Aaron Winborn

Content Here: "Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way. But if you visit a CMS customer a while after implementation you are likely to find that the responsibility of adding content is still concentrated in a relatively small proportion of the employee population"

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CMS Report wants to thank our current sponsors for their support.

Acquia - Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. With over two million downloads since inception, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build sophisticated community websites.

Open Source Training - Open Source Training provides training across North America on Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress. They have worked with Fortune 500 companies, state and local government, plus universities and colleges.

CMS Market - CMS Market is a directory for Joomla extensions as well as Mambo, Drupal modules and Wordpress themes.

CMS themer - CMS themer is a professional theming service catered to designers, developers and web companies who do not have the time or expertise to theme a CMS based on an existing website or design.

IHost.Net - IHost offers a number of web hosting services built on the DotNetNuke. iHost.Net's has serviced over 100,000 customers since 1996.

Sitecore - Sitecore provides web content management (CMS) and portal software for organizations to create compelling website experiences.

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ALEXANDRIA , VA. – Bitrix, Inc. (www.bitrixsoft.com), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces D.I.G. technology – an advanced search engine developed specifically for enterprise intranets and websites that enables high-performance data search in texts, media content and documents with smart ranking, sorting and display. The engine is available in the company’s flagship products – Bitrix Intranet Portal and Bitrix Site Manager.

"Information is a gateway to new business opportunities, while information retrieval is a key to this gateway. We are proud to present our perfected search technology and provide customers the ultimate tool for fast and accurate locating of required data across an organization’s digital assets," said Yury Tushinsky, CTO of Bitrix, Inc.

D.I.G. is designed to meet five basic principles to achieve best value and easy user adoption: accuracy, performance, content coverage, security and flexibility. This ready-made search tool intelligently implements an idea that is both simple and brilliant – thorough digging, smart display.

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And the answer to yesterday's "Eye grow Drupal" question is: Druplipets. Hundreds of cute little Druplipets, your friendly Druplicon chia pet. Druplipet is the newest member of the Acquia and Drupal Gardens family and will be making appearances at industry events this year. It is making its first appearance at SXSW along with a fun contest. Needless to say, Drupal chia pets are fun and powerful stuff!

Content Management Software (CMS) provider, pTools, today announced the addition of a range of embedded social media and networking features to its software. From within the pTools CMS, social media content can be easily re-distributed to any site anytime in any format on any social network.

A key feature, pTools ‘TwitterDocs’, allows users to post to Twitter as they publish content through the CMS. There is no need to separately login to Twitter, and the content-related Tweet is controlled and managed within the CMS and its workflows.

In addition to Twitter, customer content is presented on Facebook, LinkedIn, and indexed in live search engine results such as Google & Bing with no pre- or post-publishing tweaking required.

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"What is Content Management?

My definition is...

Content Management is the management of content."

-Tony Byrne, What is Content Management, Real Story Group, February 24, 2010

As strange as this sounds, one of the biggest debates among CMS gurus is over the very definitions of content management and content management system. I have always preferred utilizing the simple but precise definitions for the terms we use. "Real life" tends to complicate everything we do and starting simple is sometimes the only edge you have when facing increasing complexity. This is why I think the best definition for content management out there comes from Tony Byrne.

The City of Athens has launched a new Drupal site to serve as its official website, along with a Drupal-based site at http://www.breathtakingathens.com/ that provides visitor and tourism information.

Athens is a large city (3.5 million residents and 6 million tourists each year), with a large tourism base due in part to its role in the 2004 Olympic Games. To support the city's needs, the site includes a large calendar of city events, a comprehensive map-based index of city services and interactive tools that allow citizens to access city resources. The site builds on Drupal's multilingual capabilities to provide information in both Greek and English.

