A couple days ago I opened my Thunderbird e-mail client on my Windows XP system and found an e-mail from Joe Audette of the mojoPortal project. "Mojo whata?", I asked. I thought I knew most of the content management projects (CMS) projects around, but this one didn't ring a bell. After reading his e-mail, I understood I likely have not heard much about his project because my focus on CMS has been a little too narrow lately.

In his e-mail, Audette writes, "Hi, just wondering if you only cover CMS's using php technology or if you would consider giving any press to .NET/Mono based projects? Any coverage of my project mojoPortal would be much appreciated."

As I've mentioned in past posts, I have a strong desire to cover more than just PHP Web applications. mojoPortal, named after Audette's dog, is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac. Already the talk of a CMS using a blend of Microsoft and open source tools was peaking my interest.

Gallery has a new demo site for users to show off their photo sites using the online application. The new demo site provides a significant improvement over the previous forum to showcase albums. Some information on the new site by Gallery themselves found below:

"The equity a corporate blogger builds up is portable, in other words. Rather than sticking to the company, it will follow the blogger—even if the blogger heads to a competitor."

- Nicholas Carr, Lessons in Corporate Blogging, BusinessWeek Online, July 17, 2006.

Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.

Just wanted to write a quick note that the first actual beta for Firefox 2 has been released. I'm proud to say that I'm currently using the beta Internet browser as I'm writing this post. The built-in spell checker for text boxes (found in on-line forms and Web content management systems) works great! I'm also pleased to say, that the spell checker works with TinyMCE.

A couple months ago, I posted some of the features that were likely to be included in Firefox 2.0 once it reaches final release. My original list of features wasn't too far off the mark. According to the release notes, the following are new features that have been included since Firefox 1.5 was released:

Mozilla's Mitchell Baker wrote an interesting post about product development. As you develop a product and customer loyalty there is a risk to making too many changes to a product. However, the success of your product likely came about because of innovation. If you kill off introducing new ideas and concepts for your product you are also likely to kill off the reason your product became successful in the first place.

So far I've mostly posted here at CMS Report about PHP-based content management systems. However, PHP isn't the only language being used on the Web. Other Web friendly languages include Perl, Java, Ruby, ASP, Python, etc.

So for one of our first non-PHP based CMS we're going to take a look at Radiant. The Radiant CMS is a Ruby on Rails CMS that has yet to reach version 1.0. Like a lot of CMS in early development it is considered a "no fluff" CMS for small teams. In other words, Radiant is not quite ready for enterprise level work. Radiant however may work well for those personal sites and small companies that have an invested interest to promote Ruby on Rails based applications.

Something old is new again. The Blue_mark theme for Drupal 4.7 is available at CMS Report. The Blue_mark theme uses Drupal 4.7's default theming engine, PHPTemplate. This theme is released under the GPL.

The Blue_mark theme was originally offered by Charles Lowe and available for download at his site, cyberdash.com. The original theme was written for Drupal 4.4's Xtemplate theme engine. I maintained the theme through Drupal 4.6 for a personal site of mine. With the switchover to the PHPTemplate theme engine as the Drupal 4.7 defualt, significant work was needed to keep old Blue_mark alive. The Blue Marine theme was used as a starting point. Minor tweaks were made to Blue Marine's PHP files and significant changes were made in the CSS.