Bryan Ruby

This week, Alfresco announced the availability of Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 for download. This new release delivers on Alfresco’s vision of providing the open platform for social content management by delivering both a more robust content platform for building any kind of content-rich application, along with a more social user-interface for collaboration and document management.

Last fall, I once again had the privilege of participating as a member of the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Open Source Awards. For the 2010 event, I participated by voting for the category of Open Source CMS Awards. In that award, the winner was declared by the panel to be CMS Made Simple, with SilverStripe as first runner up followed by MODx as second runner up.

I received a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. Each of the judges on the panel, selects and ranks their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors including performance, usability, size and support from community, accessibility, ease of configuration, customization, scalability and security.

It has been my history to be transparent to all with how I rank each CMS as my vote will have some differences to those of the panel. This time around, I find myself hesitant and under personal protest with me providing information on how I ranked the five content management systems.

I question whether we're doing any good by declaring one CMS as better than another CMS. Dean Barker discussed on his blog some time ago this same uneasy feeling you get when you judge a CMS without having some reference to real world requirements. None of these content management systems would I consider losers and all of them remain worthy of future consideration. Yet, I'm disturbed that people will look at the numbers and interpret the results in a ways I never intended my rankings to be used.

My rankings for the Five Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. SilverStripe
2. mojoPortal
3. MODx
4. XOOPS and CMS Made Simple (Tie)

I'm not a firm believer in ties when it comes to ranking content management systems. Yet, this year I did just that for XOOPS and CMS Made Simple. All five content management systems that were reviewed I would consider as a candidate for a future project. None of the CMS would I consider a "last place" CMS so I refused to do so. It is also important to note that neither Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress competed in this ranking as previous winners in this category duke it out in the Hall of Fame category.

While I try to do my best to cover some of the big names in content management systems, I think the best part about CMS Report is it has introduced to both you and me web applications that are just starting to become known to the CMS world.

Ryan Cramer recently introduced me to a relatively new CMS called ProcessWire. Ryan is so passionate about this CMS that he would like to now grow both the user base and the open source community behind ProcessWire. In Ryan's own words:

I'm a regular reader of your Twitter feed (which I enjoy a lot, so thanks for doing it).

I've been designing and developing CMSs for about 10 years now, and specialize in large scale content management solutions for several companies throughout the US. I recently released an open source CMF/CMS project called ProcessWire.  As a user of multiple CMS platforms, I built this tool to be one that fills my own needs where other products don't, and I think it's fairly unique in several aspects (especially with regard to the API).

I'd like to grow the user base with the goal of getting more people involved in the project itself. Now that we've gone past the developer preview stage, I'm starting to look at how to get the word out...

Thanks,
Ryan

ProcessWire 2.0 is very similar in look and function to Dictator CMS (2003) and ProcessWire 1.0 (2007), both of which are still in use on many sites today. Despite intentions to do so, neither product was ever released open source, except for the projects the author used it with. ProcessWire 2.0 is the first GNU/GPL licensed version, and it is architecturally stronger than the CMSs that preceded it.

A number of  sites have already been developed with ProcessWire including such sites such as Lost River Winery, TripSite.com, Island Hideaways. Honestly, I was impressed with the design quality and functionality of the sites developed with ProcessWire.

All in all, if you're bored with your current CMS or looking for something different I think you should look at this most promising CMS, ProcessWire.

After three years of open source development, Drupal 7 has finally been released to the public. As Ric Shreves previously mentioned in his article, there are literally hundreds of changes in Drupal 7. I've included below a list of the more significant changes from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. I've also included a nice Drupal 7 marketing video via Jeff Robbins at the bottom of this post. Also there is always official Drupal 7 announcement for additional information on this latest version of Drupal.

Barring any unforseen changes to how I manage this site, I expect we will be upgrading CMSReport.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 within the next few months. I've been playing with Drupal 7 off and on this past year, but I must confess I haven't been as aggressive in my testing of this version of Drupal as I was with Drupal 6.

Some of the more significant changes in Drupal 7 since the release of Drupal 6 include:

1. Overhaul of the User Interface

Work has been done to improve the user experience and administration interface. The new administration theme "Seven", the overlay module, the dashboard and the configurable shortcut bar, all lead to a much more user-friendly interface.

2. Custom Fields

Drupal 7 bundles in the ability to add custom fields, similar in functionality to the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module. However, fields are no longer limited only to content types; they can be added to users, taxonomy terms, and other entities. Fields also have support for translations.

3. Image Handling

Drupal 7 brings native image handling to core. Image fields may be added to content, and have image styles applied to them, such as scaling, cropping, and other effects.

What a great year 2010 was for content management. Open source CMS projects seemed to have grown up this year while proprietary systems appeared to continue in their evolution. While social publishing systems may not have conquered the traditional content management system, the CMS definitely took notice by integrating as many social media features developers could come up with.

Below are the top ten stories of 2010 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list were ranked by the number of views per month since the articles first appeared at CMS Report. 

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010

1. Someone does another Drupal vs Joomla comparison
2. Open Source versus the Enterprise Solution
3. Ten Content Migration Tools to SharePoint Platform
4. Drupal themes go nuclear with Fusion
5. SilverStripe CMS becomes the first Microsoft Certified open source web app
6. Denial of Service on an Apache server
7. Guidelight Business Solutions video of DrupalConSF 2010
8. Sharepoint 2010 vs WCM Platforms
9. We Hear You: Our spam filtering needs to be improved
10. The MODx Revolution 2.0 Interviev

As you can see, stories on Drupal, Joomla!, Sharepoint, SilverStripe, and MODx brought a lot of visitors to the site. Not all the stories listed above would have been one of the ten I would have personally picked, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking. I personally, don't like "versus" articles yet readers seemed to flock those articles. Unfortunately quality of writing doesn't appear to always matter as there were some very well written articles we posted in 2010 that didn't make this list.