Optical Image Technology (OIT) and client Panhandle Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of West Virginia has been named one of three national finalists for the 2010 AIIM Carl E. Nelson Best Practices Award in the small company category.  The award recognizes excellence in the field of enterprise content management (ECM) technology, showcasing projects that have achieved a strong return on investment.  The “best practices” designation denotes processes that are quantifiable, adaptable, and repeatable. 

One of the first insurers in the region to transition from paper to electronic files and processing, Panhandle implemented OIT’s DocFinity® document and content management software for front-end scanning and secure electronic file access.  Ultimately, Panhandle’s DocFinity integration with their web-based policy administration system, company portal, website, and more eliminated paper-based processing and enabled secure remote access for agents and customers. 

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Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

Also, CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for DrupalCon - San Francisco 2010. This is our first time we have sponsored a DrupalCon event and we're excited to be helping out by promoting this event. While you can learn quite a bit about Drupal at this conference, the conference also gives you a chance to see and hear directly from the the open source community that is supporting Drupal. As a user of Drupal, it's not just about the software that sparks our interest in DrupalCon but also the people in Drupal's community we have come to know and appreciate.

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Tiki has released updates for both current release branches: 3.5 and 4.2. Both updates include bug fixes, feature polishing, and security updates. All Tiki sites are strongly encouraged to update to the latest version to take advantage of security fixes and updates. See the download page at TikiWiki.org to determine which branch (3.x or 4.x) best suits your needs.

Coming Soon: Tiki 5

The next major release, Tiki 5, is planned for April 2010 and will include many new features including shopping cart and payment support, improved translation/multilingual support, an advanced rating and scoring system, workspaces, performance improvements, and much more. See the Tiki 5 documentation for additional information on this upcoming release. Early adopters can obtain pre-release versions of Tiki 5 directly from the SVN repository.

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All Drupal developers have experienced this nightmare. You have been creating a great project, now it’s time to deploy it. No one wants to deal with it. No one wants to be the responsible of doing it.

If you are building a simple site, and there’s only a one time deployment, it’s not a big deal. You just have to follow the largely discussed and know simple rules.

The Rules:

1. Use SVN (or CVS) to keep your code updated among the developers
2. Deploy to production by backing up/restoring the database
3. Create scripts to make the deployment process automatic

That’s all, the unique problem you could have is maybe that you will have to delete the test content/users and change some settings before going live, but in summary, it’s pretty easy.

When it’s about deploying code, it’s still easy to do if you followed the simple rules. You will have only to update your SVN branch and you are done.

When the nightmare begins?

The problem is deploying changes made in the CMS, but without wiping all the existing data. In other words, merging the database changes, the settings and content stored in the database.

Scenario 1: Big (or huge) Drupal projects

You have to deploy a project in multiple phases. So while the first phase is deployed and working in production, you have a bunch of developers working on the next phase (this means, implementing new code, creating new nodes, creating new views, editing existing ones, changing settings, users, permissions, etc.)

Read more of Cesar Salazar's take on: Enterprise Drupal: Project Configuration Management and Release Management.

MySQL, the open source database product that puts the "M" in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.

The story of MySQL AB is pretty amazing, so I unleashed my "inner academic", did some research and compiled a timeline of MySQL AB's history. This timeline is assembled based on different resources online, such as MySQL press releases (example 1) and interviews with MySQL AB executives (example 2, example 3), etc.

Things to add? Let me know in the comments and I'll update the post.

• MySQL AB founded by Michael Widenius (Monty), David Axmark and Allan Larsson in Sweden.

• MySQL goes Open Source and releases software under the terms of the GPL. Revenues dropped 80% as a result, and it took a year to make up for it.

• Mårten Mickos elected CEO at age 38. Mårten was the CEO of a number of Nordic companies before joining MySQL, and comes with a sales and marketing background.
• 2 million active installations.
• Raised series A with undisclosed amount from Scandinavian venture capitalists. Estimated to be around $1 to $2 million.

• MySQL launched US headquarters in addition to Swedish headquarters.
• 3 million active users.
• Ended the year with $6.5 million in revenue with 1,000 paying customers.

