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Confident Technologies, Inc. today announced that its image-based verification solution, Confident CAPTCHA is now available as a Wordpress plugin, a Joomla extension and a Drupal module.

A new version of our favorite Ruby on Rails CMS has been released, Radiant CMS 0.9.0. Obviously, I spoke a little too soon last October when I announced that 0.9.0 was coming soon. Each open source community has their own pace and time-line for releasing the release candidates of their software. In retrospect, I should have noted that Radiant CMS developers like to take their time in making sure the Radiant releases are at a level of quality and stability they're comfortable with before releasing the final versions to the general public.

In case you haven't heard, WordPress 3.0 was released last week. This is probably the first time I've been behind in blogging about the official release of a new major version of WordPress. However, since I told you all about WordPress 3.0 coming soon a couple weeks ago, I felt there wasn't a need to rush and tell you to go get WordPress 3.0 and try out all it's new features including taxonomy and multiuser integration. Instead, I spent this past week seeing how others reacted to WordPress 3.0.

As a fan of open source content management systems, its been rather pleasing to see some of the larger technology publications spend more time talking about applications like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. For the tech press, WordPress 3.0 was no exception with some of the major players such as Computerworld, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all making sure they spin out an article reviewing this latest version of WordPress.

What may surprise you though, is that open source CMS is just not an interest of computer geeks. Slowly but surely, open source CMS is the talk of business folks too. For example, both Fast Company and BusinessWeek made sure that they included articles this past week on WordPress 3.0. In the Fast Company article, Francine Hardaway writes some classic things to why business should pay attention to WordPress. Some of my favorite lines from her article, "6 Reasons Small Businesses need WordPress":

• "WordPress can do anything you need it to do, and for a small business, that's a gift usually reserved for expensive sites."
• "Plug-ins for WordPress are the business-to-business version of apps for the iPhone."
• "WordPress no longer looks like a blog. For small businesses who wouldn't know a blog from a bag of potato chips, WordPress is a website, otherwise known as a content management system."

These are all some fantastic words from Hardaway and I think they show that applications such as WordPress are making a significant impact in the business world. I wouldn't call WordPress an ECM, but it most definately walks and talks like a CMS for the small business folks. If you haven't taken a look at WordPress in quite awhile, I'd encourage you to take a new look at this application.

Below is the summary video from the WordPress folks introducing you to WordPress 3.0. Enjoy.

Umbraco, an open source CMS based on Microsoft's ASP.NET, has announced the availability of Umbraco 4.1RC. The Umbraco Core Team of developers calls this version of their CMS as "the biggest update to Umbraco" ever. This release candidate for Umbraco 4.1 is packed with a laundry list of improvements in performance and stability as well as some new features.

New and improved features:

• Enhanced preview. Browse your entire site as it looks in the future, including out-of-the-box support for all XSLT and NodeFactory based macros
• SpellChecker. With support for more than ten languages out of the box!
• LINQ 2 Umbraco. More a .NET Developer than an XSLT guru? You can access data via the all brand new .NET LINQ API
• Examine. Ultra performant and stable index-based search engine. With a fluent API that developers will love
• New XML Schema. Not only more performant, but makes it easier to understand your data and adds future support for Intellisense in Visual Studio!
• Improved DLR support. Faster than ever and with support for Ruby too!
• New Datatypes: Image Cropper for editor friendly image manipulation and Macro Container for easily handling of feature areas. (Needs to be manually created in the data type section in the RC)
• Improved Mediapicker: Preview and advanced dialog with upload is now a part of the default MediaPicker (needs to be activated on the datatype in the RC)
  

Local Florida government delivers innovative Web services via open source CMS

Local governments throughout the country are under continuous pressure to do more with less, and Manatee County, Florida is no exception. They have a tiny IT budget compared to state and national governments, yet they are responsible for the bulk of everyday citizen services. In tight financial straits, the county could ill afford a costly proprietary system plus stiff maintenance fees for their new website IT. They turned their sights to open source alternatives, and found that Magnolia CMS fit the bill.

About Manatee County

As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don't talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal's developers. Drupal 6.17 is one of those releases which contain significant changes I think are worthy a mention.

I'm probably most excited about the improvements made in Drupal 6 for better PHP 5.3 compatibility. A couple weeks ago I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5.3 and there were just too many annoying errors showing up in the Drupal 6 system logs.  I'm hoping with Drupal 6.17, I have better luck this time around (currently running this Drupal 6 sites with PHP 5.3).

With over 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6, the following are the highlights of changes included in Drupal 6.17:

• Improvements of session cookie handling
• Better processing of big XML-RPC payload
• Improved PostgreSQL compatibility
• Better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility (my fingers are crossed)
• Improved Japanese support in search module
• Better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
• Improved logging for login failures
• An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16's new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved

The latest version of Drupal may be downloaded from the project page at Drupal.org. Whether you're new to Drupal or currently maintaining a Drupal site, this latest release of Drupal is a clear indication that there is plenty of life and plenty of development taking place with the Drupal 6 release. Now what other Drupal 6 sites do I have that still need this upgrade to Drupal 6.17.

Sharepoint 2010 has just been released and everyone is excited about the possibilities and the unique advantage it can lend to their business. Specifically, there has been a lot of talk about Sharepoint’s new web content management capabilities. A lot of folks are wondering if they could possibly use the new Sharepoint release as the technology stack to maintain both their enterprise collaboration needs and their corporate website. In this article, we will review the new Sharepoint 2010 web content management capabilities and how they may fit your organization’s strategic website objectives at this time.

Perhaps because I like to think of myself as a constant learner, I like to keep keep my eyes open for what is happening with learning/course management systems. CMS Report has been covering Moodle since the early days of our website and I believe it to be one of the more popular open source LMS out there. Moodle 2.0 is currently under development and with an estimated release date of July 20, 2010.

Although Moodle 2.0 hasn't been officially released, the developers did reach important milestones this month with the release of Moodle 2.0 Preview 1 and  Preview 2. These previews give you an idea just how all the new features and improvements are coming together for the next release of Moodle. There are a ton of new features and improvements coming to Moodle to be excited about. Below is a list of major new features we've gleamed of the Moodle 2.0 release notes.

• Community Hubs - Anybody can set up a Community Hub, which is a directory of courses for public use or for private communities. The code is implemented as separate GPL plugin for Moodle.
• Repository Support - Moodle now supports integration with external repositories of content, making it really simple to bring documents and media into Moodle via an AJAX interface that looks like a standard Open dialogue in desktop applications.
• Portfolio Support - Modules can now export their data to external systems, particularly useful for portfolios where snapshots of forums, assignments and other things in Moodle are useful to record in a journal or a portfolio of evidence
• Completion -  Teachers can now specify conditions that define when any activity or course is seen as completed by a student.
• Conditional activities - Access to activities can be restricted based on certain criteria, such as dates, grade obtained, or the completion of another activity.
• Cohorts - Also known as "Site-wide groups", these are site-wide collections of users that can be enrolled into courses in one action, either manually or synchronized automatically
• Web Services Support - Support for standards-based web services across the entire Moodle code base, allowing the admin to expose particular functions of Moodle for use by: 1) Administrative systems such as HR or SIS applications and 2) Mobile clients.
• IMS Common Cartridge - Moodle can now import courses in IMS Common Cartridge format (commonly used by publishers)
• New blocks - Comments block, Private files block, Community block, and Completion block.

Moodle 2.0 Preview 2 can be dowloaded from the Moodle download server.