I'm working on an ecommerce site using osCommerce to enable the shopping cart functionality for my client's online store. This is the first time I've used osCommerce so I'm still working on improving my comfort level with the application. osCommerce is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. According to the osCommerce site:
Given that this site, CMS Report, is less than six months old...I am truly amazed with the number of visitors the site receives in a day. While the number of visitors may be small compared to other well known sites, this is the first time I've had a site of my own that has drawn some attention. What a cool experience this has been!
I was flattered to see Drupal blogger, Greg Knaddison, mention CMS Report in one of his posts. Mr. Knaddison could have chosen for discussion so many other Drupal sites but for whatever reason he likes what he sees here. However, as postive as his message was for CMS Report, he also indicated through his post that the current mix of original content and aggregated news isn't for him.
With a tip of the hat to CMSReport. CMS report aggregates lots of content about all CMS, but they also have some original content. I'd prefer more of the latter and less of the former, but that's just me.
While CMS Report still needs to evolve and mature, its purpose was defined from the beginning. The primary mission of the site is to inform readers of the latest happenings in the world of content management systems. Now how that job gets done is another matter and readers have preferences.
Mambo 4.6 is expected to be release soon. While interest in the content management system has diminished over the past year (due to increased interest in Joomla) the open source project and community still remains active. Mambo is by no means a dead project.
With Mambo 4.6 currently available as a release candidate the folks at MamboServer report the following as the most significant new features and enhancements you can expect in the new release:
Last month, it was announced that Drupal will have an installer included in the next major release of Drupal. The installer will not only automate the creation of the required Drupal database tables for you, but should also allow for the creation of "install profiles".
However, this patch is more than just usability: it supports "install profiles" so that anyone can create a distribution out of Drupal core, contributed modules, and themes. This will begin a new era in Drupal's life. Without a doubt, there will be a Drupal for blogger distribution, and a forum distribution is already in the works. Also, new installations of Drupal will only contain database tables for the modules you've actually enabled.
While the announcement of this installer was last month, I really have not had much time to actually check how the installer will actually work. While I would expect the installer to work as easily as installers in other content management systems, I've learned over the years to not count my chickens before they hatch. Today, someone has posted a very good article on what Drupal users can expect in the next major update of their application.
A sleepless night for Earl Miles late last week provided the Drupal community a replacement to his Dashboard module. Earl Miles announced a successor to Dashboard at his site, Angry Donuts. The new module is the Panels module and I expect we'll be seeing it used a lot by Drupal's users, especially newcomers of Drupal and those less inclined to dig into the PHP code.
Dashboard the previous module, allowed Drupal developers an easy way to implement "simple" two-column layouts of content (called nodes in Drupal) that are not sidebars. While you can put blocks about anywhere in Drupal, the core doesn't offer an easy way to put content outside the "main body". While dashboard overcame the "single column" for content obstacle, it required knowledge of PHP to implement.
A couple days ago I opened my Thunderbird e-mail client on my Windows XP system and found an e-mail from Joe Audette of the mojoPortal project. "Mojo whata?", I asked. I thought I knew most of the content management projects (CMS) projects around, but this one didn't ring a bell. After reading his e-mail, I understood I likely have not heard much about his project because my focus on CMS has been a little too narrow lately.
In his e-mail, Audette writes, "Hi, just wondering if you only cover CMS's using php technology or if you would consider giving any press to .NET/Mono based projects? Any coverage of my project mojoPortal would be much appreciated."
As I've mentioned in past posts, I have a strong desire to cover more than just PHP Web applications. mojoPortal, named after Audette's dog, is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac. Already the talk of a CMS using a blend of Microsoft and open source tools was peaking my interest.
Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.
So far I've mostly posted here at CMS Report about PHP-based content management systems. However, PHP isn't the only language being used on the Web. Other Web friendly languages include Perl, Java, Ruby, ASP, Python, etc.
So for one of our first non-PHP based CMS we're going to take a look at Radiant. The Radiant CMS is a Ruby on Rails CMS that has yet to reach version 1.0. Like a lot of CMS in early development it is considered a "no fluff" CMS for small teams. In other words, Radiant is not quite ready for enterprise level work. Radiant however may work well for those personal sites and small companies that have an invested interest to promote Ruby on Rails based applications.
Something old is new again. The Blue_mark theme for Drupal 4.7 is available at CMS Report. The Blue_mark theme uses Drupal 4.7's default theming engine, PHPTemplate. This theme is released under the GPL.
The Blue_mark theme was originally offered by Charles Lowe and available for download at his site, cyberdash.com. The original theme was written for Drupal 4.4's Xtemplate theme engine. I maintained the theme through Drupal 4.6 for a personal site of mine. With the switchover to the PHPTemplate theme engine as the Drupal 4.7 defualt, significant work was needed to keep old Blue_mark alive. The Blue Marine theme was used as a starting point. Minor tweaks were made to Blue Marine's PHP files and significant changes were made in the CSS.