Content Management

Improvement: New default template

New home page

The category page

The Plone community has raised the bar on their flagship content management system with the release of Plone 4. With the unveiling and release announcement of Plone 4, this is proving a busy week for fans of this CMS that runs on the Python-based Zope application server.

"Plone 4 is much faster, requires less memory, and performs well even when serving up massive files. ", says Plone co-founder and Firefox User Experience Lead Alexander Limi. “They [Plone users and developers] also didn't want us to sacrifice what we do well to get there — and we haven't. Plone 4 is not just more powerful — it continues to improve in areas Plone has always been known for: usability, security, and a CMS that is easy to install, upgrade, and looks great right out of the box.”

Some of the significant changes and improvements in Plone 4 include:

• Notable performance improvements
• New theme
• Search and indexing improvements
• Group Dashboards for a Customized User Experience
• Massively improved handling of large files & media
• New, faster folder implementation
• Improved management of users and groups
• Dynamic forms framework based on jQuery Tools
• Improved first-run experience
• Smooth upgrade experience
• Reduced memory footprint
• Upgraded infrastructure

Interestingly, the announcements and even the Plone 4 download page discuss the "under the hood" improvements available in the CMS in preparation for Plone 5. That's right, they're already talking about Plone's future with Plone 5.

For addttional details about the Plone CMS be sure to visit Plone.org.

"We're entering a new era of the web. To the ignorant masses, this transition will go largely unnoticed; they'll enjoy increased usability and convenience, with more robust functionality and more relevant data at hand. And they'll mostly just take it for granted.

However, for web designers, front-end developers and data system programmers, we have a lot of work to do."

-Laura Scott, PINGV, HTML5 + RDFa = time to get rid of that 20th century furniture, August 23, 2010

There is a new version of mojoPortal out and about. Version 2.3.5.1 of mojoPortal offers some new features and improvements including:

In late July, MODx Revolution 2.0 was released. Before the project's release, I interviewed though email Ryan Thrash, CEO and co-founder of the MODx project, as well as Jay Gilmore. In a joint response, they graciously answered some of my questions about MODx. Below are my questions and their responses from our MODx interview.

CMS Report - The release of 2.0 is a new beginning for MODx...where does MODx go from here?

MODx - MODx Revolution represents a sharp inflection point in our history. We have a lot of very positive announcements to make in the coming weeks, but here’s a high level overview:

• MODX, LLC, is a new company we’ve formed to stand behind the core products and to continue to foster the ongoing development of the software and the MODx ecosystem in general.
• We’re hiring both from within the community and bringing in outside expertise to make sure we have a viable and sustainable business. We’re 1000% focused on accelerating MODx adoption, awareness and continuing to rise as one of the top Open Source content management platforms today. 2011 should be an unbelievable year for MODx uptake.
• We’re looking for qualified developers, consultants and agencies to partner with MODx. They’ll be recognized as MODx experts and Solutions Partners, prominently displayed on our website and outbound marketing efforts, officially launching no later than early 2011. We get a good volume of leads through the website and these will all go to Partners, which is just the tip of the iceberg of benefits from partnering with MODx.
• Similarly, we’ll be launching commercial support services to meet the demand we’ve seen from businesses in the community. We have great offerings to talk about with regard to this later.
• We’re relaunching and totally revamping our websit to better focus on and to serve more stakeholders including end users (at our new modx.com URL). We’ll have dedicated community and developer sections to make learning about MODx easier.

What this all means is that there’s now going to be an organization to hold to account for MODx. We’ve done what we think is a good job as stewards since founding the project, and we’ll have dedicated time and resources to do an even better job going forward.

It has been an extremely long time since I've done any type of comparision between Drupal and Joomla!. While I like to keep a close eye on both of these open source content management systems...I just haven't felt the need to compare the two applications with each other. The rhythm of each of the two CMS are so different that I honestly don't know what I would write in the Drupal vs Joomla post. Comparing Drupal and Joomla with each other is like comparing Country music and Jazz with each genre not really capable of diminishing the importance of the other.

This isn't to say such comparisons can't be interesting and useful. I definitely know how popular Drupal vs. Joomla! articles can be and the number of visitors such articles will bring to a site.  If you're interested in reading a new Drupal vs Joomla article, you can find such an article at Achieve Internet.

Some of the comparisons are out of date or lack sufficient technical detail to fully support their conclusions. Furthermore, both Joomla! and the Drupal CMS are on the verge of releasing new versions, Joomla! 1.6 and Drupal 7, that will move both products in a positive direction.

This series of articles attempts to address where the technologies stand now, with a keen eye on the fact that both are moving targets as they approach new releases. The focus will be on using the web design software to build enterprise level websites, including those for large businesses, government agencies, and sizable non-profits, as this is the focus of Achieve Internet, based in San Diego, CA. We will examine the following topics from a technical perspective: baseline content management system (CMS) functionality, back-end appearance and functionality, and coding & customization.

If you're interested in hearing more from Achieve Internet, the article you'll want to read is Joomla! vs. Drupal for enterprise web development, Part 1.

A new version of CMS Made Simple was released this past weekend. CMS Made Simple 1.8 offers a number of new features to enhance performance not only of the website itself, but to make doing some mundane tasks faster and easier.

Some of the more significant changes in CMS MadeSimple include:

I continue to hear great things about EPiServer from Blend Interactive's Dean Barker and other folks in the CMS industry. Their accolades for this CMS is one of the reasons I decided to begin focusing on EPiServer here at the site.

Honestly, I don't know enough about EPiServer which is why some of the EPiServer fanboys have promised getting together with me sometime to talk about this platform.  Until my education is complete, I'm going to resort to cheap writing by using press releases and blogs to get some of my information out to you about EPiServer. For instance, lets see if this product announcement by EPiServer's marketing gets you interested to hear more about their products:

EPiServer announces the release of EPiServer Relate+2 , a product package for EPiServer CMS 6, which containsEPiServer Community 4 and EPiServer Mail 5. It also includes a sample website which shows how to combine these three products to build a powerful online community. In today’s conversation economy the ability to get involved in websites where users are free to create, organize and share know-how and experiences in the form of words, pictures and videos is becoming more prevalent and Relate+ makes it a seamless experience for community members, community owners and moderators.

Included is support for Open ID where users can use an existing login ID to sign into multiple websites. The same rich text editor found in EPiServer CMS, TinyMCE, is now used for writing blog posts and the MetaWeblog API is also supported, so users can use their favorite blog applications, such as iBlogger for the iPhone or Live Writer for Windows, when creating or editing blog posts. In combination with blog syndication and ping/ pingbacks, Relate+ is a full-fledged blog engine.

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.