Aaron Winborn

Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of progress is being made in that direction.

Over the weekend, I decided to move CMS Report from Drupal 6 to Acquia Drupal.  In December, I received a message that beta testers would be rolled over into "a Community subscription entitlement that extends through December 31st, 2009".  Placing the Acquia subscription onto CMSReport.com not only will allow the site to receive the benefits of being on Acquia's network, but will also allow me to monitor the evolution of Acquia.  Acquia is still a young company and likely will continue to expand on the products and services it offers.

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Mike Elgan has a good article in ComputerWorld, Why products fail.  He makes a point that many usability tests really miss the entire point of what people really want in a product.

When you ask someone what they really want, they won't tell you the truth because they're not aware of the truth.

Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability. What's missing is that these attributes are means to an end. The real issue is always the user's physiological feeling of being in control.

In the article, he later goes on to support his argument. I think he is right, true usability is all about control. Something for all of us to ponder about the next time we participate in a usability exercise for our content management system.

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During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.

Well, it looks as if Deane Barker has finally decided to get on the Drupal learning curve and find out more about this great CMS.

I’m working with Drupal for the first time on a hobby project I’m doing with Seth Gottlieb (about which you’ll hear much more later…). Adam Kalsey — Drupal ninja that he is — is advising us on the technical implementation, and he’s been a great help.

Why Drupal? Because I didn’t know it, and figured I needed to. Seth and I, after all, had the discussion about how there are people like to feel smart and people that like to feel stupid. Learning Drupal has made me feel plenty stupid, and that’s exciting. And there’s no better time to feel stupid while learning than on a project you’re doing for yourself.

I'm always excited to see very talented content management people discuss their initial experiences with a CMS.  If Deane writes more about Drupal, I suspect his writings will be very similar to the Drupal writings of Sacha Chua.

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Wikipedia Foundation: "With the support of over 125,000 donors from around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation has achieved its goal of raising over $6 million USD to sustain Wikipedia. As of today, the campaign has generated just over $6.2 million USD."

Complete Story

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Packt is pleased to announce a new book on Drupal that acts as a practical guide with instructions for setting up a home page, product catalog, blog, events calendar, etc. using the Drupal CMS platform. Written by prominent Content Management expert Mark Noble, Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions helps developers build powerful website features for their business.

Drupal is a free Open Source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS). Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence. Written in the programming language PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design means it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website. Advertisement:

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phpBB, an open source Web forum application, officially announced the end of support for phpBB 2.0.  Long live "Olympus" (phpBB 3.0).

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Every year, there are some key information technology people that make mostly sound and trustworthy predictions for the coming year.  I'll be updating this page through the week with links to these visions of what we may expect in 2009.  My own thoughts and vision for 2009 and CMS Report will come later in another post (I am not worthy to place my own comments here).

Content Management and Social Publishing Predictions

Dries Buytaert (Drupal Project Lead) - Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom

Ryan Thrash (MODx) - Evolution and Revolution

Open Source

Dave Rosenberg (Co-founder of MuleSource) - Open source as paid software

Assorted Tech Gurus - The Future of Open Source

Technology and Information Technology

Joe Zuccaro - Twitter, Blogging, Open Source CMS (Drupal), Government

Assorted Analysts - Cloud Computing, Windows 7, Collaboration, Patents

If you come across a posting regarding 2009 by an IT leader, please feel free to leave a link in the comment section below. 

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Not long ago I wrote that KDE 4 might produce enough changes to its look and feel to help Linux become more Mac-like.  At the time, Windows Vista seemed to be trying to move in the same direction.  Interestingly, someone has noted that Windows 7 now appears to be moving towards Linux's direction with the Windows desktop looking more like KDE 3.5.

The review features screenshots and I must say, even though it has not convinced me, Windows 7 is a step forward from Vista, at least as far as the GUI is concerned.  Aside from the removal of some annoying Vista bells and whistles and the new Peek and Snap window-management enhancements, it is difficult not to notice the resemblance between Microsoft’s much-touted revamped Aero and the excellent, now 3-years old, KDE 3.5.x.

Personally, I think Microsoft, Apple, and the Linux desktop developers have run out of ideas.  Any new innovation for these desktops seem to be ideas borrowed and improved from each other's desktops.  This is one of the reasons why I have lost my "wow" when it comes to operating systems.  In 2007, I wrote:

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The year 2008 was another great year for CMS Report. In 2008, we posted close to 500 articles to the front page. Below are the ten most read articles that were posted for the year.

Similar to last year, three of the top stories have little to do with content management systems.  It seems that there is more interest in gadgets than content management systems!  Hopefully CMS Report can help change that.

