Content Management

The message below was originally posted as a comment here at CMS Report. Unfortunately, the comment was posted while I was switching the site over to a new server and just before the Memorial weekend holiday here in the United States. I'm afraid very few people saw the comment so I thought it should get more attention by posting the comment onto the "front page".

The author has narrowed his choice of content management systems for his project down to Plone, Apache Lenya, and Nuxeo 5. I'm not a user of any of the CMS listed so hopefully if you're reading this post you can spend a few minutes helping him out.

If you had to choose only one of the three CMS based on his requirements for the project he describes below...which CMS (Plone, Apache Lenya, and Nuxeo 5) would you choose? Please leave your comments belows!

The official release of phpBB3 is almost near with the first release candidate now available. The following is a partial list of features that are new in this version phpBB that did not exist in 2.0.x.

• Attachments - Attachments in posts and Personal Mail, Automatic image thumbnails,Display attachments inline
• Unlimited Subforums - Create unlimited subforums, Display active topics of all subforums
• Custom BBCodes - Create your own BBCodes, Add buttons to posting screen
• Custom Profile Fields - Add new fields on user profiles, Display them at registration, Display them on the profile view

By golly, I have been so busy the past couple weeks that I didn't even had a chance to check out a beta of Wordpress 2.2.  Now it's too late for me because Wordpress 2.2 has been officially released.  Not only does this release include over 200 bug fixes, but it also has some new nifty features.

• WordPress Widgets allowing you to easily rearrange and customize areas of your weblog (usually sidebars) with drag-and-drop simplicity.
• Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement the XML-RPC interface.
• A new Blogger importer that is able to handle the latest version of Google’s Blogger product and seamlessly import posts and comments without any user interaction beyond entering your login.

Plone 3 beta 3 was released on Wednesday of this week.  The announcement posted at Plone.org also invited users, administrators, and developers to help test the new software.  Plone 3, built on the Zope application server, is nearing a year of development .  By the time the final version of Plone 3 is released you should see the following new features included in the content management system.

• Full versioning, roll-back capabilities, in-place staging (ie. working copy support) and locking for all content.
• Inline editing of content using Ajax.
• Link integrity checking and automatic handling of moved or renamed content.

CMS Watch has a very good article on their site titled, "Question CMS Consolidation". The article serves as a reminder for IT and managers that, although technically feasible, an organization may not want to put everyone on the same content management system (CMS).  Why would an organization want to to consolidate their systems in the first place?  For those at top of the organization there may be some obvious reasons to unify the organization onto a single CMS.

Many organizations are looking at a portfolio of dozens of content management systems running somewhere on their network. From sheer tidiness alone, it’d be nice to have a shorter list. And such tidiness can have real benefits: better negotiating leverage with vendors, reduced overhead to manage contracts, reductions in the number of servers and hence in datacenter space (with attendant power and operational costs), and so on. Finally, increased demands for compliance and control are placing a premium on simplifying information management.

In my own organization, we have had both Internet and intranet servers since the mid 1990's supporting operations and administrators.  While we moved our Internet web servers onto a CMS a few years ago, it is only the past few months that many of our offices and departments have shifted their intranet from static pages to much more dynamic system.  As many of our field offices migrate their servers to utilizing newer Web 2.0 and collaboration applications, IT and management have a strong desire to consolidate those applications and servers.

CiviCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7:

Development teams have quickened up the pace with the release of Mambo 4.6.2. The release marks the completion of the complete revision of the Language Manager that began with the initial 4.6 release.  The Mambo core is now fully translatable.

Other features introduced in this minor version release include:

• Stability & security improvements
• Lighter database footprint
• A number of bug fixes
• Improved compatibility with older 3rd party extensions
• Added support for 4.5.x style SEF URLs
• Updates to many of the internal extensions
• MOStlyCE WYSIWYG editor enhancements (cross browser compliance issues addressed via an update to TinyMCE v2.1.0)

This may surprise regular visitors to my site, but I'm an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal.   Why is it surprising for some that I read the WSJ?  Well, probably because after all the links and excerpts to stories I have provided from CMS Report, this is the very first time I have ever mentioned an article from the WSJ in one of my blog posts.  The sad truth is that about every article found at WSJ.com can only be fully read if you are a subscriber of the online newspaper.  I have wanted to avoid frustrating readers the issues with providing a link to an article they can't access unless they're ready to hand over their cr

It was announced at RadiantCMS.org that the latest version of their CMS was released, Radiant 0.6 (Lapidary).

Last night the core team finished polishing off the rough edges of the latest release of Radiant. This is the first serious release in well over 6 months. The big news in this release is that we have created a first-class extension system to make it easier for you to tailor Radiant to meet your needs. A lot of people have already started using the extension system to create a number of useful third party add-ons. There are also numerous bug-fixes and improvements in other areas of the application. If you are still on the 0.5.x series this upgrade is a must. Core team member Sean Cribbs has compiled a complete list of the changes over on his blog.

End users and site managers will notice improvements and new features:

For some time I have wanted to promote and write about a new Drupal site that went online recently.  The site carries a similar mission I've tried to have with my own sites where those from competing projects, products, and organizations can come together for discussion.  In this case, a site with the desire to build a "place for those of us interested in open source solutions and community issues".  The site is OpenSourceCommunity.org.