Bryan Ruby

Yesterday, I received an email from SilverStripe Co-Founder, Sigurd Magnusson. For all the years I have been corresponding with Sigurd, I don't think I've ever seen him as excited as he was this time in breaking the news. SilverStripe, a web development company delivering open source content management systems (CMS) has achieved Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2 for version 2.4.0 of their flagship product, SilverStripe CMS. This is a world first, as the software is the only truly open source web application to achieve certification on the Windows platform.

What is a little different about this story is that it is not only SilverStripe's press relations people making a big deal about this story. Microsoft is making a big deal about the accomplishments of SilverStripe. Andrew Gordan, Microsoft's New Zealand’s Platform Strategy Manager writes:

A large amount of the innovation in the software world is happening on the web and in the cloud, and in addition to that, we are seeing increased awareness and acceptance of open source software on the Microsoft Windows platforms.

Microsoft's Certified for Windows programs are well known for indicating software and hardware products that have been thoroughly tested to work well on Microsoft Windows and as of today, SilverStripe CMS is the first Open Source web application to complete the comprehensive testing necessary to achieve "Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2" status.

In his own blog post, Sigurd mentions that the certification for SilverStripe has been a long but rewarding road. A large proportion of the SilverStirpe's  community and clients use Microsoft servers, databases, and other technology. Over the past three years there an effort has been made for the SilverStripe CMS to work with Microsoft's operating system, web servers, and SQL Server database product.

Packt Publishing announced that Pimcore has won the Most Promising Open Source Project Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Most Promising Open Source Project Award  is a revamped category for the Award this year, featuring Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, the founding member of Pimcore. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects. The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community.” Added Marc Delisle, system administrator and one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

While Pimcore occupied the top spot in the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category, TomatoCMS came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by social networking software package BuddyPress.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has five more categories left, including the Open Source Graphics Software category, for which results will be announced from November 16th through to November 19th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit Packt's Open Source Awards site.

This is a very cool product from salsaDev which takes us one step closer to the Semantic Web. The salsaAPI 2.0 helps turn unstructured text into smart content. The video below explains it much better than I or even the press release I've attached below. My thanks to Stéphane Croisier (Jahia and also a salsaDev Board Member) for recommending that I take a look at this product.

SalsaAPI 2.0: the next-generation content intelligence engine

Geneva, November 10, 2010 – salsaDev SA is happy to announce it just closed its Series A Financing round exceeding $1 Mio, with institutional and private investors. salsaDev is simultaneously releasing its new product, salsaAPI 2.0 (api.salsadev.com), leveraging the 2nd generation of its flagship technology. salsaAPI automates text analysis and semantic indexing on large volumes of information, helping organizations reach the next level of content intelligence.

The salsaAPI 2.0 offers a powerful RESTful API to index various sources of raw content, automatically enrich it with additional metadata and match it with texts of similar meanings. The product combines a comprehensive set of features into one single offering, including text analysis, intelligent search & discovery and content mining. As opposed to several competitors, the product can be used online or onsite and can be easily embedded within any 3rd party sites or applications.

A couple weeks ago, one of Magnolia's press people gave me a sneak preview of a case study for how the Magnolia CMS was being used by one of their partners in redesigning the recruitment website of the United States Navy, Navy.com. I was given the opportunity to write a story about the redesign before the case study was published online. It was a great opportunity I was being offered but I just wasn't able to find the time in my schedule to write the story.

So it is only fitting, that I at least talk about this case study on the Navy's use of the Magnolia content management system on Veteran's Day. The recent Navy.com was redesigned to be more interactive, more responsive to user needs, and better integrated with social media communities nurtured by the U.S. Navy. Additionally, the site needed to support the Navy’s recently launched new brand, “America’s Navy. A Global Force For Good™”.

