Content Management

Umbraco, an open source CMS based on Microsoft's ASP.NET, has announced the availability of Umbraco 4.1RC. The Umbraco Core Team of developers calls this version of their CMS as "the biggest update to Umbraco" ever. This release candidate for Umbraco 4.1 is packed with a laundry list of improvements in performance and stability as well as some new features.

New and improved features:

• Enhanced preview. Browse your entire site as it looks in the future, including out-of-the-box support for all XSLT and NodeFactory based macros
• SpellChecker. With support for more than ten languages out of the box!
• LINQ 2 Umbraco. More a .NET Developer than an XSLT guru? You can access data via the all brand new .NET LINQ API
• Examine. Ultra performant and stable index-based search engine. With a fluent API that developers will love
• New XML Schema. Not only more performant, but makes it easier to understand your data and adds future support for Intellisense in Visual Studio!
• Improved DLR support. Faster than ever and with support for Ruby too!
• New Datatypes: Image Cropper for editor friendly image manipulation and Macro Container for easily handling of feature areas. (Needs to be manually created in the data type section in the RC)
• Improved Mediapicker: Preview and advanced dialog with upload is now a part of the default MediaPicker (needs to be activated on the datatype in the RC)
  

Local Florida government delivers innovative Web services via open source CMS

Local governments throughout the country are under continuous pressure to do more with less, and Manatee County, Florida is no exception. They have a tiny IT budget compared to state and national governments, yet they are responsible for the bulk of everyday citizen services. In tight financial straits, the county could ill afford a costly proprietary system plus stiff maintenance fees for their new website IT. They turned their sights to open source alternatives, and found that Magnolia CMS fit the bill.

About Manatee County

As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don't talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal's developers. Drupal 6.17 is one of those releases which contain significant changes I think are worthy a mention.

I'm probably most excited about the improvements made in Drupal 6 for better PHP 5.3 compatibility. A couple weeks ago I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5.3 and there were just too many annoying errors showing up in the Drupal 6 system logs.  I'm hoping with Drupal 6.17, I have better luck this time around (currently running this Drupal 6 sites with PHP 5.3).

With over 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6, the following are the highlights of changes included in Drupal 6.17:

• Improvements of session cookie handling
• Better processing of big XML-RPC payload
• Improved PostgreSQL compatibility
• Better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility (my fingers are crossed)
• Improved Japanese support in search module
• Better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
• Improved logging for login failures
• An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16's new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved

The latest version of Drupal may be downloaded from the project page at Drupal.org. Whether you're new to Drupal or currently maintaining a Drupal site, this latest release of Drupal is a clear indication that there is plenty of life and plenty of development taking place with the Drupal 6 release. Now what other Drupal 6 sites do I have that still need this upgrade to Drupal 6.17.

Sharepoint 2010 has just been released and everyone is excited about the possibilities and the unique advantage it can lend to their business. Specifically, there has been a lot of talk about Sharepoint’s new web content management capabilities. A lot of folks are wondering if they could possibly use the new Sharepoint release as the technology stack to maintain both their enterprise collaboration needs and their corporate website. In this article, we will review the new Sharepoint 2010 web content management capabilities and how they may fit your organization’s strategic website objectives at this time.

SilverStripe 2.4 was released this week. According to Brian Calhoun, SilverStripe CEO, this release is an important milestone for the open source CMS.

We're excited to tell you that we just released SilverStripe version 2.4! This is a major new release and an important milestone for the SilverStripe community, the open source project, and our company.

SilverStripe 2.4 is the culmination of over a year's worth of development. We fixed 391 tickets and had over 1,400 changelog entries. A large number of the patches that went into 2.4 have come from you, the community, and we're especially happy that there's been increasing community involvement.

A new point release, CMS Made Simple 1.7.1, was released over the weekend. This version of CMSMS fixes numerous minor bugs and adds some important features. Some of the significant new features included in this release are:

• Better support for SSL
• API changes that allow for any form element created by a module (form tag, text input, checkbox etc) to have classes associated with the tag. This will make it much easier for designers to style forms.
• Added preferences to control the default image manager thumbnail size instead of having to edit a config file.
• TinyMCE has been upgraded to the latest version.

The Beta release of the latest generation of Tiki CMS/Groupware is now available. This 5.0 Beta includes many new features and functionality, including:

• New themes (skins)
• Many fixes and updates
• Beta release of Tiki workspaces
• Beta release of shopping cart and payments

Tiki Community members are encouraged to download and explore this new release. You can obtain the Beta (as well as all other Tiki releases) from http://tiki.org/download. For information on this and future Tiki plans, see http://dev.tiki.org/roadmap.

About Tiki

This past week, the MODx Team released an update of their MODx Evolution CMS, version 1.0.3. This update is a security, bugfix and enhancement release.

The MODx Team considers Evolution 1.0.3 a mandatory update for all MODx Evolution users as it closes some potential vectors that could lead to security compromises with prior MODx releases.

MODx Evolution 1.0.3 also offers more than 45 bugfixes including fixes for IE8 compatibility and the Manager Datepicker and more than 20 enhancements or improvements including adding Templates and TVs capability for custom installer builds, a better organized context menu, core add-on and language updates—all to make the MODx experience better for developers and users.

A new version of mojoPortal was released this week. This new version of the CMS, mojoPortal 2.3.4.1, includes the following significant changes:

• Support for Artisteer 2.4
• New Time Zone System
• Improvements for the forum
• Skin/Template Changes
• Webstore improvements

Details and additional changes in mojoPortal 2.3.4.1 can be found in the release announcement at mojoPortal.com.

eZ Systems announced yesterday the release of eZ Publish 4.3. Lots of new features and improvements in this new version of the open source CMS. The most significant changes include: