Content Management

Acquia announced significant growth in revenue and bookings as the company’s open source solutions are becoming more widely adopted. Acquia’s year-over-year revenue grew by 108 percent in 2012. According to the Boston Business Journal, this puts Acquia's revenue for 2012 at $45.3 million. Momentum continued in the first quarter of 2013, as Acquia’s bookings increased 52 percent compared to the first quarter of 2012 and more than 15 percent over the quarter prior.

A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content types.

Tags are not just for articles but is also integrated tagging into other areas of the Joomla core that made sense. Extension developers will be happy to note that tagging in Joomla 3.1 also provides the necessary API changes to integrate Tags with extensions.  Extension developers will also have the ability to develop innovative ways to use tagging beyond what is in the core CMS.

For the past few years, CMS Report has generally not posted CMS announcements for new releases which only contained bug fixes and no new additional features. So, it's been rare for us to post the "point" release announcements for Drupal as Drupal only introduces significant new features in the new full version of Drupal (such as the forthcoming Drupal 8). However, Drupal 7.22 contains a lot of minor changes so we thought it was worth talking about. Drupal 7.22 was actually released a week ago, but I didn't have time to upgrade any of my Drupal sites until this week nor look at what was actually fixed until now. 

Some of the many "minor" changes in Drupal 7.22 include:

DotNetNuke (DNN) has announced a social software solution aimed at optimizing customer engagement and loyalty through online communities. DNN Social gives businesses the ability to easily create and manage communities on their existing websites, giving end-users a one-stop destination for consuming content, exchanging ideas and interacting with other community members.

All this talk about CXM being DOA has got me thinking about the age old question when it comes to CMS – or software in general for that matter.  Should you try to build the world into your software, or focus on specific capabilities and integrate for the rest?

Sitting on my desktop the past few weeks has been an eBook from the Aluent Group, Drupal and Joomla!: A Comparison of Project Processes and Costs. I probably would have not read this eBook if it wasn't for an acquaintance of mine, Justin Kerr, letting me know that he was a co-author of the book. I'm lucky to have read the book because I think Justin Kerr as well as co-authors Robert Nowak and Jet Pixel have hit a home run in their review and comparison of Drupal and Joomla.

Recently, the fine folks at CMS-Connected gave me the opportunity to become a periodic guest for the CMS in the Spotlight segment of their show. CMS-Connected is an hour-long monthly news webcast that focuses on the content management industry. For the January show we had Joomla! in the spotlight, but once we went live I soon found myself challenged to adequately cover the CMS given short period of time and format.

Update: A recording of January's show can now be found on the CMS-Connected site. Also, a continued video discussion on Joomla! can be found here at CMS Report.

Brett Profitt recently posted on the Elgg Blog that Elgg 1.8.12 has been released. Elgg is an open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework on which to build all kinds of social environments. Elgg can be found in a number of settings from campus wide social network to internal collaborative platform for small and large organizations alike.

Elgg 1.8.12 has been released with numerous bugfixes and improvements. Enhancements in this release of Elgg include:

A few days ago, WordPress 3.5 was released and I originally planned to write the typical "what is new in WordPress" article similar to what I've done in the past for CMS Report. However, I thought this time around I would also discuss how I'm using WordPress to support the website of one of my favorite photographers, Karen Ruby of Dakota Imagery. Certainly, in this article there is no cause for you to suspect my opinions are biased with regard to her photography skills despite the fact we've been married for 11 years and she is the mother of my child.