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Mailbag: Platformic Version 3.0

I received an email the other day from Hilary McCarthy promoting Platformic.  Platformic is an online Web CMS or what her company likes to call an Online Web Develop Environment.  As usual, I'll let the email do most of the talking in this post.

Hi, I wanted to make sure that you saw that Platformic is announcing version 3.0 of its enterprise web development software, an end-to-end online web development environment and content management platform that allows businesses to quickly and easily build/update websites in real-time without sacrificing creativity or writing code.

Looking at multitasking on the iPhone and Palm Pre

I'm one of the unfortunate souls that is a Verizon customer.  I'm unfortunate in the sense that my cell phone company has been very slow in bringing modern SmartPhones with full browser and Wifi capability under their service plans.  Oh how I would love to have an iPhone or G1 Android in my hand, but neither AT&T nor T-Mobile includes big 'ol South Dakota in their service plans.  But someday things may change and I might get the iPhone or possibly even better, the Palm Pre (we have Spring here!).

SilverStripe launches Global Partner Program

Silverstripe logoThere are reasons why I have been mentioning SilverStripe quite a bit here at CMS Report. In case you haven't noticed, the New Zealand based company has been making a lot of effort this year to expand their global reach.  Recently, SilverStripe put Sigurd Magnusson, their Sales and Marketing Director, on a sort of world tour to let everyone know more about the open source SilverStripe CMS. This week the latest news from the company is the launch of their Global Partner Program.

SilverStripe has today significantly expanded its global reach. From today, its corporate headquarters in Wellington, New Zealand, is complemented by partnerships with established companies in 8 locations throughout the US, UK, Europe, and Australia.

The Partner Program gives customers access to professional SilverStripe skills and knowledge across the globe. Today's milestone will allow businesses around the world to get local professional SilverStripe support and services. Additionally, the Partner Program will accelerate market adoption and awareness of SilverStripe globally.

Customers across the world can now visit https://www.silverstripe.com/partners/ to find a local SilverStripe partner who can help implement their SilverStripe solution.

For a couple weeks, I've been aware that SilverStripe was about to announce the launch of their partner program. The goal of the partner program is to help expand support and enthusiasm for the SilverStripe CMS. I was asked to say something nice about the CMS in their press release announcing the partner program.

WhiteHouse 2.0

There has been a huge transformation this year at WhiteHouse.gov. Blogs, RSS feeds, and connections to social networking sites are being fully utilized at the President's website. Those of us that have worked in information technology positions for the federal government have experienced first hand just how slow bureaucracies can be in taking advantage of newer technologies. From my perspective, it is almost surreal to see references to Web 2.0 from a website for an office that once didn't allow the President of the United States to send emails or even use a smart phone.

SilverStripe and Mollom partner in the war against spam

Lots of news this week regarding the open source SilverStripe CMS.  It is extremely unusual for CMS Report to post something on SilverStripe as well as something on comment spam twice in one week.  Yet, my two favorite companies, Silverstripe Ltd and Mollom, are going to have me do just that because of today's announcement that they've partnered together to help SilverStripe site owners block comment spam on their sites.

New SilverStripe book expected in August 2009

SilverStripe LogoEarlier this year, SilverStripe core developer Ingo Schommer and German tech-writer Steven Broschart wrote a magnificent book for SilverStripe CMS developers.  When the book was released, SilverStripe's Sigurd Magnusson stated that this book "provides a more structured and comprehensive set of SilverStripe technical documentation than what is currently available at doc.silverstripe.com".  But there is one tiny problem with the book.  If your only language is English then you likely will have difficulty reading the 450 pages in SilverStripe – Das umfassende Handbuch because the book is written in German!

English reading SilverStripe developers will be glad to note that an English version of the book is expected to arrive in August of this year.  How do I know? Just minutes before this post was released, Sigurd posted the details on his blog:

One of the world's largest book publishers, Wiley, has agreed to license our 450-page German SilverStripe book (pictured) from the German publisher and translate it into English. The effort of updating and translating the book is being done by our core developers, including Ingo Schommer who co-authored the initial book.

The book is targeted at professional developers with existing knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and object-oriented PHP5. It provides insight into our web development philosophy and explains the theory underpinning our Sapphire framework and our CMS. It balances this with frequent practical code examples, all of which will be offered for download to make learning quicker.

The aim of the book is to teach the reader how to create websites with rich, slick, and sophisticated features, customise the CMS administration interface heavily, and create extension modules.

The book will sell for £29.95 (a little over USD40.00) online and in major bookstores worldwide.

Amazon has already reserved a place for the English version of the SilverStripe book on its United States site as well as the UK site.

With the release of the new book in English, SilverStripe fans and developers should have something to celebrate in the coming months.  Let's also not forget that the SilverStripe staff are planning some great SilverStripe meetups in both the United States and United Kingdom. The SilverStripe staff wants to meet face-to-face with developers and organizations interested in SilverStripe's software and business. Sounds like a good opportunity if you're a developer wanting to learn more about SilverStripe.

Elgg Powered Sites

I'm a big fan of Elgg, a free and open source social software that allows you to build your own social networks.  So it is with great surprise to me that I haven't really covered a lot of news about Elgg here at CMSReport.com.  Take a look at a recent post by Dave Tosh for some examples of the latest Elgg powered sites on the Web.  If that's not enough for you to judge how well Elgg can run social media sites...than Dave has more examples of Elgg sites to show you.

Snapshot of Elgg.org