Bryan Ruby

There are a lot of stories this week of the old-guard tech companies moving toward software and social media as the solution to their problems. We're well aware of HP discussing their desire to get out of the PC market (which I think is a mistake) and even Cisco is looking at collaboration software as a forward moving solution.

Over the past few years, I've heard a lot of good things about Liferay and their flagship product, Liferay Portal. The portal is an open source enterprise solution for portals, publishing, content, and collaboration. However, I must confess, beyond the demo and some positive word-of-mouth comments, I haven't had much chance to explore their products, services, and community behind the product. My lack of knowledge about Liferay is all going to change next month, because CMS Report will be at this year's Liferay West Coast Symposium in Anaheim, California.

This month, Packt Publishing began accepting nominations for its 2011 Open Source Awards. Breaking tradition, I've declined the invitation this year to be a member of the judging panel of this award (I've been a judge for the past four years). Regardless of my lack of participation as a judge, I still think this a great award and merits mention here on my blog.

As I have done each and every year in the summer, I will be taking my annual break from technology. Through the month of August, I'll be decreasing my postings and management of this site in hopes of using the time to broaden my perspective. I need to spend some time recharging my batteries and my enthusiasm for content management systems as well as information technology in general.

DotNetNuke Corp. today announced the availability of DotNetNuke 6 which they bill as "the world’s leading Web Content Management Platform (WCM) for Microsoft .NET".  Over the years, I've been quite impressed with what DotNetNuke has to offer and I've been equally impressed with the DotNetNuke leaders I've engaged with in recent months.

This week, Joomla! 1.7 was officially released to the public. New features in this new version of the popular open source content management system include:

Martin Dougiamas from Moodle.org announced today the release of Moodle 2.1. Moodle is a learning management system which in simple terms can be described as a niche CMS geared toward the education field.

Major new features in Moodle 2.1 include the following:

As expected, this week the Drupal development team released Drupal 7.3 and Drupal 7.4. 

Drupal 7.3, a maintenance release which fixes security vulnerabilities is now available for download.

Drupal 7.4 also fixes other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

Andrew Lynch posted a fantastic list of 32 Web Frameworks over at memeburn.com. He starts off that list with Ruby on Rails, Django, Drupal, CakePHP...well you get the idea.

Frameworks are built on top of programming languages and provide methods of streamlining some of the more mundane and common tasks associated with web development. In essence, they allow developers to achieve more with less coding, saving both time and money. They provide a range of simple methods that help you connect to a database, authenticate users and build an admin backend, all with a few lines of code.

Be sure to read the complete story so you can see Andrew's review of 32 web frameworks that you have to choose from for your next project.

Accrisoft. A few months ago, I knew little about Accrisoft or their flagship product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS. In early May, CMS Report met with the company for the first time and it was a great opportunity for me to get to know them better. Accrisoft is a company that anybody who is somebody in the content management business definitely needs to get to know better.

It's not that often I become quickly enthralled with a company and their products. Yet, for the past couple months I can't help but think of the first demo I saw of Accrisoft's CMS. It wasn't just the genius simplicity of their blue/green user interface for users and developers that I'm obsessing about either. It is the fact that Accrisoft convinced me it's not only users that need to rethink how websites are managed, but also the many site owners and developers that incorrectly think they don't need a company like Accrisoft.

Accrisoft is a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) Web applications and they definitely made a big splash at last Spring's 2011 CMS Expo. During the expo, I was able to meet up with Accrisoft's CEO, Jeff Kline, as well as their chief technology officer, Mark Zeitler. It wasn't just their product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS, that won me over that day but also their enthusiasm and  technical vision of what the future holds for web content management.

If Accrisoft isn't on your radar it is time to put it there. For the last five years I've focused most of my attention on CMSs that individuals and organizations are more likely to manage and host themselves. Quite frankly, a portion of my DNA is old-school IT and I've stubbornly been unyielding to any notion of running a content management system in the cloud. I've always wanted to maintain as much control as I could on the servers that host my CMS. Control of your IT assets is a good thing, isn't it? The talk of the cloud is just slick marketing talk, isn't it? Accrisoft, as well as Acquia, have persuaded me to believe that it makes perfect business and technical sense to utilize SaaS CMS.