• Raised a $19.5 million series B from Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.
• 4 million active installations and over 30,000 downloads per day.
• Ended the year with $12 million in revenue.

• With the main revenue coming from the OEM dual-licensing model, MySQL decides to move more into the enterprise market and to focus more on recurring revenue from end users rather than one-time licensing fees from their OEM partners.
• Ended the year with $20 million in revenue.

• MySQL launched the MySQL Network modeled after the RedHat Network. The MySQL Network is a subscription service targeted at end users that provides updates, alerts, notifications, and product-level support designed to make it easier for companies to manage hundreds of MySQL servers.
• MySQL 5 ships and includes many new features to go after enterprise users (e.g. stored procedures, triggers, views, cursors, distributed transactions, federated storage engines, etc.)
• Oracle buys Innobase, the 4-person Finnish company behind MySQL's InnoDB storage backend.
• Ended the year with $34 million in revenue based on 3400 customers.

• Mårten Mickos confirms that Oracle tried to buy MySQL. Oracle' CEO Larry Ellison commented: "We've spoken to them, in fact we've spoken to almost everyone. Are we interested? It's a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between $30 million and $40 million. Oracle's revenue next year is $15 billion."
• Oracle buys Sleepycat, the company that provides MySQL with the Berkeley DB transactional storage engine.
• Mårten Mickos announces that they are making MySQL ready for an IPO in 2008 on an projected $100 million in revenues.
• 8 million active installations.
• MySQL has 320 employees in 25 countries, 70 percent of whom work from home.
• Raised a $18 million Series C based on a rumored valuation north of $300 million.
• MySQL is estimated to have a 33% market share measured in install base and 0.2% market share measured in revenue (the database market was a $15 billion market in 2006).
• Ended the year with $50 million in revenue.

• Ended the year with $75 million in revenue.

• Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL AB for approximately $1 billion.
• Michael Widenius (Monty) and David Axmark, two of MySQL AB's co-founders, begin to criticize Sun publicly and leave Sun shortly after.

• Mårten Mickos leaves Sun and becomes entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital. Sun has now lost the business and spiritual leaders that turned MySQL into a success.
• Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion.

If you've got Drush installed—and you really should—you can use the following recipe to setup a backup system that will maintain daily backups for the last two weeks. Most of the logrotate configuration is based on a Wikibooks book that I found.

Make sure logrotate is installed:
whereis logrotate

Which should print something like:
logrotate: /usr/sbin/logrotate /etc/logrotate.conf /etc/logrotate.d /usr/share/man/man8/logrotate.8.gz

So for this site we'll use the full path /usr/sbin/logrotate to run the program.

If you don't know where drush is installed you'll probably want to repeat the process to determine its location. The site I'm working on right now is hosted by May First, a very Drupal friendly ISP (and an amazing progressive group), so they've installed drush at /usr/bin/drush.

drush needs to be able to find the correct settings.php file to connect to your database. Specify the root of your Drupal site using the -r switch. You can test that it's able to locate your settings using the following command:
/usr/bin/drush -r ~/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/web sql conf

If it works you'll see an array with your database connection information.

Create the state and configuration files:
touch ~/.logrotate.state ~/.logrotate.config

Edit ~/.logrotate.config insert the following text:
~/backup/dev.sql.gz {
        rotate 7
        daily
        nocompress
        nocopytruncate
        postrotate
          /usr/bin/drush -r ~/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/web/ sql dump | gzip > ~/backup/dev.sql.gz
        endscript
}

logrotate expects that the file will already exist so we need to use drush to create the first one:
/usr/bin/drush -r ~/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/web/ sql dump | gzip > ~/backup/dev.sql.gz

Test that logrotate will work correctly:
/usr/sbin/logrotate --state=~/.logrotate.state ~/.logrotate.config --debug

