Content Management

On May 2nd, 3rd, and 4th the CMS Association will be hosting the 2011 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference in Chicago. This three jam-packed days conference will give you a chance to immerse yourself in that which is relevant in the CMS world today for you and for your business. At CMS Expo you can expect to get the facts, find the support, and make the contacts to help your business succeed.

This year, CMS Expo will be featuring some of your favorite content management systems including Drupal, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, SilverStripe, and Umbraco. The 2011 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference will feature over ninety information-packed CMS training sessions. Created for Web Designers, Developers and Businesspeople, CMS Expo is the place to be for the most relevant, timely and actionable information in the fast-growth CMS Sector.

Attendees will learn the latest web skills, while making highly valuable business connections, all under one roof. Over eighty of the world’s top CMS instructors will share their knowledge and insights. CMS Expo will feature Learning Tracks on Business, Technical & Creative Foundations (such as PHP, MySQL, CSS, Web Design and more), plus their "Evaluation Track" is dedicated toward providing the perfect atmosphere to help participants compare CMSs, apps and add-ons/modules.

CMS Report is proud to be a Media Partner for the 2011 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference in Chicago. We consider this the must go-to conference of the year for fans of content management systems and those that want to stay relevant in this industry. We encourage you to click here for pricing & registration information.

From WordCamp Portland 2010, Melissa Lion & Julie Yamamoto session how how to evolve your career from blogger to professional marketer. I'm always fascinated when I hear people's professional career evolved over time, especially when it is a career that is immersed in information technology, the social web, and Enterprise 2.0.

ImpressPages CMS 1.0.8 gives more freedom and ability to be the master of your website. Copy a table from any other resource (MS Word, MS Excel, other website, etc.) and see how it automatically adapts to your website’s style. Forget 3rd party tools to have fully functional contact or registration form on your website; just drag&drop a widget for that. Create unique content administration area with only a few lines of code.

Here's a list of most important updates and fixes:

• Added table widget
• Additional contact form fields: select box, checkbox, radio buttons
• Saved or not saved status of the page
• You can move ip_config.php in upper directory for safety (above public_html, htdocs, etc.)
• Automatic check for a new version
• MagicQuotes ON support
• Autologin option in user module

San Francisco, CA and Amsterdam, the Netherlands – Hippo, a leading vendor of open source Enterprise Content Management Software, has launched version 7.5 of its Content Management System, Hippo CMS.

Hippo CMS 7.5 is an enterprise-class open source software product designed to empower your audience. Consumers of Web content are now coming to expect context-enriched experiences that use location, presence, language, behavior, social attributes and other environmental information to anticipate their needs.

But Web content management solutions haven’t changed to meet this expectation. They still focus on pushing content out to static Web sites, and expect their customers to optimize their Web content based on a slow iteration of publish, test, review, re-design.

What if you could easily open your entire content repository to new channels as they emerge? What if you could optimize your content in real-time so that no matter how your customer engages – their experience is as good as it can possibly be? What if you could empower your audience to engage with your business on their terms?

With Hippo – the answer is “now you can”.

DotNetNuke Corp., the company behind the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platform for Microsoft .NET, announced its intention to shift the primary core development language for its award-winning DotNetNuke core platform from Visual Basic (VB.NET) to C#. The first official release of the DotNetNuke platform available in C# will be Version 6.0 which will be publicly available for users of the DotNetNuke Community, Professional, and Enterprise Editions in Q2 2011, with the first Community Technology Preview available in early March.

News Highlights

• In recent years there has been a much greater emphasis on the C# language in the .NET ecosystem in terms of innovation, tooling, and examples. In switching to C#, DotNetNuke Corporation believes its developer community and install base will benefit from greater access to development resources, source code examples, and enterprise acceptance.
• A Community Technology Preview will be available in early March which will provide the opportunity for users and developers to get early access to the recently converted C# platform. Community participation and feedback will play a vital role in ensuring a high quality final release. 
• The .NET Framework provides design-time, compile-time, and run-time support for multiple programming languages. As a result, the DotNetNuke API will preserve full compatibility through this transition. This means that all platform extensions will continue to be fully compatible with the C# DotNetNuke 6.0 core. 
• DotNetNuke extensions developers, commercial or otherwise, will not be negatively impacted by the change as they will continue to be able to develop and deploy custom extensions in their preferred software development language including VB.NET or C#.
• DotNetNuke is the fastest growingopen source web CMS ever on .NET with over 1,100 subscription customers, 33,000 Snowcovered customers, 400 percent year-over-year growth, and more than 600,000 production web sites worldwide. Connect with us online: Twitter.com/dnncorp(company) or Twitter.com/dnnsc(Snowcovered marketplace); DotNetNuke blogs; and the DotNetNuke Community LinkedIn Group.

“As a long-time Visual Basic developer, I have personally witnessed the gradual shift in the .NET developer market as C# has become the dominant choice for the enterprise," said Shaun Walker, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of DotNetNuke Corp. "After extensive technical and business analysis, I believe the time is right for DotNetNuke to make the move to C#. I believe this migration will accelerate the adoption and deployment of the DotNetNuke Web Content Management Platform and make our product more attractive to a wider audience.”

