Bryan Ruby

Packt Publishing announced the five finalists for each category of its 2008 Open Source CMS Award.  Last year, Drupal was the overall winner. Voting for the winners in each of the five categories opens September 1 and ends on October 20, 2008.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges for the top three CMS in each category will then be voted for by a panel of judges.

Incidentally, this year I'll be on the panel of judges for the Most Promising Open Source CMS.

Overall Open Source CMS Award

One of the biggest unknowns for those of us that live in the north central United States...how many Drupal enthusiasts are there in our area?  Not knowing the answer to this question has been bothering me.  I have also been a little disturbed seeing the map so empty of a Drupal user group for my part of the region.  So I'm hoping those of you that are Drupal users from South Dakota and bordering areas will join me and others in the new South Dakota Drupal

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Wordpress 2.6 is more than a blog and is quickly evolving into a full-fledged Web content management system.  While they're a little late, some of my competitors (CMS Watch) also recently noted the trend of blogging applications such as Wordpress taking on more CMS-like duties.

I'm not a huge fan of creating sites with Adobe's Flash.  I personally find Flash sites difficult to navigate, bookmark, and retrieve worthwhile information.  However, I can understand why the more artistic Web designers and site owners out there prefer to use Flash when building a website.  But in my mind, one of the biggest drawbacks with Flash is that Google and other search engines have a difficult time reading and indexing Flash sites.  Let's face it, if Google can't search your site then it is highly unlikely your customers will find your site in the first few pages displayed by Google no matter which keywords are being used.

I'm sure by now, new visitors to CMSReport.com have wondered...why so few posts?  Last May, I explained that I was taking a break from technology during the off hours of my "day job".

WordPress 2.6 was released just a couple days ago.  During the time I have covered WordPress, I have always considered WordPress more as blogging application and not really a full featured content management system.  However, ever since I installed Wordpress 2.5 on one of my sites, I can't help but think that WordPress now rocks as a CMS.

If you haven't looked at WordPress in the past year or so, I recommend that you do yourself a favor and take a look at what you may be missing out.

John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise.  I not only liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.

Linux.com has a review of DocuWiki.  I've used/seen DocuWiki in the past, but for some reason or another I've never mentioned it here at CMS Report.  DocuWiki runs on a flat file system (no database required) and I've known people to choose it over others due to its easy to use ACL (access control list).

Mozzila released the final version of Firefox 3.0 today and you can download it at Mozilla.

Available today in approximately 50 languages, Firefox 3 is two to three times faster than its predecessor and offers more than 15,000 improvements, including the revolutionary smart location bar, malware protection, and extensive under the hood work to improve the speed and performance of the browser.

While I've been talking about Firefox 3 since late 2006, I have to admit that I haven't been into Firefox 3's development as much as I did with Firefox 2.  While there were some bumps on the way with the alphas and betas, Firefox 3.0 is definately a well polished product (I'm using it as I write in this post).  My first two impressions of Firefox 3 is that it is fast and that I don't quite get the awesome bar.

After 18 months of development, Geeklog 1.5.0 has been released.  As I mentioned last month, changes found in Geeklog 1.5.0 incorporates the following projects implemented during the 2007 Google Summer of Code:

• New user-friendly install script
• New Configuration Graphical User Interface
• New Webservices API based on the Atom Publishing Protocol

Additional new features and enhancements included in this release: