Content Management

A few days ago, WordPress 3.5 was released and I originally planned to write the typical "what is new in WordPress" article similar to what I've done in the past for CMS Report. However, I thought this time around I would also discuss how I'm using WordPress to support the website of one of my favorite photographers, Karen Ruby of Dakota Imagery. Certainly, in this article there is no cause for you to suspect my opinions are biased with regard to her photography skills despite the fact we've been married for 11 years and she is the mother of my child.

Social Office 2.0 represents Liferay’s first major product available through Liferay Marketplace, combines with Liferay Sync

Liferay, Inc. announced today the launch of Social Office 2.0 Enterprise Edition (EE), the newest version of Liferay’s social collaboration solution for enterprise teams. Social Office 2.0 EE, the newest app available in Liferay Marketplace, equips users with an efficient means to collaborate with teams in their business units and to build a social network within their enterprise.

This week, the Joomla! community took a huge step forward toward mobile devices and usability with the release of the latest version of their content management system, Joomla 3.0. The Joomla CMS can now display content on mobile devices as clearly and distinctly as it does on a personal computer or Mac. This innovation makes Joomla the first major CMS that includes the Twitter Bootstrap framework that enables it to be 100 percent mobile-friendly by default. So it is no surprise that the Joomla! project is highlighting Joomla 3 as a CMS that's mobile ready and user friendly.

"Joomla 2.5 is the recommended version for most existing sites and will remain so for another year."

"For most people, we recommend that you update from Joomla 2.5 only when Joomla 3.5 is released around September next year."

- Steve Burge, The Joomla! Community Portal, Joomla 2.5 is the Recommended Version for Most Sites, September 21, 2012

Two years ago I began a process to consider how best to evolve CMSReport.com beyond where it is today. I've known for some time that I needed to take some risks, get out of my comfort zone, and perhaps change how I maintain and run the site. Given the opportunity and in the spirit of taking risks I've decided to no longer run CMS Report on Drupal. That's right, after running this site on Drupal for more than six years on Drupal I've decided to use another content management system.

Presented below is a benchmark comparison test between the latest Joomla 2.5.4 Emper (stable) and the upcoming Elxis 4.0 Nautilus (pre-alpha). The tests were performed with the Apache's ab tool on my local development computer which runs Windows. The numbers shown might seem low, this is because the tests were run on a Windows operating system. On a Linux live server they would be higher but the comparison results would be the same. A quick conclusion (we will go in more details later) is that Elxis is, at least, 4 times faster than Joomla!

The Joomla! Project recently released a new version of their popular open source CMS, version 2.5.5. Shortly after this release was made available some significant bugs were noted and the Joomla team quickly responded with Joomla 2.5.6 to fix the known issues. Site administrators are now encouraged to update their Joomla site with Joomla 2.5.6 and not Joomla 2.5.5.

Some of the new features introduced in Joomla 2.5.5 and now available in Joomla 2.5.6 include:

Today, Matt Mullenweg announced the availability of WordPress 3.4. WordPress includes significant improvements to the blogging application's theme theme customization, custom headers, Twitter embeds, and image captions.

More specifically with regards to theme customization, the new theme customizer allows you to play around with various looks and settings of your current theme and provides the ability to preview those settings without publishing the changes until you're ready to go public. For themes that support the theme customizer, you can  also change colors, backgrounds, and image headers all from within the admin menu.

The folks over at Netgen (Zagreb, Croatia) wanted me to make mention of the upcoming eZ Publish Summer Camp being held in Bol, Croatia from September 5th to 8th this year. Besides being supportive of almost any conference that promotes CMSs, I thought if my Croatian grandmother was still alive today she would be quite pleased I was talking about Croatia. This three day conference promises to address a number of needs for eZ Publish developers while also giving you a chance to also spend some vacation time in boat and wine country.

Some of my friends over at DotNetNuke have been talking to me about the latest version of their software. They're excited the new emphasis their favorite CMS is taking by combining traditional Web content management with enterprise social publishing capabilities. In fact, just today DotNetNuke Corp. announced the availability of DotNetNuke (DNN) 6.2, a social CMS that provides organizations the tools they need to easily configure and deploy internal social collaboration solutions and online communities.

I haven't had a chance to demo DNN 6.2,  but I'll walk you through on what I've gleamed so far from the press releases and conversations within the community. I'm hoping to get an opportunity for a demo on the new features down the road but this will have to do for now. Just to get the definitions straightened out, what DNN is calling Social CMS is what I also like to call a Social Publishing Systems. Everyone has a different take on how to use social media, some companies get it while others are still trying to recognize their importance. Taking DNN 6.2 into consideration, it's apparent to me that DotNetNuke gets social.