October 2007

Last week, I mentioned that Mozilla is planning to give the Firefox browser a makeover.  Alex Faaborg had mentioned that they plan to integrate the look of Firefox with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Apple's Mac OS X.  The problem was Alex had failed to mention anything about the Linux operating system.  Linux users, of course, then replied by comment that they were unhappy that there was no mention of Linux in the post.

CMS Made Simple 1.2 has been released.  In their announcement, the project indicated being pleased at the number of people that participated in the beta cycle participated in the beta cycle helping to help make CMSMS 1.2 a stable released.

Last month, we reported some of the improvements and new features we thought you could expect in CMSMS 1.2.  Below is list listing of changes as worded in the official announcement of the 1.2 release.

I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.

A couple days ago my jaw dropped when I read CMS Watch's article, "Do you need an ECMS, WCMS, or Portal?".   Last week, Deane Barker of Blend Interactive and Gadgetopia had mentioned how he was uncomfortable seeing enterprise content management systems and Web content management systems lumped together in the same comparison article.  I responded to him that the boundaries between the two information systems do seem to get blurrier and blurrier all the time.  In the CMS Watch

I make it a habit not to post community squabbles that often take place in any IT project (whether open source or not).  When people have the best intentions and respect the opinions of others, I don't believe it is right for me or anyone else to publicly exploit discussions that are meant to remain within the community.  However, the conflicts going on at XOOPS.org have been made so public that it's hard for me to put a lot of faith in a project that treats its own people so poorly.

Alex Faaborg has some mock-up images on his blog of what Firefox 3 will look like on both Microsoft's Windows Vista and Apple's Mac OS X.  I have yet to see any images for what Firefox 3 may look on a Linux box and many of those commenting are also not happy Linux was left out of the picture.

You can see the mock-ups yourself by clicking here.

I'm still in need to read this InfoWorld article in its entirety, but thought it was worth mentioning now.  InfoWorld's Mike Heck has written an article, Open source CMSes prove well worth the price, which reviews and compares five content management systems.  The five CMS under review are Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone.

The good news is that all five CMS ranked Very Good or higher. However, Alfresco was the only CMS that ranked Excellent with a score of 9.2.  Plone 3.0 received the second highest ranking with a score of 8.6.  DotNetNuke and Joomla tied for third and fourth place with a score of 8.4 which put Drupal a fraction lower with a score of 8.3.  While none of these CMS ranked poorly, I'm sure the open source communities are bound to scrutinize over how the individual criteria were scored and ranked.

While the content management system, SilverStripe, has been on my radar for some time I never really took the time to cover the Web application here at CMS Report.  Now it so happens that SilverStripe has been nominated as one of the most promising open source CMS out there.  About the only thing I can do to correct my oversight is to put SilverStripe on a list of the "top 30" CMS we focus on here at CMS Report.  Sadly, mostly out of nostalgia, SilverStripe will be bumping Simple PHP Blog off the "CMS Focus" list.

Earlier this month, SilverStripe 2.1 was released.  The folks on the SilverStripe team appear pretty excited about this release, with just the right synergy brewing to give this CMS a good future.  Some of the new features and improvements in SilverStripe 2.1 include:

• New security system (benefiting from Google Summer of Code)
• Blog Module (with drag-n-drop widget support including tag clouds, RSS feed, etc)
• Support for Updated Gallery Module

Download links to SilverStripe 2.1 are available via SilverStripe.com.

"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television, I know because I designed it."

- Larry Roberts, ARPANet and Telnet founder, quoted in "Its Creators Call Internet Outdated, Offer Remedies", Wall Street Journal, Oct 2, 2007