Interview

I was recently asked by the Argus Leader, a local newspaper in Sioux Falls, to give my two cents on the controversial South Dakota #DontJerkandDrive campaign. Since then the article has been syndicated out to USA Today and other publications. It seems that I caught the attention of a reporter when I labeled the campaign as "brilliant" on Twitter.

I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to put out a plug for my review of the Magnolia CMS on CMS-Connected last month. This was probably one of the easiest shows I've done in the sense that the Internet connection was good and the rest of the show seemed to complement my own segment well. My thanks to Boris Kraft, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer for Magnolia, for briefing me well about their product and spending some extra time with me during the demo.

Samir Bhatt is the author of recently published Liferay Portal Performance Best Practices which provides guidance on how to build and define architecture of high performing Liferay based portal solutions. This is the second book after co-authoring Liferay Beginner’s Guide in 2012.

Samir Bhatt has over 12 years of IT including 4 years of Liferay Portal experience. In addition to authoring this book, Samir has also co-authored Liferay Beginner’s Guide. Samir is a Liferay certified trainer delivering training on Liferay Portals worldwide.

Jahia, provider of Java based open source CMS solutions, today announced that the United Nations Population Fund  (UNFPA) has selected Jahia CMS and partner Quoin to provide comprehensive support for UNFPA's international websites. The following is an interview with Brad Kain, Quoin co-founder and President.

Background Information: UNFPA is the United Nations Population Fund, an international development agency that promotes the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity. UNFPA supports countries in using population data for policies and programs to reduce poverty and to ensure that every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, every young person is free of HIV, and every girl and woman is treated with dignity and respect. The three core areas of their work - reproductive health, gender equality and population and development strategies - are inextricably related. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality, migration and more, influence every aspect of human, social and economic development. Reproductive health and women's empowerment powerfully affect, and are affected by, population trends. For each core area, UNFPA created large databases.

The Project

Interviewer: Hi Brad. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us to discuss your latest win of the UNFPA content management project with Jahia CMS.  Tell us about the UNFPA website project.

Brad Kain: UNFPA is a leader in digital media within the UN, offices throughout the world with a global website, 7 regional portals and over 100 country websites.

Interviewer: So what does the integration project look like? How does this fit with Jahia’s mission and what can these sites achieve with assistance from Jahia CMS?

Brad Kain: Quoin recently won a three-year contract with the United Nations Population Fund (www.unfpa.org) to provide Jahia CMS support and site development. We will work with this global mission-driven client to redesign the organization, regional, and country web sites. Our onshore/offshore team is looking forward to providing rapid and effective development support as the UNFPA focuses on the use of social media to engage visitors.

In late July, MODx Revolution 2.0 was released. Before the project's release, I interviewed though email Ryan Thrash, CEO and co-founder of the MODx project, as well as Jay Gilmore. In a joint response, they graciously answered some of my questions about MODx. Below are my questions and their responses from our MODx interview.

CMS Report - The release of 2.0 is a new beginning for MODx...where does MODx go from here?

MODx - MODx Revolution represents a sharp inflection point in our history. We have a lot of very positive announcements to make in the coming weeks, but here’s a high level overview:

• MODX, LLC, is a new company we’ve formed to stand behind the core products and to continue to foster the ongoing development of the software and the MODx ecosystem in general.
• We’re hiring both from within the community and bringing in outside expertise to make sure we have a viable and sustainable business. We’re 1000% focused on accelerating MODx adoption, awareness and continuing to rise as one of the top Open Source content management platforms today. 2011 should be an unbelievable year for MODx uptake.
• We’re looking for qualified developers, consultants and agencies to partner with MODx. They’ll be recognized as MODx experts and Solutions Partners, prominently displayed on our website and outbound marketing efforts, officially launching no later than early 2011. We get a good volume of leads through the website and these will all go to Partners, which is just the tip of the iceberg of benefits from partnering with MODx.
• Similarly, we’ll be launching commercial support services to meet the demand we’ve seen from businesses in the community. We have great offerings to talk about with regard to this later.
• We’re relaunching and totally revamping our websit to better focus on and to serve more stakeholders including end users (at our new modx.com URL). We’ll have dedicated community and developer sections to make learning about MODx easier.

What this all means is that there’s now going to be an organization to hold to account for MODx. We’ve done what we think is a good job as stewards since founding the project, and we’ll have dedicated time and resources to do an even better job going forward.