Content Management

Last week, DotNetNuke Corp announced the availability of DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1. This edition is the latest release of its web content management and application development framework for business-critical websites and web applications built on Microsoft .NET. The DotNetNuke Professional Edition is built on the same open source core as the free DotNetNuke Community Edition but includes several exclusive features and is fully supported and documented. The annual DotNetNuke Professional Edition subscription costs $1,999 per instance.

New features added to both the community and professional editions of DotNetNuke 5.1 include:

• Added Management Console to simplify access to admin functions
• Auditing for core tables to increase security
• Content Approval and Versioning
• Stop banners displaying and clickthrough count incrementing when indexed by crawlers
• Skin Event Handling
• Google Analytics Support
• Custom XML Sitemap Ranks

Besides the new features and normal bug fixes, DotNetNuke 5.1 also offers additional improvements over DotNetNuke 5.0 including:

The open source project MiaCMS announced that they and the project team behind the Aliro CMS are joining forces to create a best of breed and next generation CMS. For those folks that aren't familiar with MiaCMS, MiaCMS is a fork of Mambo. I was first introduced to MiaCMS while sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. Admittedly, Aliro is new to me. Aliro is a project that while appreciating the features and history of the Mambo family (including Joomla!) still saw a need to make some dramatic changes to the CMS architecture and modernize the code base.

A new version of mojoPortal is out, version 2.3.0.8. This new version of the CMS includes the following new features:

• Search Engine Improvements
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Improvements
• Content Template Editor
• Skin (Theme) Improvements

mojoPortal is available at the official download page. Additional details on this version of mojoPortal can be found at mojoPortal.com.

Radiant 0.8.0 was released. While not that exciting of a release, at least it gives me something to talk about with regards to the Radiant CMS.

Radiant 0.8.0 “Asterism” features a brand new and more compliant caching mechanism based on Rack::Cache, and numerous bugfixes and small enhancements. Also included are:

• An extensive integration suite using Cucumber and Webrat
• Rails 2.3.2 (previously 2.1.2)
• Highline 1.5.1
• Haml 2.0.9

Additional development news can be found about Radiant CMS on their blog.

"We frequently counsel customers not to default to SharePoint (or Google, Oracle, IBM, et. al.) just because there's a lot of awareness of that package in the marketplace. Awareness is a marketing concept that cannot convey how a product will fit for you, architecturally, functionally, and financially."

-Tony Byrne, Analyst, CMS Watch, "Is Drupal Over-hyped?", June 11, 2009.

Kieran Lal, Acquia, recently had the opportunity to give a presentation on Drupal in front of an information system's course at San Francisco State College. It's a good video for anyone that wants to learn everything they possibly can about Drupal and given only one hour to do so. I would have loved to seen more questions and answers on the video as Kieran is one of those people that responds very well when people present him with good questions and good ideas.

WordPress 2.8, currently under development as a beta, is expected to be completed and released in a week or two. Until then, you can check out some of the documentation at wordpress.org to find all of the new goodies being added to this latest version of the blogging software.

Some of the highlights for WordPress 2.8 include:

Raphael Mudge sent us an email on his latest project, After the Deadline.

I'm a computer scientist working to fill a gap in current CMS feature sets.  It isn't a new social or wireless feature.  I'm working to bring spelling, style, and grammar checking to web applications.  The technology is available for WordPress and the Open Source TinyMCE editor.

After the Deadline is an exciting plugin that adds a much needed feature often missing in most CMS rich text editors. After the Deadline currently supports plugins for TinyMCE and Wordpress. Some additional bullet points behind the plugin include: 

• Corrects spelling with 90% accuracy
• Checks 1,500 words for misuse
• Finds grammar errors
• Improves writing style
• All plugins are licensed under the LGPL

When I recommend to someone that they should use Drupal for a project it is not uncommon for them to question my wisdom on the subject. Those new to Drupal are often shocked by Drupal's initial learning curve, no rich text editor in the core, and a user interface with a longer workflow than it really should be. As powerful and functional as Drupal can be it historically has had usability issues.

I received an email the other day from Hilary McCarthy promoting Platformic.  Platformic is an online Web CMS or what her company likes to call an Online Web Develop Environment.  As usual, I'll let the email do most of the talking in this post.

Hi, I wanted to make sure that you saw that Platformic is announcing version 3.0 of its enterprise web development software, an end-to-end online web development environment and content management platform that allows businesses to quickly and easily build/update websites in real-time without sacrificing creativity or writing code.