Content Management

The Newbie Issue

I received an interesting e-mail the other day through the contact form at my site regarding the social bookmarking "features" I have for my posts.  The questions asked to me are quite common among new users of any Web content management system.  While the questions in this particular e-mail I received would be more appropriate to be asked and answered in the forums at Drupal.org, there were some things in the message I felt the need to address though my blog.

What really keeps an open source project going? I think it all starts when someone in the open source community asks the tough questions. Take for instance this one, "Has XOOPS lost its appeal?". The project will evolve depending on how the project responds to such challenging questions. In this particular case, those closer to the open source project asked in a proactive response, "How do we give XOOPS appeal and user satisfaction?".

I mentioned not long ago reading that there are an estimated 1700 applications on the market for content management systems. In an ideal world, I would love to cover them all here at CMS Report. In the real world, I just don't have time to put focus on every single thing involving content management system (CMS).

One of the easiest ways to change a well written theme in a Web content management system is by tweaking the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). To be honest, I'm horrible at theme development. I prefer to focus my time on function, administration, and content of the information system. However, any bit of information that helps you tweak those themes you downloaded for that CMS is good news, right? After enough tweaks, you can may just have a theme with a style you can call your very own.

This fork of Joomla to improve accessibility interested me

Accessible (a8e) Joomla! is a Joomla! fork that conforms to accessibility guidelines and web standards. A8e Joomla! will follow regular Joomla! releases. The project should implode when regular Joomla! finally conforms to the standards.

Accessibility of Internet sites is very huge within the federal government and addressed by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, 1998.

I almost missed this one. Plone 2.5.2 was released a few days ago. Plone is a CMS written in Python (something I know a lot about) that is built on the Zope application server (something I know very little about). The Plone 2.5.2 release is a bug fixer for the following:

• LiveSearch
• Unicode handling
• External Editor
• IE7 rendering

The original announcement from Plone.org can be read here.

CMS Made Simple 1.0.3 was released to fix a number of bugs and security issues. Some of the changes in 1.0.3 as reported in the ChangeLog since CMS Made Simple 1.0.2 was released include:

Are you tired of all the Drupal and WordPress posts we've been doing lately here at CMS Report? Not my fault...I only report the CMS news! The fact is that among the open source CMS that I post about...both Drupal and WordPress have been churning out a lot since the New Year started. The release of Wordpress 2.0.7 is just a good example as any.

On Drupal's sixth birthday Dries Buytaert announced that Drupal 5.0 has been released. The 5.0 version of the content management system is considered a very significant release by its open source community. Consider this, it's been almost half a decade since Drupal 4.0 was released.

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.

This just goes to show you how small of a world it is. Traffic to CMS Report is usually rather light over the weekend, but I noticed an increase in the number of people visiting the site Saturday and Sunday. These "new" visitors were coming from Lorelle VanFossen's WordPress blog. She recently posted an article on some of the features expected in the yet to be released WordPress 2.1.

Ryan Boren, one of the lead WordPress developers, has been releasing preview information on WordPress 2.1, along with some other well-know WordPress developers, testers, and users. Here are some teasers about WordPress 2.1, due out soon...