Bryan Ruby

If you are reading this post, then congratulations...you are now seeing CMS Report on its new server (a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server).  As I tweak the VPS in the following weeks, I may fall back on the old server from time to time but for the most part, I'm home.  Today officially ends my grand-experiment of running a moderately busy Drupal site on the cheap.

This is one of my first posts on dotCMS 1.5, so "long-time" dotCMS users feel free to correct me if I get anything wrong here.  Earlier this month, dotCMS 1.5 was released.  dotCMS is an open source Java based CMS geared toward toward the enterprise with Web customer resource resource management (CRM) and eCommerce, and business intelligence.

New features included in dotCMS 1.5:

On Monday, Packt Publishing announced the five finalists in each category of its 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  The five categories are Most Promising, Best PHP CMS, Best Other (Non-PHP) CMS, Best Social Networking CMS, and Overall Winner.  In the finals stage, the public as a whole is eligible to vote for each category through October 26th.  While that may seem like a long time for the polls to be open, I'd encourage you to vote early so that you have no excuse for why your favorite CMS didn't make it to the winners list.

Around this time last year, Packt Publishing announced the "top five" finalists for their award (no separate categories in 2006).  In 2006, those CMS projects that made it to the finalist list included Drupal, e107, Joomla, Plone, and Xoops.  When those five CMS were announced, I chose to double my efforts on covering those applications here at CMS Report.  Although the extra categories this year have brought quite a few more Open Source CMS into the foreground, I still don't see why I couldn't keep most of them on my CMS Focus radar scope.  With 16,000 people nominating their favorite CMS for this award, that amount of generated interest is hard to ignore.  Luckily, I already cover many of the CMS that did make it as a finalist...but there are still many new CMS on that list that will shake things up a bit here at CMSReport.com.

We Americans can be so stupid at times.  In the country of "land of the free", we spend too much of our efforts working to restrict the freedom of others.

Tomorrow's legal fight may be over Web browser add-ons that let people avoid advertisements. These add-ons are growing in functionality and popularity, which has led legal experts we surveyed this week to speculate about when the first lawsuit will be filed.

Robert Cambell announced the expected release of CMS Made Simple 1.2 with the beta version expected in a couple weeks.  After the CMSMS 1.2 release all focus will be on development of a 2.0 version of the CMS.

Some of the new features and enhancements can be expected in CMSMS 1.2:

• Graphical HTML Text editor (Frontend WYSIWYG)
• News 2.5 has an ‘extra’ field for additional information (maybe an image)  and supports frontend article submission
• Full permissions for the Admin Group (gid == 1) and not just the first user (uid == 1)

I'm always amazed how Dilbert's creator, Scott Adams, always remains tuned to the geeky side of life.  This time Adams uses the "What is Web 2.0?" question as a "powerful anti-meeting" spell.  You gotta love it.

Due to copyright laws, I can't show the Dilbert comic strip here.  However, if you click on the thumbnail in this post...you'll magically arrive to the correct page at Dilbert.com.

MySiouxFalls.com is a new and local online news source for the city where I currently reside, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  At first, I was not all that excited about the site and had not plan on mentioning the MySiouxFalls.com site in my writing. We've all seen these sites before, right?  In fact, I would say that many of the visitors to this blog likely have designed or participated in building sites similar to MySiouxFalls.com.  That's not to say that there are not some things from a content management perspective worth mentioning.
 

So, Python isn't really a CMS topic unless you're a Plone user.  However, as my world at work slowly moves from Python to Java as the language of choice...I'll promote this underdog open source language anytime.  From the IBM developerWorks site:

I just can't believe the year Drupal is having.  There has been an explosion of Drupal sites almost everywhere you turn.  Drupal is very popular with the masses in 2007.  So popular in fact, that I wonder as with all things popular if we'll be seeing 2008 as the backlash year against Drupal as it has quickly evolves as a litmus test for open source CMS (one of my predictions for 2008).

The latest Drupal-based site to flash on the screen of my browser is the portal (currently in beta) for the European Commission sponsored Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF ) project.  The site aims to be a community-driven platform for the production and distribution of educational materials. Its sustainability depends on the building of a strong community of users and participants of the platform.  The site may actually be live by the time you read this post.

"It can happen anywhere, at any time. You’re doing your job, minding your own business, and it suddenly dawns on you: you’re the company’s webmaster."

--Shane Schick, "Accidental webmasters rejoice – help is on the way", GlobeandMail.com, September 5, 2007