The year 2011 will undoubtedly bring change and new stories to the world of content management systems. I think the year will also be a year of decision for the direction we take CMSReport.com. I feel as if this site of ours is stuck somewhere between our roots as a niche blog and a potentially popular CMS news site. I'm hoping we make some changes in the new year that all our readers can appreciate and value.

The developers of mojoPortal have recently released a new version of their CMS, mojoPortal 2.3.5.8. Some of the new features include:

• A new Flickr Gallery feature
• A new User Sign In Module that can be put on a content page such as the home page
• A new scroller setting in the Feed Manager to enable a scrolling news ticker
• Some improvements to the List/Links feature including a new introduction that can be used to place html above the list and a new option for non-ajax paging
• Database authentication and LDAP - a new config setting for fallback to LDAP if database authentication fails. This allows scenarios where your internal users such as content authors can login with their LDAP credentials while still allowing public users to register and sign in with database credentials.
• A new option to disable CSS caching while designing by clicking a button that sets a cookie to disable it. The previous way of of disabling it from config still works but this new way may be more convenient. You will find the button under Administration > Advanced Tools > Designer Tools
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.4.2
• Updated Italian resources
• Bug fixes for things reported in the forums since the previous release including several fixes in the SQL CE data layer and the Firebird data layer.

The latest version of mojoPortal is available on the site's download page.

As yesterday's press release mentioned, MODx Revolution 2.0.5 has been publicy released.  I thought I would briefly focus on some of the specific changes in this minor release update from the MODx team. Over 175 issues and improvements were addressed in Revolution 2.0.5.

Some of the highlights of Revolution 2.0.5 include:

As some of you know, I'm very interested in how government and large organizations are using information systems, collaboration tools, and social media. This past weekend, I had a chance to read some of the trade magazines stacked under my desk and collecting dust. I came across a great article published in Government Computer News that discussed how emergency management is using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

The artice, written by Rutrell Yasin, lists five ways to use social media for better emergency response which include:

Yesterday, I received a press release from one of Liferay's marketing people. Instead of just publishing the press release, I thought I'd also include the part of the email that also introduces the product. This is a  good way for you to get an insider's look to how marketing relationships between a site such as CMS Report and the CMS companies are established. Kyle's introduction to the product actually peaked my interest into Liferay more than the press release and may help you consider Liferay as part of your enterprise solution.

Hi Bryan,

Liferay (makers of the Java open source portal that was recently voted a leader in Gartner's magic quadrant), has developed its own support issue tracker that is included in the Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Editions. Liferay used to use JIRA, but needed to make some tweaks to simplify the support process - so they built this using their own Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition.

Liferay is used by hundreds of thousands of developers; as Gartner reported in the report above, a "surprising amount" of enterprises ask Gartner about Liferay's portal.

Press release is below.

Thanks,

Kyle

Liferay Releases LESA to Enterprise Customers

Los Angeles, CA - November 30, 2010: Liferay, Inc., provider of the market’s fastest growing enterprise portal product, recently announced the availability of the Liferay Enterprise Support Application (LESA), a new multifaceted support issue tracker, designed to simplify and streamline the enterprise support experience for its customers. The web application, available through the Liferay Customer Portal, provides Liferay Enterprise Edition customers a clean and simple interface to improve interactions with the Liferay support team.

LESA features a simplified user interface that greatly improves the support experience for both developers and non-technical administrators. Customers will benefit from having one application that aggregates, organizes, and monitors disparate data and services in the support process. Customers can now search tickets by username, issue severity, due date, and other attributes. This will simplify how customers track open tickets and allows them an efficient escalation process. LESA’s ability to issue multiple assignees also improves productivity by permitting more people to work on a ticket at a given time.

“Customers who have tested LESA have been very pleased with the capabilities and have reported quicker and more accurate resolutions,” said Craig Kaneko, Liferay’s Director of Support and Subscription Services. “Customers report that usability and accessibility are much higher with LESA than what is available from other support systems, including those of the world’s largest software providers.”

Built entirely on Liferay Portal 6EE, LESA, is now available to all Enterprise Edition customers. For more information, please visit www.liferay.com. 

CMS Made Simple is the winner in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award category of the 2010 Open Source Awards. CMS Made Simple has won this Award for the first time in the past five years, having been a presence in the Award since 2007. Packt also announced  SilverStripe as first runner up with MODx in the second runners up position.

I had the privilege of sitting as a judge in this year's Open Source CMS Award category. My vote was a little different from the official award ranking where I would have placed mojoPortal, another 2010 award finalist, in a runnerup position.  I may have been the only judge that may have ranked mojoPortal in the top three positions. As I've done similarly in past years, in the near future I'll post how I judged the finalists in this category. However, it is now CMS Made Simple's well deserved moment and I won't take the spotlight away from them with my personal ramblings.

Attached below is the official press release I received from Packt Publishing announcing CMS Made Simple as the winner of the Open Source CMS Award. Congratulations to all those involved int he development and support of this great open source CMS.