1. Dell releasing the Mini 12 netbook this week?
2. Drupal shopping carts: Ubercart and e-Commerce module still the way to go
3. The Mac and Windows Alternative: My Linux Laptop
4. Social Publishing Systems to topple the CMS
5. Another weekend with Drupal 6
6. Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1 Performance Comparison
7. Drupal SMFforum Integration module no longer supported
8. The iTouch Alternative: Nokia's N800
9. Best PHP Open Source CMS: Drupal wins, Joomla and CMS Made Simple tie for second
10. The Dangers of Reviewing Open Source CMS

As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.  May everyone have a great 2009!

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In keeping with tradition, the following are seven articles that were posted here at CMSReport.com and received less attention than I had hoped.  Either the reader didn't show up to view the article or there was little discussion on the subject matter.  I'll let you be the judge on whether these articles deserved the obscurity they received in 2008.

1. Walt Mossberg on the Asus Eee PC
2. The Content in 1996
3. Revealing numbers from Alfresco regarding the enterprise stack
4. Are there not enough girl geeks in the world?
5. U.S. Falling Behind as Academics Goes Global
6. The case for a boxed CMS: Security
7. Is Microsoft finally seeing the light with Office?

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Jennifer Franklin Elrod: "I wish I had the book MediaWiki Skins Design when I first set out to design a MediaWiki skin for my philosophy subsite. It would have saved me so much time and trouble. Those were the days when I didn’t have a baby. I could stay up half the night going through hours of CSS trial and error just to tweak one or two little design elements. I could never do that now. As soon as I have time I intend to use some of the info in this book to clean up my skins. Nothing like this existed to my knowledge when I set out to make my skins. Documentation is often the weakest link in the open source community. This book fills an important gap that should democratize MediaWiki even more, making it more appealing to a wider swath of the web population."

To read more visit http://squirreltao.dreamfishery.com/2008...

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A new tool that makes it simple to place Outlook emails into SharePoint and share those files within a document library has been released by nSynergy. 

eMail management has become a high priority for all businesses, both large and small, with most written correspondence being delivered in email form. Businesses can use tools like SharePoint to manage most of their important business documents, but the inability to easily place emails into SharePoint and share those files within a document library is a problem that many SharePoint users have encountered. nSynergy developed a tool called myDocs to integrate SharePoint and Outlook, and finally solve the problem of managing email within SharePoint.

Drag and drop emails into SharePoint folders

With myDocs you can now use Outlook to drag and drop emails directly into specific folders that represent SharePoint document library folders. You can also view, open, create and access documents and emails directly within Outlook. With emails, documents and other files being accessible through Outlook, everyone in your workplace can use Outlook and SharePoint together to create a powerful yet simple document management tool.
The ability to automatically move emails from Outlook into SharePoint and create document library folders from Outlook is a process that will energize your SharePoint 2007 workflows. Advertisement:

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Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development is a new book from Packt that helps users to program their own Joomla! extensions. Written by Joseph LeBlanc, and tested against the final release of Joomla! 1.5, this book helps create extensions with PHP using built-in HTML and JavaScript functions.

Joomla! is the world's hottest open-source content management system, packed with various features. Its greatest quality is that it is extremely extensible, allowing any number of complex applications to be cleanly integrated.

This book will help users understand the Model-View-Controller design pattern used in components. Using HTML functions, programmers will be able to maintain a consistent look and reduce repetitive code. They will be able to manage customized Google Maps using the MooTools JavaScript framework. They will also be able to create toolbars, list screens with pagination, and menu items. Advertisement:

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Away from this blog, I've been putting a lot of energy into how best to work with social software in larger organizations (Enterprise 2.0) behind the firewall.  My professional attention has been shifting away from using Web content management systems, social publishing systems, and other collaboration tools on the Internet.  I really think the next big advancements and challenges for web technologies will not be on the World Wide Web, but the less explored intranet ran by medium and larger size organizations.

In one form or another, I've been involved on both sides of the firewall in my organization. Ten years ago it was a huge challenge for organizations and businesses to figure out how best to utilize the Internet to meet their business needs. As challenging as I saw the Internet for my own organization, I'm convinced there are greater challenges on the intranet side of the house.  For the most part, we all can see what the others are doing with their Internet Web servers, but few of us get to see what other organizations do with Enterprise 2.0 behind their own firewalls. Advertisement:

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mojoPortal 2.2.8.1 was released over the weekend.  The main purpose for the release was to fix a bug in the MS SQL version of the blog that was introduced in version 2.2.8.0.  Yet, one thing I've learned about mojoPortal is that in many of their bug fix releases...they almost always add some new new or enhanced features.  This release is no exception.

