May 2012

Some of my friends over at DotNetNuke have been talking to me about the latest version of their software. They're excited the new emphasis their favorite CMS is taking by combining traditional Web content management with enterprise social publishing capabilities. In fact, just today DotNetNuke Corp. announced the availability of DotNetNuke (DNN) 6.2, a social CMS that provides organizations the tools they need to easily configure and deploy internal social collaboration solutions and online communities.

I haven't had a chance to demo DNN 6.2,  but I'll walk you through on what I've gleamed so far from the press releases and conversations within the community. I'm hoping to get an opportunity for a demo on the new features down the road but this will have to do for now. Just to get the definitions straightened out, what DNN is calling Social CMS is what I also like to call a Social Publishing Systems. Everyone has a different take on how to use social media, some companies get it while others are still trying to recognize their importance. Taking DNN 6.2 into consideration, it's apparent to me that DotNetNuke gets social.

During the Memorial weekend, I decided to pull the plug on the CMS related news feeds we were streaming into Planet CMS. One of CMS Report's biggest strengths has always been pointing people toward the right direction in their search for content management systems. Knowing that one site couldn't support all the stories that needed to be written about CMSs, we began to rely more heavily on using a news aggregator within our Drupal CMS to provide you the links and excerpts to articles written elsewhere. I did this all with good intentions, but Google apparently disagrees.

“Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.”

- Matthew Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, Quoted by Bobbie Johnson, "New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way", May 23, 2012

Responsive Web Design is without a doubt one of the Web's biggest buzzwords for 2012. The Web is changing fast and even though the importance of CMSs addressing mobile devices was well predicted, I suspect even the tech gurus are surprised at the current growth rate of smartphones. If you don't know it by now, there is a lot of pressure on web designers and site builders to ensure that their client's websites are responding to the changing Internet. A website should look good no matter how it is being displayed, whether that site is being viewed on a desktop, cell phone, tablet, or whatever new device the Ghost of Steve Jobs brings us.

Organizations deal with a lot of confidential information every day, information that is typically managed using business applications, like SharePoint. That means that properly implemented and managed security is critical to these applications.

With SharePoint, you can implement effective security, but managing it with the tools you get out of the box isn’t the easiest. Here we look at the challenges you will face managing security and permissions within SharePoint and discuss why you should make it a key element of your Information Architecture plan.

One of the benefits of conferences such as last week's CMS Expo are the opportunities to come across content management systems you know nothing about. Such was the case for me when I was introduced to Wondercode, a content management and e-commerce solution developed by a Norwegian company. My introduction to Wondercode was in a showcase session with Sven-Erik Knoff as the presenter. 

Hundreds of corporate and commercial websites run Wondercode, each with their own unique twist and functionality. This panel will go in depth in showing you just how flexible, customizable and powerful Wondercode is

"Innovation is an art, but it is an art where “managerial” interventions can accelerate or retard the rate of progress. Much of this concerns the sources from which ideas originate, the speed by which ideas move through an organization, the invitations to participate, the attitudes of the key decision-makers and the sources of inspiration that they draw from."

- Bill Fischer, The Virtues of Having Strange People Close By, Forbes.com, May 17, 2012

I finally got my introduction to Telerik Sitefinity! I was not only the moderator for a panel at last week's CMS Expo, but I also had a chance to attend a few of the many sessions being offered during the conference. One of the first sessions I attended was a presentation focused entirely on Telerik's Sitefinity CMS with Pat Harlow as the presenter for this flyover session.

Telerik Sitefinity CMS is a modern online business platform which adapts to any business requirement and works equally well for online marketers, developers and IT managers.  This session will cover different capabilities of the system – Mobile Web, Form builder, and built-in Ecommerce. Pat Harlow will also highlight the Module Builder and Sitefinity Thunder, which makes developers more productive than Santa’s elves. Join this session to see what’s coming up for the next Sitefinity releases!

For busy people, these sessions are productive and valuable by giving attendees a great overview of a vendor's CMS within a one hour time frame. Despite Telerik being a sponsor here at CMS Report, I never before sat down with their sales people to go over Sitefinity's features. Below are some of notes I took during the presentation as well as my "first" impressions of the Sitefinity CMS.

François Hollande won the presidential election in France last week, with the help of an impressive campaign and content management system SilverStripe.

Hollande’s website http://francoishollande.fr was the web-based focal point of the door to door campaign and functioned as the main communication tool throughout the whole election period. In the month before the election, the site had three million unique visitors and ranked 15th most visited information site in France.

dotCMS, an open source, Java-based web content management system, is pleased to announce the release of v2.0.  This latest release continues dotCMS’s pursuit of providing one the most scalable, powerful and easy-to-use web content management platforms in the marketplace today.   No spin or catchy titles, just good, meaningful tools and functionality for both commercial-grade and multi-tenant content driven web applications. 

“dotCMS 2.0 is our response to the on-the-ground, real needs of both business users and developers,” announced Will Ezell, CTO of dotCMS.  “We have exciting plans for the 2 series, which will continue to rapidly improve upon our already robust enterprise content platform”.