As mentioned in the case study, integrators spent six months researching and evaluating open source content management systems. Their evaluation was platform-agnostic; they considered Java, PHP and Python solutions in their research. Key evaluation criteria were:

• Easy to learn and easy to use for content authors
• Short learning curve for designers and developers
• Easy to integrate with custom business objects
• Compliant with Web standards and accessibility guidelines
• Scalable and robust

Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition, together with the Magnolia STK and Blossom module, met all of these criteria. Navy.com is now running on Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition with Magnolia STK and Blossom, Magnolia's instant Spring integration. The infrastructure supporting this site includes an Apache Web Server, Tomcat Application Server, MySQL Database, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

If you have ever worked for a large organization, you should easily relate to this Dilbert cartoon. As the IT guy trying to make everyone happy at work, I've spent the last year making sure everyone that needs two monitors gets two monitors. It's not an easy task in an era of tight budgets and cycle replacements but we're getting there...

Earlier this week, the CMSMS Development team released another milestone version of CMS Made Simple. CMS Made Simple 1.9 is a feature version with focus on flexibility and maintaining ease of use.

Significant additions and improvements in CMSMS 1.9 include:

Slowly but surely, CMSReport.com has turned into a nice side business for me. The problem is that this site has grown to a point that it demands more of my time than I can currently offer it. The future of CMS Report is now sitting at crossroad. I plan to be spending the next few months deciding where this site should go from here.

Some of the options I am considering for this site include:

Like most website administrators, I have a long history of fighting spammers and protecting my sites from unwanted content. Over the years I've used a lot of tools and services to block spam from reaching the pages of my sites. In recent years, the service I've relied on most heavily is Mollom.  Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website

Overall I've been very happy with the spam filterering Mollom provides for my sites. However, occasionally Mollom can be too aggressive and remove legitimate story and comment submissions. And when I say "remove" I most definately intend to use the word in the literal way. You see, up to now, Mollom had an "all or none" approach to rejecting or accepting spam. When your stories or comments were rejected, the content submission was simply discarded without review by a human.

If you've ever submitted good clean content to CMSReport.com or another site only to only have it identified and discarded as spam, you have every right to be upset with spam filters. Over the past couple months, I've had a number of people upset that the spam filtering CMS Report has been using rejected their story submission. This may not be all the fault of Mollom either as I was also using the Bad Behavior module too. My apologies to everyone that has gone through this experience when they've submitted legitimate comments and stories to this site. Unfortunately, without spam filtering the content on this site would not be good to view. Spam filtering is a necessary part of maintaining a site open to the public.

Luckily, there has been some improvements in the Mollom for Drupal module that should keep your posts and comments from getting discarded while continuing to protect this site from spam. The module has now been improved to to retain spam comments as unpublished posts in a site's moderation queue. So we're giving the new module a try. I won't promise that your content will not be identified as spam, but I do promise you that every intent is being made to review your comments and stories for publication.

A few days ago, I read Mary Jo Foley's article titled Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted. According to an interview with the President of the Server and Tools Division at Microsoft, the company will be shifting support for Silverlight away from the PC and Mac desktop and toward the phone market.

So what’s a developer to make of Microsoft’s messaging (or lack thereof) about Silverlight at its premiere developer conference?

I asked Bob Muglia, the Microsoft President in charge of the company’s server and tools business, that very question and got what I consider to be the clearest answer yet about how Microsoft is evolving its Silverlight strategy.

“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.

But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.

Microsoft plans to be using HTML 5 to replace the functions currently being provided by Silverlight 5.

It is not the point of this post to debate the merits of HTML 5, Silverlight and even Flash. What is my point though, is that Microsoft appears to me to be desperate. Desperate to come up with a strategic plan that will carry them beyond the day of Windows PCs. Microsoft is desperate to become innovative for the sake of innovation that they're really confusing a lot of their developers. If only after a few years of support, Microsoft is shifting focus of it's Silverlight platform...what potential developer in his or her right mind would support another future Microsoft endeavor? Just take a look at the comments to Bob Muglia's blog post discussing this topic and I think you'll see my point.

Brett Profitt just announced the release of Elgg 1.7.4 via the Elgg blogs. While the majority of changes in this release are bugfixes, there are two notable changes in Elgg 1.7.4 related to Twitter and user validation.

Brett writes about the new features: