Bryan Ruby

Now that Gallery 3.0 is in the beta phase of its software development, I feel it's safe to talk about the new features users can expect out of this open source web-based photo album organizer. Now I realize that Gallery is not a full content management system, but I also know there are plenty of people out there that think they need a CMS when perhaps what they really need is something a little simpler. For those that want to build a site to display and share their photography I recommend a look at Menalto's Gallery.

The philosophy behind Gallery 3 development is to make the web application easy and fun to customize with a big focus on usability. The developers have made every effort to make it much easier for the casual developer to hack on the product and do some really cool things with the software. The emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks quick and easy.

New features and enhancements in Gallery 3 include:

• Support for upgrading to further releases
• Full HTTPS support
• Use the EXIF caption (information provided by your digital camera) as the photo description
  

Last week, DotNetNuke Corp announced the availability of DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.1. This edition is the latest release of its web content management and application development framework for business-critical websites and web applications built on Microsoft .NET. The DotNetNuke Professional Edition is built on the same open source core as the free DotNetNuke Community Edition but includes several exclusive features and is fully supported and documented. The annual DotNetNuke Professional Edition subscription costs $1,999 per instance.

New features added to both the community and professional editions of DotNetNuke 5.1 include:

• Added Management Console to simplify access to admin functions
• Auditing for core tables to increase security
• Content Approval and Versioning
• Stop banners displaying and clickthrough count incrementing when indexed by crawlers
• Skin Event Handling
• Google Analytics Support
• Custom XML Sitemap Ranks

Besides the new features and normal bug fixes, DotNetNuke 5.1 also offers additional improvements over DotNetNuke 5.0 including:

The open source project MiaCMS announced that they and the project team behind the Aliro CMS are joining forces to create a best of breed and next generation CMS. For those folks that aren't familiar with MiaCMS, MiaCMS is a fork of Mambo. I was first introduced to MiaCMS while sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award. Admittedly, Aliro is new to me. Aliro is a project that while appreciating the features and history of the Mambo family (including Joomla!) still saw a need to make some dramatic changes to the CMS architecture and modernize the code base.

A new version of mojoPortal is out, version 2.3.0.8. This new version of the CMS includes the following new features:

• Search Engine Improvements
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Improvements
• Content Template Editor
• Skin (Theme) Improvements

mojoPortal is available at the official download page. Additional details on this version of mojoPortal can be found at mojoPortal.com.

Radiant 0.8.0 was released. While not that exciting of a release, at least it gives me something to talk about with regards to the Radiant CMS.

Radiant 0.8.0 “Asterism” features a brand new and more compliant caching mechanism based on Rack::Cache, and numerous bugfixes and small enhancements. Also included are:

• An extensive integration suite using Cucumber and Webrat
• Rails 2.3.2 (previously 2.1.2)
• Highline 1.5.1
• Haml 2.0.9

Additional development news can be found about Radiant CMS on their blog.

"We frequently counsel customers not to default to SharePoint (or Google, Oracle, IBM, et. al.) just because there's a lot of awareness of that package in the marketplace. Awareness is a marketing concept that cannot convey how a product will fit for you, architecturally, functionally, and financially."

-Tony Byrne, Analyst, CMS Watch, "Is Drupal Over-hyped?", June 11, 2009.

Perhaps Mozilla is finally seeing the light. There is a story circulating around that Mozilla will be providing better tools to deploy and manage Firefox within the enterprise. According to a PC World article that sources Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla Corp:

Through the program, which will start sometime soon after Firefox 3.5 is released at the end of June, companies can use a Web application provided by Mozilla to specify certain customizations for the browser -- such as bookmarks to certain sites or corporate intranets or portals, he said.

It has been a couple years since I changed the look and feel here at CMSReport.com. While my current theme, LiteJazz from RoopleTheme, has served me well the past couple years, it's time for a change.

BuddyPress 1.0.1 was released yesterday. This point release fixes a number of security issues in the 1.0 version so it is a critical upgrade for everyone currently running BuddyPress. There is also a number of other bug fixes so please review the release history for more information.

Raphael Mudge sent us an email on his latest project, After the Deadline.

I'm a computer scientist working to fill a gap in current CMS feature sets.  It isn't a new social or wireless feature.  I'm working to bring spelling, style, and grammar checking to web applications.  The technology is available for WordPress and the Open Source TinyMCE editor.

After the Deadline is an exciting plugin that adds a much needed feature often missing in most CMS rich text editors. After the Deadline currently supports plugins for TinyMCE and Wordpress. Some additional bullet points behind the plugin include: 

• Corrects spelling with 90% accuracy
• Checks 1,500 words for misuse
• Finds grammar errors
• Improves writing style
• All plugins are licensed under the LGPL