If everything is working correctly you'll see something like:
reading config file /home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/.logrotate.config
reading config info for "/home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/backup/dev.sql.gz"

Handling 1 logs

rotating pattern: "/home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/backup/dev.sql.gz"  after 1 days (7 rotations)
empty log files are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /home/members/rmo/sites/dev.rudemechanicalorchestra.org/users/rmodev/backup/dev.sql.gz
  log does not need rotating

Edit your crontab:
crontab -e

And add the following line which will run logrotate at midnight:
0 0 * * *       /usr/sbin/logrotate --state=~/.logrotate.state ~/.logrotate.config

That's it, you should now have two weeks of daily backups. You'll want to check back on it tomorrow and make sure that the backups are actually occurring and that the old ones are being renamed to .sql.gz.1, .sql.gz.2, etc.

Elgg 1.7 was released this week. Elgg is an open source social platform and is made for individuals, groups and institutions to create their own fully-featured social environment. This new version of Elgg introduces some new features but much of the development time was spent improving the core API to make Elgg a stable platform for future development.

Some of the significant changes in Elgg 1.7 include:

• Proper UTF8 support in the database -- This allows developers to use MySQL's native string functions in queries
• A new data directories layout to work with standard filesystems
• Full-text search
• A new core API for retrieving entities
• A functional REST API
• Unit tests

Elgg 1.7 is available at Elgg.org on their downloads page.

Packt is pleased to announce Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide, a new book that helps PHP developers build applications that interface with the customer, product, and order data using Magento's Core API. Written by Jamie Huskisson, this book is packed with examples for effective Magento development.

Magento is an Open Source, e-commerce web application that was created by Varien, and built on components of the Zend Framework. Magento is the hottest and most powerful e-commerce software and has gained popularity in a short period of time. Users can control the look, content and functionality of their e-commerce web site with the help of Magento’s powerful theming engine.

Magento 1.3: PHP Developer's Guide will help developers extend and customize the Magento e-commerce system using PHP code. They will get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento and learn about the best modules available. Developers can then build a shipping module for their Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them.

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For 40 years, scientists have searched for a way to bring nuclear fusion to the masses. If successful in bringing fusion online, we all could have an inexhaustible form of power to meet our world's energy needs. The promise of fusion is a dream that many have hoped to see become a reality in their lifetime.

Perhaps not for as noble of cause, Drupal users have sought better themes for their Drupal sites. Four years ago, it seemed to me that creating a good theme for Drupal was almost done as an afterthought. There simply were not too many places for a user to go for a quality Drupal theme. I recall spending a lot of wasted time maintaining my own (boring) themes for Drupal sites. The Drupal days of version 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and even 4.7 for themes were dark days indeed. Luckily, Drupal 5 introduced us to a new theme called Garland. Garland may not have been a perfect theme but in my opinion the theme marked the beginning of an era for a new style of Drupal themes.

In the past few years, the number of Drupal themes provided under open source or via private companies have exploded. Along with that explosion, various starter and base themes have been introduced too. On the top of my head I can think of Zen, Genesis, Basic, and AdaptiveTheme. These starter/base themes offer theme developers opportunities for everyone to build or use professional sub-themes. In fact, this site used Zen in the theme's early years and today we're currently using a Genesis based theme called Extreme Updates (slightly modified). With each passing year, the theme offerings for Drupal has steadily improved in quality and quantity. This year is no exception and brings us a new official base theme to carry us over into the next generation of themes made for Drupal.

The year 2010 brings us Drupal's newest base theme, Fusion.  Currently, there probably isn't a Drupal theme that offers site owners more control over layout and style than a Fusion based theme. Fusion has the support and backing of well-known Drupal theme shop, TopNotchThemes. TopNotchThemes appear to be serious enough about Fusion revolutionizing the way themes are done in Drupal. This week they publicly announced their new line of themes and a website called Fusion Drupal Themes. Most of the themes offered at the site are for a price, but there are a couple free themes also being offered that should give you a chance to see what Fusion is all about.

