December 2009

A couple days ago, I posted CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2009. The articles listed were ranked by popularity based by how many times viewed and the rate that they were viewed through the year. Popular stories do not always signify well written articles or are always an indication of personal favorites. Each year, I write a number of content management or IT related articles that I love but for various reasons you the people didn't have interest in reading and sharing.

Below are some of my favorite articles written in 2009 that were not a part of the previously posted Top Ten list. If I had a Top 20 Stories list the articles in both of these listings would be included.

• Looking forward to Microsoft's Windows 7
• Reviewing Barrie North's Joomla! 1.5 book and video
• The problem is bigger than SharePoint
• Testing the water with Acquia Search for Drupal
• Shortcomings of Enterprise Wiki Deployments
• Two CMS Worlds on Twitter
• Charging for online news doomed to fail
• Theme development and the GPL
• Judging Five Overall Best Content Management Systems
• Quoting IT: Addison Berry
  

The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that's the subject matter that our readers want to read.

Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking.

1. Mollom: A solution for comment spam
2. 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS: Drupal wins, Wordpress and Joomla! not far behind
3. Serving a home for my Drupal site
4. WordPress leads the Packt as 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS
5. Allen Ellis: Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It
6. Google PageRank
7. Alfresco Module Obtains U.S. DoD 5015.02 Records Management Certification
8. Using Wordpress city saves $19,000
9. Cheryl McKinnon, Nuxeo, and Open Source
10. Drupal Gardens preview video by Acquia

The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I'll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I've said before, I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.

There are a number of nice features and improvements that are included with the new WordPress 2.9. Probably the feature that will get everyone's attention is the improvements in the media-handling of images and videos. The improvements in this latest version of WordPress continue to show why this open source blogging application excels in usability.

Four features that the developers are highlighting in WordPress 2.0 include:

In the world of open source CMS there is no comparison more attention getting than an article comparing Drupal and Joomla!. Probably, the granddaddy Drupal vs Joomla! comparisons of them all was posted over three years ago by the Joomla SEO company, Alledia. I extended the discussion Alledia started with my own comparison between Drupal and Joomla. My article evidently struck a chord in late 2006 and currently is approaching near 200,000 reads.

Good comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! are popular because quality comparisons between the two applications are rare. It's very difficult to have passion for one CMS, be well informed on both CMS, and in the end be non-bias in your comparison. In the three years since I wrote my article, I've only come across three additional comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! that I thought worthy to bookmark.

I haven't updated my own article comparing Drupal and Joomla because I have developed a bias opinion over the years that I can't overcome. Both are good applications in their own right, but in the end I almost always recommend Drupal over Joomla!. That's why I'm glad to see Alledia update their own comparison between these popular CMS with "Joomla and Drupal - Which One is Right for You? Version 2".

New features provide terminology management, content branching, and additional reporting capabilities

Half a year ago, I posted a video previewing the upcoming release of ImpressCMS 1.2. Unknown to me at the time was that it would take another six months before the content management system was to become finally released. According to the project developers, it's actually been 14 months since the release of ImpressCMS 1.1.

Almost 14 months in the making, ImpressCMS 1.2 is now ready as a Final release! ImpressCMS 1.1 was released at the end of October 2008 and the scope of changes in this release has kept the developers, testers and translators busy.

ImpressCMS has had a short, but notable history - founded in 2007, an initial release in January 2008, 3rd place in Packt Publishing's Most Promising Open Source CMS in 2008 and 1st place in 2009, a 2008 finalist in SourceForge's Community Choice Awards, 32 separate releases and almost 10,000 commits in its code repository.

Some of the new features and improvements in ImpressCMS 1.2 include:

• Imagemanager, with online editing
• Fully customizable Profile module, with social networking features
• Content module
  

This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I've had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. WordPress
2. DotNetNuke
3. SilverStripe
4. MODx
5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your "best" CMS.

I'm one of the many CMS enthusiasts excited about CMIS. CMIS is the abbreviation for the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS). Please check AIIM's official guide to CMIS for further details.

Before you do go over to AIIM's site, you might want to also check out Stefan Waldhauser's "8 reasons why CMIS will transform the ECM industry" posted at Digital Landfill. I like reason number four:

4 -- No more lock-in to one ECM-vendor because of CMIS.

Until today the ECM industry was driven by high complexity and proprietary systems that prevented to switch to other vendors. Even when a vendor dramatically increased maintenance fees (many customers know what I’m speaking about) there often was no choice to go somewhere else because of the tight and proprietary integrations between the customer build applications and the ECM-infrastructure. CMIS will help separate the applications from the ECM-platform and so there will be no more lock-in to one vendor. Doesn’t that sound great?

I think the biggest thing CMIS offers is customer satisfaction in not having to choose one vendor over another. As I stated this morning on Twitter, I see CMIS as recognition that the "total enterprise solution" is a lie. I have yet to see an enterprise software package provide the complete solution that vendors often promise their customers. Somewhere in the product's life cycle the customer finds that they need more than what the current software and/or vendor can deliver but the customer also isn't ready to leave their current system behind. CMIS hopes to solve the migration issues involved with moving from one application to another by allowing both applications to work together.

There is a cost issue here with CMIS though and, so far, I haven't seem much dicussion on the subject. While CMIS allows more than one application to share and work with the content it will not always reduce costs and maintenance fees. The fact is CMIS may now require the customer to provide ongoing support for multiple applications and platforms instead of the single platform they were once supporting. In general, when the customer's IT group has to support additional applications they also need additional time and money required to provide that support. Just like the problem CMIS is trying to solve, CMIS will not always be the total solution to your problems.

Not having the opportunity to own an iPhone due to lack of coverage by phone carrier AT&T, I haven't been a smartphone user. Then a few weeks ago my carrier, Verizon, introduced the Motorola Droid and I purchased my first smartphone.  Since then, I've been carrying the Droid where ever I go and taking full advantage of the phone's features.

This morning, Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, announced the release of its new Digital Asset Management offering (Nuxeo DAM) for beta preview. Nuxeo is using the Gilbane Conference in Boston to present DAM as a featured product in its conference booth (#122A).

Nuxeo DAM is a packaged application, based on the Nuxeo open source ECM platform, that addresses the complex and resource-intensive demands of managing the rich media assets of today's business. According to Nuxeo, Nuxeo DAM is:

Designed to meet the creative and ever-changing needs of marketing and brand managers, Nuxeo's digital asset management software opens up new opportunities for the creators, users and consumers of rich media to take control of their critical image, video or audio content.

Key benefits that Nuxeo DAM provides include:

• Intuitive experience, designed for creative users
• Productivity accelerant: automate and streamline routine tasks
• Trusted repository, designed for secure and easy scaling as projects expand
• Flexibility: modularity and interoperability through open source and open standards including CMIS compatibility