Aaron Winborn

I can't tell you how much I'm in awe of our sponsors. For several months CMS Report's sponsors have consistently helped finance the costs to running our site by purchasing banner space. For niche sites like this one, that sponsorship is important. Sponsorship helps us pay for the bills from our host provider, internet service provider, and any software or hardware needed to support this site.

CMS Report provides great content on a wide variety of CMS related topics. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can purchase banner space at this site either through Google's ad services or through BuySellAds. For those times that we have sold out on our banner space, BuySellAds does offer sponsors the ability to put themselves on a waiting list to advertise on our site. We've been holding the price of sponsoring CMS Report below market value so at times you might find the waiting a little long.

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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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.

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.

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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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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While Flash CMS is probably the best way to create a fancy, multi-functional website, there is always a chance to improve the user experience in website management. With exactly this purpose in mind FlashMint has released Mint Editor – a new offline content management software to edit and customize FlashMint XML templates at ease.

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The XOOPS Projects has released Alpha 2 of its upcoming XOOPS 2.5.0 release.

This new release a major redesign of the Administration module which has been AJAX-ed with jQuery. Some of the new features are breaking a new ground for XOOPS, like the visual placement of blocks, and we're sure that the users will love them. The 2.5.0 release will be definitely the most innovative XOOPS  release in years.

Some of the major improvements/additions include new Help System for Admin and modules, MySQL Dump function, Tables Maintenance and Cache Clean-up in Maintenance, new Redirect messaging system, and Column sorting in tables. 

The focus on improved usability resulted in more visual administration using drag & drop, among them module ordering and block placement, and direct access to files for editing and folder management via a new File Manager. 

The developers also did a lot of code refactoring to use the latest XOOPS API. 

You can see a video with overview of the main new features on YouTube 

For more info and download links, please visit XOOPS Site

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Real Group Story: "The goal in implementing content technologies and related processes is really to apply management principles to content. Unfortunately, "management" too frequently gets conflated with "control." This is a common thread through many definitions of ECM in particular: "controlling unstructured information." Yet, management is much more than control. Good management also features enablement and empowerment. Management implies rules, but also supports creativity -- often in different amounts in different contexts."

Complete Story

Have you ever had the need to produce a web site that needed dynamic CMS features and capabilities but felt that using one of the usual suspects (Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc.) was the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly?

That's certainly the feeling I had when finally getting around to refactoring a small site of mine that has been on the Internet since 1997.  There had been numerous updates and tweaks made to the site over the years, but it was still based on static html pages and a bunch of customized (and poorly organized) javascripts.  Adding or modifying content was a manual process.

I had almost talked myself into using Wordpress....

Read the remainder of this article.

Last week, CMS Report received an email regarding a new CMS that focuses on managing multimedia content. The application is written in Python so naturally we're going to talk to let our readers know about this new platform.

I'm not sure if you guys have covered this yet, but as a regular reader of cmsreport.com I thought I would let you know.
Earlier this month my company launched a new Open Source python based CMS focused on video and podcasting.

http://getmediacore.com/

MediaCore is a free open source video cms and podcast platform.  MediaCore can pull video or audio from any source, track statistics, enable commenting, and provide a high degree of control over the presentation and administration.

Let me know if you guys need any further information on the project. Right now we are just trying to get the word out about it.

Cheers,
Stuart

There have been a number of pretty cool things happening at Konductor recently:

• Web Designer Mag published a really good tutorial and review of Konductor, calling it "The perfect platform for designers to create, and non-designers to edit." Check out Konductor's press page to read what they had to say.
• The Konductor Extension for Dreamweaver was recently released on the Adobe Dreamweaver Exchange, and—in addition to being the featured extension—it just exceeded 20,000 downloads!
• New content has been published on the blog showing how easy it is to mash up Konductor and Flickr to create a slick gallery on your website, plus a new video has been posted on YouTube showing the Firefox website being cut on to the system.

Rita McGrath at Harvard Business Review has written a blog post on why she hates micropayments.  Micropayments are financial transactions involving very small sums of money (see Wikipedia). For online publishing, a small fee would allow you to view the content for a certain period of time or for a certain number of articles.

Personally, I'm not sold on the concept of micropayments for content which is probably why I was lured to Ms. McGrath's article in the first place.

The idea has been around a long time — at least since the mid-to-late 90s — with both supporters and detractors weighing in. Millions have been lost by companies seeking to capitalize on streams of micropayments, almost all of which eventually crashed and burned. Myself, when confronted with a request to chip in 99 cents for a one-time glimpse at an article or $2.99 for a week's worth (as some of my local newspapers are doing) — well, I close that window and go away.

The author of the article discusses further the importance for any payment system adopted to consider "how the payment link of customers' consumption chains fits into their total experience". Micropayment systems have a tall order in that they need to be seamless, transparent, and achieve inevitability. Even grimmer for publishers, it's not only the micropayment experience that needs to be improved but also the non-micropayment systems too.

For the past few years, I've paid a yearly subscription to the Wall Street Journal for the print publication and the online subscription. With my yearly renewal coming up very soon, I've decided to discontinue my online subscription to the WSJ. Why would I do that? There are some very basic reasons to why I'm dropping WSJ.com. I rarely find myself reading the online content of the WSJ. I either already read the stories in the print version of the WSJ or I have found myself already familiar with the news story because I read a similar story posted elsewhere online. Stopping by the WSJ.com, unlike CNN or FoxNews, never became a daily ritual for me.

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