Content Management

A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy".  In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE.  For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell).  So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan.  Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.

I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple.  I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec.  Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly.  While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there.  All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell.  Simple enough right?  In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ).  However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.

Simple PHP Blog 0.5.0.1, a maintenance release, went public on Tuesday of this week.  I know I don't talk too much about it here, but I still like to keep at least one eye open on this particular blogging application.  For you see, I consider Simple PHP Blog my very first Web content management system (WCMS).

This post you are reading has been saved unpublished for a few days as I have feared it reads too much as a rant.  In this post, I'd like to discuss the difference between good and bad competition when it comes to similar "news sites" such as my own CMS Report.   I also want to touch on about how a CMS such as Drupal and Joomla brings both the good and the ugly online.  Unfortunately as with all technology, the modern CMS not only has been a blessing to sites dishing news for their writers and their users...but also a curse.

I know this was announced a couple weeks old, but I still wanted to mention it here for the sake of those that like the simple things in life. CMS Made Simple 1.1 was released in mid-July.

The features/improvements in this released included:

Not long ago, Development Seed posted a fantastic comparison of multilingual handling between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

Starting Monday July 16, Packt Publishing will be accepting nominations for their 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  Last year, I had fun watching closely as the top five open source CMS were nominated and I even made some predictions for which projects would be declared the winners.  This year, I'm also honored to announce that I have been selected as a judge for the Overall Winner category!

That's right, while I have my favorites when it comes to CMS, it looks as if I've proven myself to be non-bias and open-minded enough to be on the jury.   Ironically, I'm not the only one from Sioux Falls, South Dakota that will be on the judging panel.  Deane Barker, Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, has also been selected as a judge for the social networking category.  Evidently, the long winter months in this part of the country has given us too much time to talk and discuss various topics such as technology, content management systems, and innovation.  Then again, it's also possible Sioux Falls is a lot more forward-thinking then people typically give credit to the city.  Either way, neither Deane or myself know anyone from Fargo.

If you recall, this is the award that last year, Joomla was declared by the judges as the winner, with Drupal in second place, followed by Plone in third place.   Different this year then in 2006 is that the CMS projects may be nominated by various categories and more prize money is being offered.

To be honest, I've had problems getting excited in the past about XOOPS as a CMS or as an open source community.  There just didn't seem to be a whole lot of buzz about this CMS and I was seriously thinking about dropping it from my personal "top 30 list" found to the left under "CMS Focus". 

I came across a well written summary of content management applications (especially open source CMS) via a Security Blog over at GLORIAD. The CMS article is a near perfect overview on the state of CMS in 2007. This article is a "must read" in my opinion and it's really too bad I didn't write it first. Can you tell I'm envious?

At the end of the article the author concludes:

I must confess, I really don't fully understand how the Internet ranking systems actually work.  Ranking systems such as Google's PageRank and Alexa's Traffic Rankings seem to use a mystery of statistical analysis, algorithms, and a sprinkle of voodoo calculus to come up with the numbers they do.  Although most people lack the understanding to how these numbers are derived it is still fun to watch those rankings change from day to day.  For example, since the Fall of 2006 I've seen the rankings for CMSReport.com change from 830,790 to around a steady 90,000.

Recently, I read some good posts regarding content management systems (CMS) on a few blogs I visit almost daily.  The posts have had me thinking and reflecting in general about CMS.  However, I won't talk too much about them so you get a chance to go on and read the articles yourself.  The first post comes from OpenSourceCommunity.org and the second post from Gadgetopia.