing, I had never really looked into Drupal (Mambo was in the open source CMS headlines back then) . However, just the possibility of my agency considering the use of Drupal during that time helped motivate me to learn more about Drupal.

I have only now started paying attention to the Umbraco CMS. While they may call Umbraco the "friendly CMS", I'm not sure I'm aware of a single CMS that doesn't self-describe itself as the CMS to use. This is why I enjoy blog posts from actual users new to a CMS describing what they have learned about the software. In learning Umbraco, I'm glad I came across Lee Messenger's "A Complete Newbie's Guide To Umbraco CMS".

This week, eZ Systems announce the immediate release of eZ Publish 4.2, the new version of its Open Source Content Management System. The new release brings important improvements to the heart of eZ solutions, the eZ Publish engine, as well as major advances and new features for eZ Flow and eZ Find. A new extension, eZSI, makes its debut in the 4.2 package providing full support for the Edge Side Include standard to eZ Publish.

Bård Farstad, CTO and Founder of eZ Publish, described the motivation underlying the new release: "Our team focused on Usability for both end-users and editors, as well as Scalability and Performance for customers using eZ Publish in extremely high-traffic installations ". Farstad emphasized that "in those two focus areas, eZ Find (the enterprise-grade search plugin for eZ Publish) has become a key element for achieving the best results".

The 4.2 release was developed by eZ Systems with contributions from eZ Publish partners and trusted community members, and is immediately available as certified software, which benefits from eZ System's Premium support and maintenance services, including the unlimited bugfix guarantee.

Akismet is a powerful spam filter that’s built in to WordPress.com. But what if you’re running a self-hosted WordPress blog?

This tutorial will give you the simple information you need to install and activate Akismet on your WordPress.org blog.

Source

mojoPortal 2.3.1.9 has been released. A number of image related features went into this new release. Some of the new features found in mojoPortal 2.3.1.9 include:

This is one of those rare posts where I post an article about a change in the executive ranks of a CMS company. However, thanks to Jon Marks and his CMS gurus on Twitter list I've been a Twitter follower of this person.  Cheryl McKinnon is moving from Open Text to Nuexo as their Chief Marketing Officer. Nuxeo is one of the leading provider of open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software and services.

The Nucleus CMS core development team has released Nucleus CMS v3.5. Although Nucleus CMS contains a lot of bug fixes, it's the new features that will catch your attention.

Highlights of the new features in this release include two new plugins in the core system: