Content Management

Josh Clark sent an e-mail to us the other day saying that his Web content management system, Big Medium 2, is availabe for public consumption. While he sent the usual press release, I thought I'd go ahead and paste his full e-mail to me. Sometimes it's good to note that it's not just a "company" pushing a product but instead to actually see the people developing the software pushing their own products.

Bryan,

First off, thanks for all you do. You offer such terrific coverage of the CMS space and the challenges facing practitioners. Super-professional but with a personal feel. I love it.

I posted a comment on one of your posts introducing Big Medium 2 a couple of months ago and now, at long last, it's out of beta. I'm passing along the press release below in hopes that you'll find it of interest to your readers. Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions, and thanks again.

All best,

Josh

 PARIS, DEC 17, 2007 -- Josh Clark and Global Moxie announced the release of Big Medium 2, a web content management system aimed squarely at web designers.

Markus Karlsson, CEO of Emojo, sent CMS Report an e-mail regarding extending social content management features into their "eBusiness Suite", Affino. In the e-mail he says:

We’re launching the Social Content Management edition of the Affino eBusiness Suite (please see details below). It has a number of tailored social content management, social media, social networking and social promotions elements essential for managing socially lead sites. These are quite different from traditional web and enterprise CM capabilities so may be of interest to you.

If you could give us feedback or a mention then that would be greatly appreciated.

I'm short on time for doing any type of review or give any meaningful feedback on this CMS. However, I have posted below the press release he sent attached to the e-mail. Also, you can check out the new features in the latest release of Affino at Emojo.com. Finally, if you have used Affino before, I would be interested in hearing what you have to say about it via the comments section.

The anticipated SilverStripe 2.2 was released this week.

SilverStripe 2.2.0 is a major release containing a staggering quantity of new features and work from our ten Google Summer of Code students and an equally impressive effort from the core team.

Lots of new features and enhancements with this version of SilverStripe. Some of the new features and changes for this CMS include:

• Redesigned interface and workflow

• Multiple language support

• Google Sitemaps support (improves search engine optimization)

Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday. As in the past, I wanted to use CMSReport.com as a "live" test site for the beta/release candidates of Drupal as I did with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. However, as this site has matured, so has my reliance on too many contributed modules currently not supporting Drupal 6. So for now, I've decided to place Drupal 6 in a subdomain, drupal6.cmsreport.com.

I am excited with what I have already seen in Drupal 6. I consider version 6 to be Drupal on steroids. Drupal 6 has a lot of performance and power improvements that are already apparent even in the Beta. Put it this way, the day the Views module is ready for Drupal 6, is the day I go live with running CMS Report on Drupal 6.

Since dotCMS is a "new" CMS that we're focusing on, I'm needing to add some content. This was announced a couple weeks ago, but still worthy of posting if you're trying to catch up like we are on what dotCMS is all about.

dotCMS 1.5.1 released – Open Source CMS, Web CRM and eCommerce - Dotmarketing released dotCMS 1.5.1 today which provides over a 150 fixes and improvements to a feature rich, open-source J2EE enterprise class web content management system.

New features included in this version of dotCMS are:

A couple months ago, I experienced a number of errors at my Drupal site that all pointed to a corrupted database. I believe the problem likely was the caused by a sloppy export/import I performed with the MySQL database while moving the site to a new server.

While my particular database problem was an easy fix, if you really don't know much about databases you may find that you really need some guidance on how to solve problems like these. This article is the process I went through to correct this particular MySQL database problem in Drupal 5 and some general database rules that show why this problem occurred in the first place.

I came across another one of those "top ten" lists, this time, "Ten Reasons to choose Wordpress". Among the ten reasons to choose Wordpress were:

• Wordpress is used the world over
• Famous bloggers use Wordpress
• Wordpress is free

I've used Wordpress before and I have to say I chose it for its functionality and not whether a million zillion people used it. I know there are people who use, join, and buy something because it is popular. However, I have thankfully never been one of those people.

The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.

Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.