New items in mojoPortal 2.2.8.1 that are worth mentioning include:

• Yahoo User Interface Library - Implemented a YuiGridView, which is an ASP.NET GridView decorated with the YUI DataTable javascript.
• A Sales Overview report for the WebStore

mojoPortal 2.2.8.1 is available via mojoPortal's download page. Advertisement:

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CMS Report was recently toying with the idea of including paid advertisement in our news feed.  Instead we decided that our readers would be better served by seeing a "thank you" to our sponsors.  A monthly thank you from CMSReport.com seems to be fitting as just a few weeks ago we launched new sponsorship opportunities here at the site.

CMS Report wants to thank the following 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.

Wild Apricot - Wild Apricot has been specifically built to store member records and contact lists and link them to your Website and other software tools to automate and streamline administrative tasks for clubs, associations and communities.

Atlantic Global - Atlantic Global develops business management software that is designed to enable organizations to better understand their projects, time, resource capability and deployment, thereby enabling improvement in operational efficiency and effectiveness.

Netidnow - NetIDNow provides all the tools you need to make your own website or an ecommerce store quickly and inexpensively.

CMS Report also wants to thank these enthusiastic Google Adsense advertisers.

Ektron -  Ektron provides a complete platform with all of the functionality necessary to create, deploy, and manage your Web site.

Top Notch Themes - With TopNotchThemes you can instantly download a ready-to-launch Drupal theme. A premium Drupal theme that'll take your site from default to dynamite in minutes.

KnowledgeTree - KnowledgeTree is open source document management software that connects people, processes, and ideas. Collaborate, securely store all your critical documents, address compliance challenges, and focus on providing a simple solution that works for your business. Advertisement:

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Occasionally, I see a post that I have written as a reference in a white paper, a book, or somewhere else online.  I actually started CMSReport.com as a place for me to learn more about Web content management systems and information systems.  Whenever someone references CMS Report it signals that we have gone full circle where someone is also learning from me.  There is not a more awesome feeling than this.

One thing I have yet to achieve is being a legitimate reference at Wikipedia.  Until now!  CMS Report is being referenced on the wiki page for Frog CMS.

1. ^ "phpRadiant to imitate Radiant CMS" (2007-01-04). Retrieved on 2008-04-28.

For those that do not not know, phpRadiant was the original project name for this current Frog CMS.  Frog CMS was inspired by the Ruby on Rails application, Radiant CMS.   Naturally, after two years in development, the developers for Frog CMS have become inspired with their own roadmap for building this CMS.  Frog is currently available at version 0.9.5 from the Frog CMS download page.

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"An objective without strategy, or a strategy without execution remains a dream."

-Dries Buytaert, Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom, "Contributing back to Drupal", Buytaert.net.

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Yesterday, PHP-Fusion announced that someone had hacked into their site and changed the download link for PHP-Fusion Version 7.

Hello all,

We had an issue a few days ago where a malicious person gained access to our site as a super administrator via a weak account/gained password. They apparently changed the download link of PHP-Fusion version 7 to spendspace and it was packaged as a .rar file.

If you downloaded one of these files, please reinstall your entire site using a fresh copy from SourceForge.

While this isn't a good thing, it is a positive that PHP-Fusion disclosed the possibility that the link led to a version of PHP-Fusion that may have been maliciously changed.  I can recall a number of other projects (open source and propriety) that have found their source code made vulnerable by someone intruding into their servers.  What is always important to customers in these cases is disclosure and transparency.  So far, PHP-Fusion seems to be doing the right thing.

However, as of this Thursday morning...it looks like PHP-Fusion's hosting company has suspended their account. At the time of this writing, there is no words given as to the reasons for the suspension.  I suspect the suspension is likely to be security related.  Perhaps, we'll see an announcement at SourceForge on the status of PHP-Fusion if their home site doesn't come back online soon. Advertisement:

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Early Tuesday morning, Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP joined Windows Vista as available operating systems for the Dell Inspiron Mini 12.  By Tuesday evening, I found myself ordering the Ubuntu version of the Mini 12 with the 6-cell battery and 80GB hard drive.  Despite having installed Linux on countless systems, this will be the first time I've ordered Linux pre-installed for the client PC.  I'm eager to find out how well Dell supports their Linux systems.

While the Mini 12 tops the end of the scale for netbooks due to its 12.1 inch widescreen, I believe the Mini 12 will be a perfect Linux replacement for my aging Averatec notebook.  Although I wouldn't have minded a smaller netbook, the Mini 12 with its 1280x800 screen resolution and comfortable keyboard was just too enticing.  Plus the thought of constantly needing to use the browser's scroll bars with the lower resolution (1024x600) of the smaller netbooks was a concern of mine. Advertisement:

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