Content Management

As many of you know, I recently sold my shares in Agility – the web CMS company that I co-founded. Over the last three months, I have been experimenting with new technologies as I formulate the next step in my career.

As a first project, I decided to build a new website for a product that my wife’s company developed – the ClearBlue Ionizer. ClearBlue is a new technology for purifying water in pools and spas that drastically reduces the amount of chemicals required.

Years ago, I quickly discovered there was great public interest in comparisons of open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. When you throw WordPress into the mix and you can attract an even greater audience. Despite how much traffic such headlines draw people in, CMS Report has been pretty selective when we provide or point to such articles. There is some uncertainty whether there is genuine value being provided in feature comparison articles which is why I've shied away from them in recent years.

Well, this certainly wasn't on my radar. Gábor Hojtsy, Drupal 6 lead maintainer, announced that starting March 1, 2014 support for PHP 4 in Drupal 6 will end. I wasn't surprise to hear about Drupal developers dropping support for PHP 4. Instead, I was in shock to hear that Drupal didn't drop support for this ancient version of PHP sooner.

Over the weekend, I spent some much needed time doing some maintenance work for my wife's photography site which runs on WordPress. One of the concerns I had with the release and automatic update of WordPress 3.8 is how it might impact the Photocrati theme package my wife uses for the site. So far, I haven't found any issues related to the WordPress 3.8 upgrade. I am a little concern we may have an issue with the Photocrati gallery not allowing her to add additional photos to a current gallery, but as far as I can tell this is a separate issue.

A couple years ago, if you would have asked me what I thought about Joomla! I would have told you I think they've lost their way. Their community of developers seemed to be searching on how best to innovate and take risks with a well established stable content management system. I feared that the open source group was stuck looking back and that all we could expect was dull incremental changes to their CMS. Despite the fear, I knew better. Open source communities have a way of reevaluating their priorities and creating spectacular results where you least expect them to do so.

Yesterday, The Joomla! Project and Community announced the availability of Joomla CMS 3.2.0 Stable. Since the release of 3.1.5, over 1085 commits have been made to the code base with 50 different people contributing to commits. But this release has a lot more than just bug fixes and includes a host of long awaited features for the open source content management system.

Some of the new features in Joomla 3.2 include:

While Drupal 8 has been been under development for two and a half years, I haven't talked much about it. I learned long ago that it doesn't do much good to talk about an upcoming release of a CMS until the software crosses over from what most of us would consider "vaporware."

The month of August starts out with a bang for WordPress fans. We knew given Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word speech that it was only a matter of time when WordPress 3.6 would be released. Starting yesterday afternoon, site administrators such as my wife (it runs in the family) were quickly greeted with a notification that the WordPress update is available.

Yesterday's launch gives WordPress sites the availability of a new blog-centric theme (Twenty Thirteen), "bullet-proof" autosave and post locking, a revamped revision browser, native support for audio and video embeds, and improved integration with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.

The Joomla! project recently released a new version of their flagship content management system, Joomla 3.1.4. This is a maintenance release with no security fixes. While most of the updates are technical and will likely only be of interest to developers and site maintainers, there are also a few user interface tweaks here and there. For example, this version will now show the Joomla username in the administrative area.

Specific feature enhancements for Joomla 3.1.4 include the following:

Over the years, we all have abbreviated DotNetNuke as DNN as we've discussed this open source .Net based content management system. It looks like the corporate folks upstairs have finally made this interchangeability official. DotNetNuke Corp will now be known as DNN.