Content Management

Bitrix .NET Forge CMS - A New Content Management System with a Community Edition

ALEXANDRIA, VA. - June 14, 2011 – .NET Forge CMS is a new website CMS for web developers who know and love .NET technology.  The new product includes a free Community edition and a Professional edition with e-commerce capabilities.  .NET Forge CMS is a professional platform for .NET developers with ORM tools and MVC architecture which are field-tested in large projects.

CMIS for Open Content Management Collaboration with Hippo and Nuxeo

Boston, Paris and Amsterdam, the Netherlands – June 14, 2011 – Hippo, a leading vendor of commercial Java Open Source Web Content Management is proud to announce a new technical alliance with Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM Platform) company.

The two companies have built an ECM/WCM connector based on the OASIS CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) standard.  A webinar with a demonstration of this connector will take place on July 20th.

Both Nuxeo and Hippo are open source, Java-based, CMIS-compliant platforms, so the partnership between the two is a natural extension – bringing high value functionality to developers, content architects and end users of both systems.   The Hippo/Nuxeo connector benefits from a high degree of flexibility and ensures that content coming from any source within the organization can be easily integrated into both platforms.   
“The Hippo CMS and Hippo Portal helps empower our customer’s audiences, by driving multi-channel, multi-lingual, multi-site solutions,” said Hippo CEO Jeroen Verberg. “The CMIS connector to Nuxeo applications adds yet another possibility for the online communication of content. And, of course a connector between these two open source, Java-based platforms is quite empowering for organizations who need a scalable system that can grow and integrate with other tools.”

The Future of Open Atrium

In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for  Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.

Q. What are Phase2's plans for Open Atrium?

Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.

Tiki 7 Released, the latest from Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware

The next major release of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is now available -- Tiki 7. In addition to more than 200 miscellaneous fixes and code improvements, Tiki 7 boasts several eagerly awaited new features:

  • Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware Drag-and-drop of modules
  • Dozens of new plugins including Blip.tv, Vimeo, TokenAccess
  • Introduction of the Theme Generator
  • A new unified search infrastructure, based on Zend Lucene
  • Integration with OpenStreetMap and Zotero
  • Revamped Slideshow
  • Mobile, using jQuery.mobile

With this release, Tiki has made some important technological changes, too. Tiki 7 marks the beginning of movement towards HTML5 and the end of support for Internet Explorer 6. Integration with jQuery Mobile is also featured in this release, replacing HAWHAW (first introduced in 2004) for mobile support.

The code for Tiki Trackers have been completely revamped in this release. This will allow developers to more easily improve the feature and better integrate it within all aspects of Tiki.

The release of Tiki 7 also means that Tiki 6 become the LTS (Long Term Support) version and that development on Tiki 3.x officially ends. Although Tiki 7 is available immediately for early adopters, many site administrators may elect to wait until 7.1. See https://dev.tiki.org/Version+lifecycle to determine which Tiki version is right for you.

For details on Tiki 7, review the Release Notes and documentation. To download Tiki 7 (and all other versions), visit https://tiki.org/download .

Introduction to Percussion CM1 CMS

Buried deep in a month's worth of unread emails was a request for me to take a look at Percussion Software’s CM1 web content management system. The claim is that "CM1 transforms the content management experience for organizations with complex content requirements, who lack the scale required to deploy and maintain a traditional WCM". CM1 was designed to allow marketing teams to quickly build and manage highly interactive, social, scalable websites, and open up content contribution to users across their organizations.

ocPortal 7: A CMS for custom social websites

This week ocProducts released version 7 of the Open Source CMS, ocPortal, making rapid improvements based on feedback from user testing.

ocPortal 7 builds on the user-experience work that has also driven the previous three releases, with the aim of making it easier to build highly sophisticated social web-sites that can be fully customized by regular users.

In addition to implementing user feedback, the developers have enhanced ocPortal further by optimizing how long the simplest common administration tasks take. These have now made things even easier, and more manageable, than in the past.

CMS Expo: Social Drupal

CMS Expo in Chicago last week gave me a great opportunity to learn about a variety of content management systems. I spent most of my time at the conference getting out of my comfort zone by visiting with those companies and open source projects that I knew the least about their products and services. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevented me from visiting with my personal favorite CMS, Drupal. By the end of the conference, I felt I needed to treat myself by attending one of the final sessions in the Drupal track, "Social Drupal".

What key activities should you integrate? In what scenarios might you be smarter to leave the heavy lifting to an outsourced solution?  What elements are critically important right now when building your social relevance in the market?  Find this out and more at this practical advice session on how you can be using Drupal to capture the Social Media audience which awaits.

My hope for the session was that it would give me good pointers for how to connect my Drupal sites better to the social web. Lullabot's Blake Hall led this information packed session. Blake began the session by pushing his vision that this session should not just be called "Social Drupal" but also "Community Plumbing (without the crack)". The proposed rewriting of the title for this session is a reminder to the audience that Drupal has always been social.

Blake started the session reminding that one needs to take a look at the bigger picture by taking a look as your site's Social Media Strategy. This strategy would include the following elements:

  • Authentic Story
  • Honest Dialogue
  • Engage your audience
  • Activate the social media

While the big picture is always nice consider it's the details that help determine whether your site is going to succeed. From this point forward Blake focused on specifics and I feverishly did my best to keep up. Some of the notable remarks from Blake that caught my attention:

  • First step is to take a look at your business goals and the resources you have available when building/supporting your site. Blake of course sees Drupal as being able to address both ends of this equation.
  • Some of the social modules for Drupal he recommends include Feeds, Flag, Twitter, Dashboard, Fivestar, Messaging, Radioactivity (gotta check this one out!), and Organic Groups.
  • Speaking of organic groups, take a look at groups.drupal.org: especially Social Networking Sites group to tap into Drupal community's expertise on social publishing.

New OpenCms 8 from Alkacon Software

OpenCms 8 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.

Alkacon and OpenCms logo

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

Major new features in OpenCms 8

  • The "Advanced Direct Edit" mode allows to create page content by drag & drop.
  • The new sitemap editor allows to create new pages and rearrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
  • A multiple file enabled upload dialog all based on HTML replaced the old "Upload Applet".
  • The new "Content Subscription Engine" allows to inform users when important documents have changed.
  • The XML content editor now support elements.
  • The new publish dialog supports session based selection of content as well as add/remove of individual resources.
  • Extended support for creation of content for mobile devices with the tag.
  • A central "Shared Folder" has been added that is available from all sites for sharing content.
  • JPA support has been added to the database layer, so there's support for 10+ additional databases.