Content Management

Presented below is a benchmark comparison test between the latest Joomla 2.5.4 Emper (stable) and the upcoming Elxis 4.0 Nautilus (pre-alpha). The tests were performed with the Apache's ab tool on my local development computer which runs Windows. The numbers shown might seem low, this is because the tests were run on a Windows operating system. On a Linux live server they would be higher but the comparison results would be the same. A quick conclusion (we will go in more details later) is that Elxis is, at least, 4 times faster than Joomla!

"The most successful people online, starting with Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, or Guy Kawasaki, all have one thing in common. They maintain a very active blog. At the end of the day, this is where your online home base resides.

If you want to succeed online, get a blog (via Tumblr, WordPress, or Typepad) and start crunching out quality content. It's the lifeblood of your online presence."

- Ilya Pozin, 7 Habits of Web-Savvy Entrepreneurs, Inc., July 5, 2012

I woke up this morning with a very nice announcement that SilverStripe 3.0 has official been released. As you know, I'm a huge fan of the SilverStripe CMS. Next week, I hope to cover SilverStripe 3 better, but with limited time this Friday you'll just have to be satisfied with a copy of the below press release.

If I'm lucky, I think I might also be able to find a video interview I did last year with SilverStripe's co-founder, Sigurd Magnusson, on the then upcoming SilverStripe 3. I had some video editing format issues that perhaps I'm a little smarter now to overcome. Stay tuned on this "developing story".

Call me a sucker for education, but despite the fact that CMS Report retired Moodle from our Top 30 list last year, I still insist on posting Moodle articles from time to time. The supporters and developers of Moodle have released Moodle 2.3, a new version of their open source CMS. The "CMS" in this case stands for Course Management System. In order to avoid confusing the Moodle CMS with the other type of "CMS" we typically cover here, I will continue to stick to calling Moodle a Learning Management System  (LMS) or even an LCMS.

Oracle WebCenter Content just got a great companion product – CARA from Generis, an Oracle Gold Partner. CARA is a web-based interface on top of WebCenter Content and it provides both a high-performance / high functionality end-user experience, as well as a full suite of configuration tools that allow you to build a business use case for Oracle WebCenter without coding.

The Joomla! Project recently released a new version of their popular open source CMS, version 2.5.5. Shortly after this release was made available some significant bugs were noted and the Joomla team quickly responded with Joomla 2.5.6 to fix the known issues. Site administrators are now encouraged to update their Joomla site with Joomla 2.5.6 and not Joomla 2.5.5.

Some of the new features introduced in Joomla 2.5.5 and now available in Joomla 2.5.6 include:

Today, Matt Mullenweg announced the availability of WordPress 3.4. WordPress includes significant improvements to the blogging application's theme theme customization, custom headers, Twitter embeds, and image captions.

More specifically with regards to theme customization, the new theme customizer allows you to play around with various looks and settings of your current theme and provides the ability to preview those settings without publishing the changes until you're ready to go public. For themes that support the theme customizer, you can  also change colors, backgrounds, and image headers all from within the admin menu.

The folks over at Netgen (Zagreb, Croatia) wanted me to make mention of the upcoming eZ Publish Summer Camp being held in Bol, Croatia from September 5th to 8th this year. Besides being supportive of almost any conference that promotes CMSs, I thought if my Croatian grandmother was still alive today she would be quite pleased I was talking about Croatia. This three day conference promises to address a number of needs for eZ Publish developers while also giving you a chance to also spend some vacation time in boat and wine country.

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.

“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