March 2011

For the blogger, the most difficult day of the year has to be April Fools' Day. This is the day where jokes are played and stories are made  up. Computer geeks and CMS junkies easily get into the spirit of this celebrated day by pulling all kinds of online pranks. One of my fondest April Fools memories is from 2007 when the official Japanese and Russian Drupal sites migrated for a day from the Drupal CMS over to Joomla!. Good times, good times. The folks over at ocProducts have gotten into the 2011 April Fools spirit by announcing ocPortal 7 with HTML6.

I need your help! Please help me keep track of all the CMS related April Fools' stories that you find online.  Please feel free to add to my list by of content management pranks via a comment below or through Twitter. If you prefer to tweet the story instead I suggest we start using the Twitter hashtag: #aprilfoolscms.

List of Fake Content Management Stories on April Fools Day 2011

1. ocPortal - ocProducts announces ocPortal 7 with HTML6
2. Drupal - Announcing CertifiedToSUCK.com
3. TYPO3 - New paradigm for TYPO3 4.6 development
4. Drupal - Announcing the Drupal Retail Store
5. Joomla - Joomla Templates from YOOtheme
6. Real Story Group  - No more content management
7. Sharpened.net - The End of the Keyboard and Mouse
8. IBM developerWorks - Scrum Alliance 2.0
9. CMS Made Simple - Intuit Announces Acquisition of CMS Made Simple
10. Enano - Enano merges with Joomla!
11. EpiServer - EPiFAX 1.0 Released
12. Plone - Plone Announces New Release Naming Scheme Effective April 1

Miami, Florida (March 29, 2011) —  dotCMS has made 1.9.2 available to the community and general marketplace.  This is the second major release of new features and improvements since dotCMS rolled out the 1.9 series back in July of 2010 and features a number of improvements geared toward performance, scalability and ease of use.

“1.9.2 represents a leap forward for dotCMS.  We and our global network of partners have established a solid pace in rolling out features and community plugins,” commented Will Ezell, CTO of dotCMS. “We are seeing the 1.9 series take a strong hold in the marketplace and the changes in 1.9.2 speaks to dotCMS’ continued focus on the meeting the needs of both the enterprise and of their end user.”

1.9.2 has also been benchmarked on both cloud and physical servers and shown to scale extremely well horizontally and vertically – serving over 4,600 transactions a second across a variety of page types.  The complete performance report can be found here.

New Features Include:

• Online Image Editor allows content contributors to edit images without needing additional software.  Users can resize, crop, rotate, "save as" different image types and adjust hue, saturation, brightness and coloration of images stored in dotCMS.
• New Image Renditions and Clipboard allows content editors to use edited versions (renditions) of source images without having to store multiple versions of the same image.  An Image clipboard allows users to create the rendition they want to use, add it to their clipboard, and paste it into their content for re-use.
• Inline Editing allows content editors frictionless editing of site content, inline, without needing to return to the admin portal.
  

Building your intranet is like using a recipe. You want to make the final product enjoyable, and to do so, you need to ensure that all of the ingredients are well balanced.

I recently made a delicious dinner for some friends and was later asked how I did it. I slyly said “a little this and that”, but really, it is a tried and true recipe from my step mom, a chef. Over the years I have perfected the dish to make it “my own”, but I still have to peak back at my food stained recipe book to ensure that I am on the right track. With an intranet, similar to cooking a nice meal, users do not see the creative process until it’s perfected and delivered.  Like a good meal, and as the site develops, the users will crave more. 

Intranet design is similar to cooking in that it allows for revisions along the way. An intranet site starts with design applications that provide functionality to the site. You need to build up these applications with text, borders, pictures, in order to make the site operational and appealing to the user’s eyes. Along the way, you can add or remove icons, text boxes and documents to enhance the page. It’s a never ending process of exciting changes that increasingly make the intranet more accessible for the users.

docSTAR has released the newest version of its award winning document management system docSTAR 3eleven. This new upgrade features enhancement to the advanced API of the docSTAR system. Beyond the 100+ integrations already available with docSTAR, customers will now be able integrate their system with any internet explorer based program.

Version 3eleven will also include a new fully functioning web based solution for remote access. Using WebWorks users will be able to not only search and retrieve, but also annotate, edit and management workflows from their web browser, allowing for remote users easy access to documents even when out of the office.

Version 7.5.4 of OpenCms is now ready and available for download.

OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions.

This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 7.5.4 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of issues that persisted in the 7.5.3 version. Some new features have been added as well.

