Content Management

Over the years, I have gone on record stating the importance in allowing users the ability to leave comments at this site anonymously. I have always recognized that there is a segment of the online community that likes to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave an online trail that can be traced back to personal online accounts. Despite all the trouble I've had with the spammers and bots, the benefits of anonymous comments was always worth it to me in hopes of reading that one life changing comment provided by someone who preferred to stay in the shadows.

This week, Joomla! 1.7 was officially released to the public. New features in this new version of the popular open source content management system include:

As expected, this week the Drupal development team released Drupal 7.3 and Drupal 7.4. 

Drupal 7.3, a maintenance release which fixes security vulnerabilities is now available for download.

Drupal 7.4 also fixes other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Lots of changes are starting to take place here at CMS Report. We're now running on a new version of the Drupal content management system!

Over the weekend, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade CMSReport.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. It's hard for me to believe that it has been almost half a year since Drupal 7 was released. This was a frustrating upgrade for me as I've traditionally upgraded CMS Report shortly after any new release of Drupal is out. In fact, I have sometimes upgraded a site before the release is official. As a content management system, my five-year hate-love relationship with Drupal is still going on strong.

Despite the usual learning curve associated with a major Drupal upgrade, I ran into two additional problems I've never had to face with this site. First, the CMSReport.com of today is a much more complex site to run, maintain, and upgrade then it was in 2008. With the number of readers and sponsors this site now sees, I just don't have the luxury of blowing up the site and say "oh well" lets start again. Secondly, the selection of premium or contributed themes available for Drupal 7 just plain sucks (there, I said it). I must have spent half of my upgrade time just searching for and then tweaking a Drupal 7 theme. People often complain about the lag time between a Drupal release and the availability of third-party modules. In my opinion, it is the lack of theme development going on with Drupal that is the real problem with Drupal upgrades.

SubHub.com today launched its new Drupal 7-based Content Monetization Platform (CMP), featuring the world’s first Drupal-powered app store.

SubHub's new CMP enables anyone to design and launch a content website in under five minutes, and make money from their content by incorporating optional apps such as paid membership.

The app store -- the first of its kind for Drupal modules -- enables website owners to add functionality simply by selecting an app and adding it to their SubHub website. Initial apps include MailChimp, Google Analytics, content feeds and YouTube. Some of the apps are free (e.g. Google Analytics) and some of them will carry a small recurring charge (e.g. paid membership functionality).

Any developer can submit an app to the SubHub app store to be made available to SubHub’s growing network of website owners. New apps will be added regularly. SubHub will share revenues with the app developer.

“We have two core objectives. First we want to give non-technical people the opportunity to build an outstanding website using Drupal, one of the leading open-source content management solutions," said Evan Rudowski, co-founder of SubHub. "Second, we want to give Drupal developers the opportunity to make money from the modules they have spent hundreds of hours building.

"Our customers gain great functionality, and developers make money -- it's a win all around," Rudowski said.

This week ocProducts released version 7 of the Open Source CMS, ocPortal, making rapid improvements based on feedback from user testing.

ocPortal 7 builds on the user-experience work that has also driven the previous three releases, with the aim of making it easier to build highly sophisticated social web-sites that can be fully customized by regular users.

In addition to implementing user feedback, the developers have enhanced ocPortal further by optimizing how long the simplest common administration tasks take. These have now made things even easier, and more manageable, than in the past.

WordPress 3.1.3 was made available to the public yesterday. This release is not only a  security update for all previous versions but also offers some new features.

WordPress 3.1.3 contains the following security fixes and enhancements:

One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).

Everett Griffiths recently wrote a comparison between WordPress and MODx over at TipsFor.US. In the article he walks the reader through various CMS comparison factors such as installation, templating, menus, plugins, architecture, custom content, security, and support. This comparison specifically focuses on WordPress 3.1 and MODx Revolution.

Everett writes:

Mark Jaquith, a lead developer for Wordpress, recently posted on a WordPress developer's blog the plans for WordPress 3.2.  Below are some of the changes and features Jaquith says will be on this new version of WordPress that caught my eye. My personal comments gave been added to the side.