January 2011

Recent Mallsoft acquisition lays foundation for advanced Sitefinity e-commerce functionality

WALTHAM, MA, JANUARY 17, 2011 –Telerik, an end-to-end provider of software application lifecycle and content management solutions today announced the launch of Sitefinity 4.0, the newest edition of its powerful, scalable Content Management System (CMS). The platform’s redesigned product architecture delivers an array of enhancements, like advanced workflow control for better business process management and improved ease-of-use, generating considerable productivity gains of up to 70 percent. Underscoring its commitment to meeting the needs of customers developing commercial websites, Telerik also announced its recent acquisition of Mallsoft, leading developers of e-commerce shopping cart technologies. The acquisition lays the groundwork for the integration of advanced e-commerce functionalityand a robust system for handling online stores within the Sitefinity platform.

“This is the culmination of many years of real-world experience, extensive time and resources invested in product R&D, and in gathering customer feedback. Additionally, with new frameworks supporting Mallsoft’s e-commerce technologies, users have the ability to fully manage all aspects of their online business, from corporate websites to intranets to online stores. Sitefinity 4.0 has matured into one of the market’s most powerful, comprehensive, and highest quality content management solutions being shipped today,” said Martin Kirov, executive vice president of Sitefinity atTelerik. “By minimizing complexities while providing robust tools and innovative features addressing every aspect of the site building and management experience, Sitefinity 4.0 enables users to quickly, easily, and efficiently optimize their web presence.”

Intersoft Solutions today announced the official release of WebUI Studio® 2010 R2, the world’s most advanced presentation layer toolset for ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF application development. Featuring over 60 new rich controls for Silverlight and WPF platform, and dozens of new business-inspiring samples, developers can now rapidly build cross-platform applications with the next-generation user experiences, while at the same time leveraging the best practice in architectural design pattern.

With the new R2 release, WebUI Studio® delivers a total of 280 high quality UI components for ASP.NET, Silverlight and WPF development, setting its position as the world’s most comprehensive user interface library suite available today.

Smaller, Faster, Better. Those are the claims for ImpressCMS 1.3 and now you have the ability to put it to the test. The project developers have published a review release of the upcoming version. In addition to the internal changes, ImpressCMS 1.3 will run under PHP 5.3, positioning it for better implementations as web hosts begin upgrading their servers.

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.

"Suffice it to say, we’re in the middle of one of the most important computing shifts in history. And as has happened before with other major paradigm transitions, new businesses will emerge to define and dominate markets."

- Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net, 2011: The Enterprise Resets, TechCrunch, January 2, 2011.