Main fixed issues and improvements in OpenCms 7.5.4

• Fixed issue 1717: DB deadlock if OpenCms hits db.pool.default.maxActive when db.pool.default.whenExhaustedAction=block
• Fixed issue 1900: Performance Patch for OpenCms
• Fixed issue 1901: Workplace login page security issue
• Fixed issue 1909: Internet Explorer crashes after saving structured XML content with image added from gallery into HTML field
• Fixed issue 1942: Publish scheduled jobs are missing after server restart
• Fixed issue 1945: Avoid reflected XSS on some authenticated resources (provided by Michele Orru)
• Fixed issue 1949: Database size does not decrease after (completely) deleting resources
• Fixed issue when creating a new user or editing an existing user using an Oracle database
• Fixed issue using delete and lock resource when called without path parameter
• Fixed issue in galleries: Broken layout with long item file names or titles
• Fixed premature publish thread interruption within CmsShell
• FCKEditor compatible with Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4
• Added new optional CmsShell start parameter to load additional commands

 Please check out the release notes for further details of the changes in this release.

People are increasingly interested in making healthy and environmentally friendly choices at work and at home, and your intranet can support this way of life. Use your intranet to engage and educate employees on greener lifestyles with our top ten tips.

Top Ten Tips for a Greener Intranet

Tip #1: Create a Green Community sub-site

Spearhead your campaign with a Green Community area of the intranet, and then add in collaborative apps like the ones below.

Tip #2: Suggestion box

Nashua, New Hampshire, USA – Kentico Software (http://www.kentico.com), the Web content management system vendor, announced the re-launch of their Trees for Bugs initiative. Company employees will plant a tree for every software bug reported in each latest version of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET.  The company also promises to fix all reported bugs within 7 days.

”I’m proud to say that although our product gets more complex, we are constantly eliminating the number of bugs in new versions. We have also been successful to keep our promise and comply with the 7 days bug fixing policy since its announcement back in 2009.” said Martin Hejtmanek, CTO at Kentico Software. “Our efforts became an indivisible part of Kentico's commitment to deliver a stable platform for managing websites, on-line stores and social networks.”

“Kentico has always been committed to provide high-quality user experience to our customers and partners. While we test our software extensively, it’s important to make sure that we encourage our customers to report any bugs they find. Based on the feedback on our initial program, which was only related to the 4.1 version of Kentico CMS, we decided to keep it for all upcoming CMS versions, starting with the current 5.5 R2 release,” said Petr Passinger, PR Manager at Kentico Software. “From now on, we will plant a tree for every bug found in each latest version of Kentico CMS.“

The Trees for Bugs initiative is well explained in the following one and half minute animated video:

The current number of bugs, and therefore the number of trees that will be planted, can be seen at the re-designed Trees for Bugs website: http://trees.kentico.com.
 
The homepage of the Trees for Bugs website shows a graph that represents distribution of bugs/trees between individual development teams. With almost 6,000 active customers in 84 countries, the website provides country standings in the “Bug-Finding” discipline.

Each planted tree is dedicated to the person who reported the bug and labeled with their name. The tree is also listed in the tree gallery and its location is marked on a map.

New case study details how SWM employed Magnolia’s STK to connect with customers and slash administrative costs

NEW YORK, NY — March 23, 2011 —  Magnolia, the open source content management vendor that delivers simplicity on an enterprise scale, today announced publication of a major case study detailing how Magnolia CMS helped Munich-based utility SWM upgrade its web image to engage with customers and promote environmental goals of green energy and sustainability.

The Tiki Community recently completed TikiFest Boston, the seventh code sprint in Boston. More than 20 community met to plan, discuss, and demonstrate Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. Many of the new features included in Tiki 7 were demonstrated, including:

• Unified Search (based on Lucene)
• Tiki-powered web sites on mobile devices, using jQuery Mobile
• theme generator

Extensive work began on the revamp of Tiki Trackers -- a Tiki feature that allows users to create interactive forms and searchable datasets. Tiki 7 will include reorganized and streamlined code, allowing for easier enhancements in the future. Several TikiFesters also participated in a documentation sprint, in an effort to make the Tiki Docs more user-friendly and "catch up" to the current development.

The TikiFesters also joined the Boston jQuery Meet-up group. The event, "Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware and jQuery: the story of a successful integration," featured talks by Nelson Ko and Jonny Bradley. Ko and Bradley provided an overview of Tiki to the group and explained (and demoed) the jQuery integration that will be available in Tiki 7.

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer for Wordpress, recently posted on a WordPress developer's blog the plans for WordPress 3.2.  Below are some of the changes and features Jaquith says will be on this new version of WordPress that caught my eye. My personal comments gave been added to the side.