November 2011

Last weekend, digital agency water&stone, released their 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. I consider this report one of the few non-bias and detailed surveys that come across my desk each year. The report isn't perfect, but the report does help give a good snapshot on the state of who's who in the world of open source content management systems.

You are most definitely going to want to take a look at the details in the report. The findings in this year’s report were based on a survey of more than 2,500 CMS users and additional research into a wide variety of measures of market share and brand strength. I'm still combing through the survey and taking note of the interesting individual nuggets of information that can be found in the results of the survey.

Not surprisingly, the report confirms the ranking position of open source's three most dominate Web content management systems in the market. The press release itself summarizes the results this way:

PHP-based systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal continue to dominate the web content management space. But, while the Big Three remain unchanged from last year, the Report concludes that WordPress retains a clear lead in the face of decreasing competition from Joomla!.

The decreasing competition from Joomla! can be seen most noticeably in the decrease of installations reported by the survey respondents in 2011 compared to 2010. The survey does note that this dramatic drop is likely due to the Joomla! community aggressively promoting the survey last year. This year, the promotion efforts were not coordinated and less influential. I only point this out because this is an example of where the report isn't "perfect" via inconsistencies in the yearly survey sample introducing  a margin of error in the trend comparisons. 

CMS websites are now the norm as the preferred content management and delivery solution. Nevertheless, many CMS web applications face scalability issues. However, when a CMS is put in the cloud, it theoretically resolves the scalability issue to obtain a complete benefit.

But, if a cloud platform is not configured to match the particular needs of the CMS, it will need to work harder. This will result in higher loads than what is actually needed to serve the incoming traffic. Therefore, in most cases, it is sensible to cache the static content. The issue that one faces here is whether the cloud is able to tell the difference between a user who has signed into an application and is therefore being served with dynamic content and the one who has not yet signed into the application.

At the same time, a CMS presents many other challenges other than scalability due to the paradigm shift from the traditional model of sharing files from a central repository.  The reason behind this is that websites no longer operate isolated or in standalone mode. They must be able to interact with a range of other business applications that range from ecommerce business solutions to CRM databases to a range of reporting as well as analytics tools. To cut a long story short, websites have become increasingly data and content hungry because of their complex nature and the requirements of their users.

Managing such websites is now a full-time job.  Earlier in the traditional hosting scenario, the site owner had to figure out how to look after the application, but also the servers, backups, databases, and others.  Now, the platforms are specialized, so handling a web application which was a full time job can now be addressed by a person who can pay full-time attention.

The XOOPS Development Team is pleased to announce that a new version, XOOPS 2.5.4 Final, is available for download and testing. In addition libraries have been updated to their latest versions:

• phpMailer 5.1
• TinyMCE 3.4.6
• jQuery 1.6.4
• jQueryUI 1.8.16

• Increased productivity
• Decreased training and support costs
• Reduced development time and costs
• Reduced maintenance costs
• Increased customer satisfaction

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyke's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.

OpenCms 8.0.3 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 8 contains a greatly improved user interface for content managers and numerous other enhancements.

With OpenCms 8.0.3, many important and useful additional features and improvements have been added to the core system and a number of issues that persisted in the 8.0.2 release have been fixed.

The World Day of Interconnectedness on November 11, 2011 became a very special for MotoCMS and its users. That day, the company released the new major Version 1.6 of its powerful Flash CMS.

The new version is probably the most significant from all MotoCMS releases - it is 100% based on the users' feedback.

This update introduces many new powerful features and improved functionality, including:

The latest version of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Tiki 8.1, is now available for immediate download. This release includes many new features and improved functionality, including more than 3,200 code updates by 43 Tiki Community members. Review the Tiki 8 Release Notes and change log for complete information.

Some key highlights of Tiki 8 include:

A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

DotNetNuke Corp. has announced the immediate availability of DotNetNuke version 6.1 which makes it fast and easy for organizations of all sizes to deliver tailored online experiences for thousands of unique mobile devices.   For the first time, DNN 6.1 also provides a site group capability, which dramatically simplifies and speeds up the management of permissions and profiles across multiple desktop and mobile websites.

Oslo, Norway - Webnodes AS, a company developing a .NET based semantic content management system, announced the release of version 3.7 of their CMS. This new release improves the system in a number of key areas.

Fully integrated dynamic Schema.org support

With this release, Webnodes is the world’s first CMS with fully integrated and dynamic Schema.org support. This means that all content classes and properties in Webnodes can be mapped to corresponding types and properties in Schema.org dynamically.