Software Development

So I'm halfway through my three month sabbatical from blogging and I get an email from my good friend, Shaun Walker. For those that don't know Shaun, he's the CTO and co-founder for DNN Corp. You know, the guy that started DotNetNuke. To make a long story short, Shaun wanted to remind me that the DNN community recently released 7.3 which focuses on platform performance. Shaun thought it would be a good idea to mention the release to readers here at CMS Report.

Paul Rubens’ February article in CIO magazine, 7 Reasons Not to Use Open Source Software, has received quite the backlash in open source circles. I’d like to take a moment to add my own two cents, but I won’t be fanning the flames of the hardline open source fire. Let me be clear—I take issue with this article, but I don’t disagree with most of it. Instead, I think it only tells part of the story, failing to give open source credit where it’s due.

New developer toolkit helps Liferay’s customers develop and manage sophisticated mobile apps

LOS ANGELES, CA – April 1, 2014 – Liferay, Inc., which makes open source portal software, is releasing a mobile software development kit today. The Mobile SDK is part of Liferay’s commitment to being a mobile-ready platform, which began with making responsive design work out of the box in Liferay Portal 6.2. The Mobile SDK takes the platform’s mobile capabilities a step further, making the unique benefits of Liferay Portal available to mobile app developers.

Open-source PHP framework ImpressPages recently released a preview of its upcoming 4.0 version. Users can get their hands on the new website management tool with built-in content editor and get a hint of what’s really coming up. Let’s see what’s so new about it.

I'm very selective when it comes to promoting white papers. A white paper is a document often used as a marketing or sales tool in business. White papers are long-form content designed to promote a products or service which often use selected facts favorable to the company sponsoring the document. That use of "selected facts" bothers the natural-born scientist in me. However, every now and then you come across one of these papers that holds true, is well written, and by an author or analyst you respect.

If you're an insider of the content management industry, you're well of aware of the recent claims by some that the content management system is dead. If you're still using CMS as part of your vocabulary, you must not be keeping up with the times because it's all about customer experience management (CEM or CXM).  This is what some want you to believe. It's wishful thinking by those that want to be at the cutting edge of something new and believe you do that by diminishing the value of what we know currently works. Every few years we go through this movement and every time history has shown that the demise of the CMS is exaggerated.

World’s most comprehensive heatmaps now available following oversubscribed beta

London, 10th February - Decibel Insight, the visual web analytics company, today released the world’s most comprehensive and innovative set of heatmap tools, designed to help organizations understand and adapt to the behavior of their website visitors.

Decibel Insight’s heatmaps enable companies to optimize their web content on all devices to improve conversion rates. The new, enterprise-level tools, which incorporate nine of the most advanced heatmaps on the market, are now publicly available, following an over-subscribed beta program.

CodeEval recently released their list of Most Popular Programming Languages of 2014. Each year they release this list based on thousands of data points they've collected by processing over 100,000 coding tests and the input of over 2,000 employers. This list confirms what Python and Java developers already know. It is also list to disappoint Tcl developers and those nostalgic of the Visual Basic days.

According to CodeEval, the top five most popular programming languages for 2014 are:

Well, this certainly wasn't on my radar. Gábor Hojtsy, Drupal 6 lead maintainer, announced that starting March 1, 2014 support for PHP 4 in Drupal 6 will end. I wasn't surprise to hear about Drupal developers dropping support for PHP 4. Instead, I was in shock to hear that Drupal didn't drop support for this ancient version of PHP sooner.

A couple years ago, if you would have asked me what I thought about Joomla! I would have told you I think they've lost their way. Their community of developers seemed to be searching on how best to innovate and take risks with a well established stable content management system. I feared that the open source group was stuck looking back and that all we could expect was dull incremental changes to their CMS. Despite the fear, I knew better. Open source communities have a way of reevaluating their priorities and creating spectacular results where you least expect them to do so.