Over the weekend, the core developers for CMS Made Simple, an open source project, announced the release of CMSMS 2.0. While not a complete rewrite, CMSMS 2.0 is a significant re-factoring and renewal for the content management system. Many of the changes involved are focused on giving the web professional an easier and simpler editing experience within the CMS.
In the announcement, Robert Campbell further explains how CMSMS 2.0 came to a final release.
The development team for CMS Made Simple recently announced the latest version in its CMSMS 1.11 series. This release brings a few minor features, some performance improvements, documentation improvements, a Smarty upgrade, and a number of bug fixes (including a minor security issue).
Some of the more significant new features and improvements found in CMSMS 1.11.8 include:
Finding the right content management system (CMS) for a website takes a little research and effort on the part of the webmaster. Understanding what a CMS is, how it works, and what features are needed for each website will help the webmaster choose not only the best CMS but also the web hosting service that offers and supports that CMS.
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
Last fall, I once again had the privilege of participating as a member of the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Open Source Awards. For the 2010 event, I participated by voting for the category of Open Source CMS Awards. In that award, the winner was declared by the panel to be CMS Made Simple, with SilverStripe as first runner up followed by MODx as second runner up.
I received a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. Each of the judges on the panel, selects and ranks 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 including performance, usability, size and support from community, accessibility, ease of configuration, customization, scalability and security.
It has been my history to be transparent to all with how I rank each CMS as my vote will have some differences to those of the panel. This time around, I find myself hesitant and under personal protest with me providing information on how I ranked the five content management systems.
I question whether we're doing any good by declaring one CMS as better than another CMS. Dean Barker discussed on his blog some time ago this same uneasy feeling you get when you judge a CMS without having some reference to real world requirements. None of these content management systems would I consider losers and all of them remain worthy of future consideration. Yet, I'm disturbed that people will look at the numbers and interpret the results in a ways I never intended my rankings to be used.
My rankings for the Five Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:
I'm not a firm believer in ties when it comes to ranking content management systems. Yet, this year I did just that for XOOPS and CMS Made Simple. All five content management systems that were reviewed I would consider as a candidate for a future project. None of the CMS would I consider a "last place" CMS so I refused to do so. It is also important to note that neither Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress competed in this ranking as previous winners in this category duke it out in the Hall of Fame category.
CMS Made Simple is the winner in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award category of the 2010 Open Source Awards. CMS Made Simple has won this Award for the first time in the past five years, having been a presence in the Award since 2007. Packt also announced SilverStripe as first runner up with MODx in the second runners up position.
I had the privilege of sitting as a judge in this year's Open Source CMS Award category. My vote was a little different from the official award ranking where I would have placed mojoPortal, another 2010 award finalist, in a runnerup position. I may have been the only judge that may have ranked mojoPortal in the top three positions. As I've done similarly in past years, in the near future I'll post how I judged the finalists in this category. However, it is now CMS Made Simple's well deserved moment and I won't take the spotlight away from them with my personal ramblings.
Attached below is the official press release I received from Packt Publishing announcing CMS Made Simple as the winner of the Open Source CMS Award. Congratulations to all those involved int he development and support of this great open source CMS.
For a long time I’ve been really interested in performance aspects of content management systems and smarter blogging systems. This is the reason for my decision to test some of the popular systems on a workbench and to get some technical information about these systems.
The test was quite simple. I installed the packages on my sandbox server and added a function (cip-bench()) to the installation. Then I ran the index page with the default template and configuration. The data I got from the test was limited on the raw index page after the installation. I picked up 5 aspects for the test:
It is interesting to see how different some CMS solve their tasks. I was surprised of some results for example 399 database queries of contenido.
To sum up this test I was impressed by chyrp. It’s delivered with an elegant backend and I think it has got a lot of potential to become more popular and famous. The memory usage of wordpress seems to be improved in contrast to previous versions.
| name | memory | avg time | queries | tables | required files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| chyrp | 5.556 MB | 0.3 – 0.5 | 7-10 | 8 | 63 |
| geeklog | 6.97 MB | 0.6 – 0.7 | 59 | 50 | 38 |
| serendipity | 6.773 MB | 0.5 – 0.55 | 11 | 21 | 48 |
| textpattern | 2.823 MB | 0.2 – 0.3 | 21 | 17 | 12 |
| wordpress | 12.044 MB | 0.4 – 0.6 | 15 | 11 | 73 |
| name | memory | avg time | queries | tables | required files |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| cmsmadesimple | 7.543 MB | 1.1 – 1.48 | 38 – 52 | 52 | 92 |
| contenido | 9.562 MB | 0.6 – 0.9 | 254 – 265 (399) | 76 | 123 |
| impressCMS | 10.938 MB | 0.5 – 0.6 | 53-55 | 57 | 139 |
| joomla | 6.289 MB | 0.7 – 0.8 | 7 – 11 | 33 | 127 |
Packt Publishing recently announced the finalists in each of the categories for their 2010 Open Awards. While award categories for content management systems are still included, this year Packt is also adding additional flavors of open source projects to be judged. The new award categories include awards for most promising open source project, e-commerce applications, graphics software, and JavaScript libraries.
The Voting for the winners in each of the categories ends on November 5, 2010. This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges in each category to be announced on November 15, 2010.
A new version of CMS Made Simple was released this past weekend. CMS Made Simple 1.8 offers a number of new features to enhance performance not only of the website itself, but to make doing some mundane tasks faster and easier.
Some of the more significant changes in CMS MadeSimple include: