Bryan Ruby

I caused a little bit of controversy during my review of ImpressCMS as one of the five most promising CMS.

ImpressCMS impressed me so much that I decided to add it to CMS Report's CMS Focus.  ImpressCMS pushed XOOPS off of this list!

Even for The Register, not a very long article but it does ask some important questions.  The article, Welcome to the world of collaboration by stealth, suggests via questions that collaboration is bigger than the IT department.

Because it involves software, probably the IT department's. But is IT equipped for the task? And does it want the responsibility? Collaboration is a human process, in essence, so surely the buck stops somewhere else - even if IT provides a number of enabling tools.

A month ago, I started observing an increase in traffic from a relatively new aggregation site called Alltop.  CMS Report is now being featured in Alltop's content management page which is dedicated to "all the top content management news".  Alltop recently expanded the number of topics they cover and I surmise that content management is one of those new topics.   While there are already a number of news aggregation sites referring their readers back to CMSReport.com (and if you're one of them...we thank you), Alltop is special.     

What makes Alltop so special? First of all, the site is a project associated with Guy Kawasaki.  Guy Kawasaki has a history with Apple but he is one of those successful IT guys with so much confidence in himself that his time at Apple alone doesn't define him.  If you check out his blog on a regular basis you'll come to understand what I'm trying to write here.

Secondly, Alltop is special because it was developed by a neighbor, Electric Pulp.  Electric Pulp is based in my city, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  I don't know what it is, but there seems to be a lot of successful tech companies with national presence to be found in Sioux Falls.  Go figure that one out.

Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.

Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

Alex S. wrote to us and and recommended that everyone take a look at MyBB, a Web forum application.

I noticed MyBB isn't on your CMS Focus list.  I would recommend you looking into it as it is an amazing system.  It even just went open source recently.

But, don't take my word for it KDE is now using it them selves.  It's new compared to SMF and phpBB but it's already competing with the best (including IPB and vB).

https://mybb.com/

I'm not a developer or anything.  Just recommend this amazing forum system with a bright future.

A recent blog post from Sarah Parez tries to answer some "want-to-know" questions on the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications.  With software as a service becoming more popular, Google has quickly become a competitor of Microsoft's Office Suite with its Google Docs. Microsoft is aggressively fighting back by making its Office software available via the Web browser.

Yes, your host has been very bad in answering his email.  So we continue to make good by giving everyone their 15 minutes here at CMS Report.  Some of these CMS we'll cover more in dept at a later date.  Rita, an advocate for FatWire writes:

Do you cover WCM? By way of background, FatWire Software provides industry-leading web experience management (WEM) solutions that enable organizations to deliver a rich online experience to users and to simplify management of their web presence.

CMS Wire recent took a look at Technorati's Top 100 blog sites and determined which CMS the sites were using most.  They concluded, not surprisingly, that Wordpress was the most popular CMS with 34% of the top sites using the blogging application.

Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second [16%], and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.

This year, I was given the privilege of sitting on the judging panel for Packt Publishing's 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS Award.  Judges on the panel were required to select their top three CMS based on a number of factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security.  These top three CMS were to originate from the five finalists in the most promising category which included: CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT Portal, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.

As I promised earlier, I'm posting online my notes and comments on how I ranked all five finalists in the most promising category.  For better or for worse, Packt Publishing also gives their judges a lot of flexibility in how they rank a CMS.  While I wouldn't consider this a complete analysis of the CMS, it should provide enough information on the impression each CMS left me when reviewed.  While the methodology for determining the best CMS may be subjective, I do try to design my ranking of the CMS to be fair and non-biased.

The order in which I ranked the top "most promising" CMS were:

1. SilverStripe (my highest ranked)
2. ImpressCMS
3. CMS Made Simple
4. MiaCMS
5. MemHT Portal (my lowest ranked)

In order to come with the above rank, I chose to use factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration, ease of customization, scalability, the the amount of support/documentation offered through the project's site/infrastructure.  I did not use security as a factor in my ranking.  Since the CMS must be less than two years old to qualify in the most promising category, it seemed unfair to rank these CMS by security since by definition they're not fully matured projects.

I'm always interested in stories of how content management systems are being used in government.  Government Technology has a lengthy article on how government portals are evolving into Web 2.0 sites.  They put special focus on sites hosted by state governments.