This week, the Wordpress core developers released WordPress Version 3.1.This release took a little longer than CMS Report had first anticipated, but we see it as a sign that today's WordPress is much more complex than it used to be when it was considered only a tool for blogging. In fact, Matt Mullenweg in his Wordpress 3.1. announcement  seemed to recognize this continued evolution of WordPress as a content management system.

With the 3.1 release, WordPress is more of a CMS than ever before. The only limit to what you can build is your imagination.

New features in WordPress 3.1 that would be of interest to content authors and site managers include:

• A "lightning fasy" redesigned linking workflow which makes it easy to link to your existing posts and pages
• An admin bar so you’re never more than a click away from your most-used dashboard pages
• A streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels intended to improve the user experience for new bloggers.
• A refreshed blue admin scheme available for selection under your personal options

For WordPress developers, additional new features that may interest them in this latest version of WordPress include:

• A new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts
• New CMS capabilities:
  • archive pages for custom content types
  • a new Network Admin
  • an overhaul of the import and export system
  • the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries

WordPress 3.1 is available for download from WordPress.org or you can update from within the dashboard within your current version of WordPress.

The SilverStripe open source community recently posted their roadmap to SilverStripe CMS v3.0. Version 3.0 represents a major year-long development project and is expected to be a substantial improvement over the current v2.4.x series. With an aggressive schedule, a stable version of SilverStripe CMS v3.0 is expected to be available by the end of 2011.

The roadmap introduces three major goals of SilverStripe CMS v3.0:

• Better technical platform. Sapphire, the underlying programming framework, will evolve from an integral part of SilverStripe CMS, into a product that can stand on its own feet. In forming this delineation, improvements will be made throughout the core, including the ORM, data integrity, templating language, and performance. Sapphire v3.0 will consequently enable developers to make richer and more complex web applications and websites.
• Better user experience for content authors. A refresh of the content authoring environment will bring even better usability and productivity. The interface will transition to jQuery, making the system capable of much greater customization. Managing images, embedding videos, and previewing work in progress will all be made easier. Images and documents will be able to versioned and secured in the same way pages can currently be.
• Improved support for the social and mobile web. SilverStripe's existing templating language and support for web services already provide a foundation for the two top themes in the web currently: social media and mobile devices. With SilverStripe CMS v3.0, the developers intend to improve the core to make development for both easier and richer.

SilverStripe's Business Relationship Manager, Sigurd Magnusson, sent CMS Report an email about this new roadmap for version 3.0 and how developers can help get involved. "Note at this stage", said Magnusson, "the main thing we want people to do, is join our development mailing list so they people can be involved in the decisions and contribute to the development of this new major release, due late 2011". The official mailing list for the development of SilverStripe CMS 3.0 can be found at Google Groups.

Those interested in additional information regarding SilverStripe CMS v3.0 are encouraged to take a look at the SilverStripe 3.0 Planning page. A video recording of the  first public presentation on SilverStripe CMS v3.0 is posted below the fold and slides from the meeting are also available.

The Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware project has released Tiki 6.2. This release includes fixes and updates only. Tiki encourages all sites to upgrade to this latest release. Tiki Community members have made over 240 code contributions for this release. Review the release notes and https://dev.tiki.org/tiki6 for complete information about this release.

Active development continues on the 6.x branch, which will become the LTS (long term support) version, following the release of Tiki 7 (planned for April, 2011). Please see https://dev.tiki.org/Version+lifecycle for more information.

You can download Tiki 6.2 (and all Tiki releases) from https://tiki.org/download.

Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces its TrafficJuggler™ load balancing technology, which effectively addresses customers’ needs for online business continuity. It delivers industry-leading performance capable of handling traffic spikes caused by extreme visitor activity or by targeted DDoS attacks.

"Sudden traffic spikes and web terrorism are common realities that threaten online business continuity. To cope with this challenge, we continuously improve our products’ performance capabilities, resulting in a stunning figure of 430% growth over the past three years," said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc.

Sydney, Australia – 16 February 2011– Elcom, one of Australia’s largest independently owned Web Developers, today announced the latest release of CommunityManager.NET (Version7.3) – its flagship enterprise Web Content Management software.

CommunityManager.NET is utilized by over 500 organizations worldwide, and provides a secure and scalable framework which supports websites, intranets, ecommerce platforms, membership systems, mobile platforms and online training capabilities.

Underpinning this latest version of CommunityManager.NET is a variety of updates and additional new features, designed to increase efficiency and reduce costs through an improved user-experience for clients and end-users. At the core of this latest release is the addition of A/B testing to Elcom’s existing Online Marketing offering.

According to Elcom’s Product Director, Anthony Milner, “This new feature was developed in response to industry trends and by really listening to what our clients wanted”. It allows users to test a baseline control sample webpage and compare it to a variety of single-variable test samples, in order to better evaluate and improve response rates. This ultimately enables the execution of “smarter marketing” through testing, evaluation, better resource allocation and enhanced tracking ability – thereby significantly improving Return on Investment.