Bryan Ruby

At this moment, I have a tall stack of unread books related to content management systems sitting in front me. Publishers and authors apparently like my review style because new books continue to be sent my way. However, reading a book from cover to cover for a review (the last one being six months ago) takes time and I just haven't been able to keep up with the required reading. So with admission that I haven't read every page of these books, I've decided to at least start posting mini-reviews of select books and hoping that this move is still a win-win-win for publishers, authors and readers.

Over the years, I have gone on record stating the importance in allowing users the ability to leave comments at this site anonymously. I have always recognized that there is a segment of the online community that likes to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave an online trail that can be traced back to personal online accounts. Despite all the trouble I've had with the spammers and bots, the benefits of anonymous comments was always worth it to me in hopes of reading that one life changing comment provided by someone who preferred to stay in the shadows.

Dana Blakenhorn is one of the keynote speakers here at Liferay West Coast Symposium. He's probably one of the most non-Liferay speakers at this symposium giving him the perfect opportunity to express new ideas to this community of Liferay developers, partners, and users. I love these "strength of weak-ties" guests in conferences as it allows for some people in this crowd to "get it" and run with it.

The description for his talk:

Here at the Liferay West Coast Symposium, Bryan Cheung (CEO) and Paul Hinz (CMO) just announced the newest and upcoming version of the company’s Liferay Portal 6.1, as well as the developer community release of the new Liferay Marketplace. Liferay, Inc. hopes these moves represents a showing of strong new convergence of portal, web content management and modular applications for Liferay products.

As I mentioned last month, this week the 2011 Liferay West Coast Symposium takes place. I'm excited to attend this conference as when it comes to Liferay, I'm definitely a newbie and this is a great opportunity for CMS Report to focus and learn more about Liferay. During this conference, Liferay is scheduled to announce the details for Liferay Portal 6.1 as well as their new Marketplace.

Yesterday, Packt Publishing announced the finalists for their 2011 Open Source Award. This announcement signals the start of the next stage where the finalists are now open to public vote, which lasts until October 31.

Not all the categories in the award are content management related, but if you have an interest in open source I think you'll find each one of the finalists have a great story to tell. The finalists, listed in alphabetical order across all the categories, are as follows:

Open Source CMS Award

Using Facebook and Twitter, Steve Burge has compiled a list of social media responses to the question, "Why does Joomla rock?". It's an interesting list of 40 tweets and FB status messages and he's conveniently categorized the responses into short answers to the question.

Why does Joomla Rock?

Our CMS Focus page lists the top 30 content management systems that we want to discuss most here at CMS Report. It has been more than a year and a half since I made any changes to this list and so I decided it was time to make some significant changes. On this page you'll now find 10 new CMS that have been added to the list as well as ten previously listed CMS that were "retired" to the "Hall of Fame".

The applications listed under CMS Focus are not necessarily the biggest and most popular in content management, but instead are CMSs that for whatever reason have caught and kept my attention. If you find value in the CMS Focus page then that's great news and I'm glad I could help. If you find little value in lists such as these, that's fine too and I hope that you can find other content here at CMS Report that at least plays a role in your quest for a better CMS solution.

For those curious, the following ten web applications were added to CMS Focus:

• Accrisoft
• Contegro
• Hippo CMS
• Jahia
• Liferay Portal
• Magnolia
• Nuxeo
• Percussion CM1
• Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware
• TERMINALFOUR
  

SilverStripe Ltd. is due to release SilverStripe CMS 3.0 in alpha in October and beta by the end of the year. The biggest change to the current content management system will be the separation of the SilverStripe Framework as it’s own entity. The framework as a stable basis, formerly known as ‘Sapphire’, enables the developer to build more than just traditional websites and potentially build applications for any device and any purpose.

Accrisoft Corporation has announced the release of the newest version of Freedom CMS, a software package for building and managing database-driven, content-managed websites.