Bryan Ruby

At the 2013 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference I have the privilege of moderating a panel focused on the Cloud. That's actually a broad topic, but I think it's a topic that is increasingly becoming well understood by the CMS community. Last year, I moderated a similar panel and, in my opinion, we spent way too much time trying to define the Cloud.

A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content types.

Tags are not just for articles but is also integrated tagging into other areas of the Joomla core that made sense. Extension developers will be happy to note that tagging in Joomla 3.1 also provides the necessary API changes to integrate Tags with extensions.  Extension developers will also have the ability to develop innovative ways to use tagging beyond what is in the core CMS.

On my to-do list for quite some time has been wanting to talk briefly about some of the new features included in the latest release of Agility CMS. You may recall that CMS Report migrated over to Agility's Magazine Publishing Suite last Fall. So, keeping up to date on new features added to Agility CMS is not only a news story but also something of personal interest to me.

Some of the more significant new features included in the Agility March 2013 release are:

For the past few years, CMS Report has generally not posted CMS announcements for new releases which only contained bug fixes and no new additional features. So, it's been rare for us to post the "point" release announcements for Drupal as Drupal only introduces significant new features in the new full version of Drupal (such as the forthcoming Drupal 8). However, Drupal 7.22 contains a lot of minor changes so we thought it was worth talking about. Drupal 7.22 was actually released a week ago, but I didn't have time to upgrade any of my Drupal sites until this week nor look at what was actually fixed until now. 

Some of the many "minor" changes in Drupal 7.22 include:

This week, I received an email from some marketing folks that Acquia was announcing they are open sourcing their mobile application code for posting content to Drupal sites. For those that don't know, Acquia is a commercial open source software company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal. This isn't the first time Acquia and other Drupal vendors have given code back to the Drupal community and you can be assured it won't be the last.

The calendar is moving fast toward one of my favorite content management focused conferences, the CMS Expo which is hosted every year in Evanston, Illinois (near Chicago). This year, the conference will be held on the 14th, 15th, and 16th of May once again at the Hilton Orrington Hotel. This event is billed as a "Learning & Business" conference showcasing some of the world's leading content management systems and the people who power them. Whether the CMS you favor is proprietary or open source, focused on small business or enterprise, non-profit, government or commercial applications, there is something for everyone at CMS Expo.

The recording video of the March 26th CMS-Connected show is now available online. CMS-Connected is a monthly webcast featuring news, trends and commentary related to the content management industry. In this particular show the focus was on mobile and social eCommerce with much of that discussion including Gabe Sumner from Sitefinity. I also participated as a guest on the show discussing my impressions of MODX  during the "In the Spotlight" segment.

"We can now send people through their own personal industrial revolution in 90 days. So if you're a bright guy, a bright gal, you got an idea you can turn it into reality. Just like you could do it in code 15 years ago, now you can do it in hardware."

- Mark Hatch, CEO Techshop, Interview by Robert Scoble in "America's most important startup?",  Video published on Mar 25, 2013 via YouTube

Yesterday, Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that Acquia has released the next generation of Mollom, the Mollom Content Moderation Platform. The new Mollom platform is being billed by Acquia as the "first cloud content moderation platform built for the enterprise". Mollom is capable of reducing the time that’s required to moderate large volumes of user-generated content. Personally having used Mollom to assist me in moderating user content for small to medium sites, I would think the need for something like Mollom is even greater for enterprises with an even larger web presence.

DotNetNuke (DNN) has announced a social software solution aimed at optimizing customer engagement and loyalty through online communities. DNN Social gives businesses the ability to easily create and manage communities on their existing websites, giving end-users a one-stop destination for consuming content, exchanging ideas and interacting with other community members.