Content Management

On my to-do list for quite some time has been wanting to talk briefly about some of the new features included in the latest release of Agility CMS. You may recall that CMS Report migrated over to Agility's Magazine Publishing Suite last Fall. So, keeping up to date on new features added to Agility CMS is not only a news story but also something of personal interest to me.

Some of the more significant new features included in the Agility March 2013 release are:

MotoCMS, which has previously been a well known provider of the Flash CMS, has just announced the release of their new MotoCMS for HTML along with a bunch of complete HTML website solutions for easy development and management. The new web solutions with the integrated MotoCMS HTML are already available on a specially created pre-release page landed on the official MotoCMS website. The company is currently working on the new HTML designs’ store, which is expected in the near future.    

If I learned anything from my open source vs. proprietary CMS post, comparing CMS’s based on the method used to code them is no longer that relevant. Following the great discussion that was triggered convinced me that comparing along this dimension no longer contributes much to the CMS selection process.

The other thing I learned was that being cheeky, while good for attention, probably isn’t the most forthcoming way to educate the readers of this great publication. So this time around, I promise to be more thorough and objective!  Hopefully we’ll get some insights from the community again as well!

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:

This week, I received an email from some marketing folks that Acquia was announcing they are open sourcing their mobile application code for posting content to Drupal sites. For those that don't know, Acquia is a commercial open source software company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal. This isn't the first time Acquia and other Drupal vendors have given code back to the Drupal community and you can be assured it won't be the last.

The recording video of the March 26th CMS-Connected show is now available online. CMS-Connected is a monthly webcast featuring news, trends and commentary related to the content management industry. In this particular show the focus was on mobile and social eCommerce with much of that discussion including Gabe Sumner from Sitefinity. I also participated as a guest on the show discussing my impressions of MODX  during the "In the Spotlight" segment.

The first thing I did when I sat down to write this article was search the Google Keyword Tools for ‘Proprietary vs. Open Source CMS’. I wanted to see what kind of traffic this article might get. I got 0 searches per month globally.  A flip of the terms to the title I chose nets a whopping 22.  With < 10 in the United States.

My curiosity was piqued, so I checked ‘Open Source CMS’ and ‘Proprietary CMS’ and was not surprised with the 9,900 global searches for the former to 91 for the latter. This is out of 450,000 searches globally for ‘CMS’.

What I am surprised about is that more people aren’t looking for information comparing these two very different approaches to CMS.

Yesterday, Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that Acquia has released the next generation of Mollom, the Mollom Content Moderation Platform. The new Mollom platform is being billed by Acquia as the "first cloud content moderation platform built for the enterprise". Mollom is capable of reducing the time that’s required to moderate large volumes of user-generated content. Personally having used Mollom to assist me in moderating user content for small to medium sites, I would think the need for something like Mollom is even greater for enterprises with an even larger web presence.

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?