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David Akermanis pinged me yesterday on Twitter ("Twatted me" just sounds so wrong) stating that it has been a full year since my last blog post. And it's true it's that old, March 3rd, 2009 was the last time this website got some new content. It has been a crazy busy year, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to make a one year no-blog-post anniversary blog post to bring it back up to speed. The majority of this will be old news, but it's here just to make sure we're all on track...

• DrupalCon DC was so much fun, I posted the pictures on Flickr
• The proposal to turn Drupal into a Distributed Micro-Blog went through with the Knight Foundation and we're currently going through documentation and reports to make sure it goes through nicely
• Helped put together a new site for my good friend, David Akermanis. The aim was to be a social networking hub for his latest events, pictures, music, and his thoughts on life. Been about a year since then, so it desperately needs a new design!
• The Open Video Conference in June was crazy fun. Guest star appearance of Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde! Video interview here.
• Created yet another Drupal module: Konami Code
• Got a new Nikon D90 and absolutely been loving the pictures its taking
• Paula Valstein plays a wicked show, as did Ingrid Michaelson (here's The Chain) and Joshua Radin (here's Everything'll Be Alright). Oh, and Nick Warren, Ronski Speed, Ferry Corsten, should I go on?
• DrupalCon Paris was absolutely amazing. Paris is an incredible city, and I guiltily regret not exploring more of it instead of going to the DrupalCon sessions. Definitely going to have to visit France again.
• The New York Anime Festival was a blast. I have to get on top of uploading pictures from events. Watched Cowboy Bebop and liked this scene from episode 18 the most.
• Some of the modules I maintain are now Drupal 7 ready: String Overrides, Disqus, Mobile Theme, OpenID URL, etc.
• I'm now a Drupal Engineer at Acquia! My projects so far include keeping some of their internal workings on track, being a bridge between the marketing team and the engineering team, and helping out as much as I can in other areas. It has been absolutely fantastic so far, and I'm so happy to be part of such an incredible team.

Moving forward, I plan to post more rapidly on here. Although I'll be writing less content on each post, I will be posting more frequently. There's normal blogging (essay-ish) and then there's micro-blogging (140 characters), I think I'll turn this into something in between... A Miniblog?

In closing, I'd like to thank you everyone! It has been an amazing no-blog-post year. A very busy, productive and fun year. I hope to see you all soon!

Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ:OTEX) (TSX: OTC) announced on February 22, 2010 they have entered into an agreement to buy Canadian neighbor Nstein Technologies Inc. (TSX-V: EIN).  This brings the total WCM acquisitions for Open Text to 5 (FIVE) over the past several years.  While I am sure Open Text has a solid strategy in mind for their shareholders we have concerns about the underlying roadmap for these products and the potential impact on existing customers of the now acquired WCM frameworks. 

Continue Reading Travis Cole's (COO of Oshyn, Inc) thoughts on "Open Text WCM/CMS Aquisition Roadmap"

ALEXANDRIA , VA. - Bitrix, Inc. ( www.bitrixsoft.com ), a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, announces the release of Bitrix® Site Manager ASP.NET 4.6 a multi-featured website management solution for the .NET platform now reinforced with an advanced security framework, social networking features and a number of additional enhancements to provide customers cost-effective online tools that compel Internet users to action.

Security Uppermost

"Security is the cornerstone of each and every web project. There is no need for great features if the website can be easily hacked, exposing valuable digital assets and damaging an established image," said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc. "The new version of Bitrix Site Manager ASP.NET combines powerful functionality and integrated proactive protection, shielding websites against malicious programs and hacker attacks."

The new security framework provides proactive protection against the majority of known web attacks and security flaws like XSS and SQL injections and phishing. The framework recognizes threats among incoming requests, blocks website intrusions and maintains a comprehensive log about suspicious and dangerous activity being registered, providing an opportunity to respond accordingly.

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