Bryan Ruby

Moodle, an open source software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites, has released it's latest version...Moodle 2.6.1. This latest version provides a number of bug fixes and small improvements as well as fixes to security vulnerabilities that were recently discovered. The new features in Moodle 2.6.1 include:

A constant worry of mine as CMS Report's editor is that we won't have enough articles to publish and give you reason to visit this little site of ours. Luckily, authors and contributors with interest in content management systems constantly prove that such my worries are unnecessary. This year almost 900 articles were submitted to CMS Report. I can't tell you how grateful I am for every article that was submitted to our site. Of those 900 submissions, we deemed only 300 of those articles worthy to publish based on quality of the writing and whether we felt the story was of interest to our readers.

Years ago, I quickly discovered there was great public interest in comparisons of open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. When you throw WordPress into the mix and you can attract an even greater audience. Despite how much traffic such headlines draw people in, CMS Report has been pretty selective when we provide or point to such articles. There is some uncertainty whether there is genuine value being provided in feature comparison articles which is why I've shied away from them in recent years.

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.

Over the weekend, I spent some much needed time doing some maintenance work for my wife's photography site which runs on WordPress. One of the concerns I had with the release and automatic update of WordPress 3.8 is how it might impact the Photocrati theme package my wife uses for the site. So far, I haven't found any issues related to the WordPress 3.8 upgrade. I am a little concern we may have an issue with the Photocrati gallery not allowing her to add additional photos to a current gallery, but as far as I can tell this is a separate issue.

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.

The Jahia Solutions Group recently sent us a message through our good friend Anne de Forsan. They wanted to let us know that Jahia 7 will be unveiled during JahiaOne. JahiaOne is Jahia's first international user conference which will be held in Paris for two days, February 6-7, 2014. The open source vendor is presenting this new generation Java CMS solutions at the conference. They're also focused on their own vision of "Digital Industrialization".

Acquisition brings fully integrated e-commerce capabilities to Sitecore’s experience platform

Sitecore, a global leader in customer experience management software, announced this week that it has acquired commerceserver.net. Sitecore acquired commerceserver.net from SMITH (formerly Ascentium), a global digital experience agency that builds, sells and supports the Commerce Server e-commerce engine.

There is a new version of OpenCMS available, OpenCms 9. OpenCms is an enterprise ready web content management solution built in Java and XML from open source components. OpenCms can has historically been easily deployed on almost any existing IT infrastructure and suited for medium and large enterprise internet or intranet applications. This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 9 brings several enhancements while being fully backward compatible with OpenCms 8.x. Significant new features and improvements in OpenCms 9 include:

Yesterday, The Joomla! Project and Community announced the availability of Joomla CMS 3.2.0 Stable. Since the release of 3.1.5, over 1085 commits have been made to the code base with 50 different people contributing to commits. But this release has a lot more than just bug fixes and includes a host of long awaited features for the open source content management system.

Some of the new features in Joomla 3.2 include: