Open Source

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of Tiki 6. This version of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware represents hundreds of hours of work by dozens of members of the Tiki Community. Nearly 50 developers contributed more than 1,500 code changes for this release.

In addition to countless tweaks and updates, Tiki 6 includes several new, key features:

• Extensive re-work and improvements to the Tiki blog, comments, spreadsheets and tracker features
• Batch functions (via cron jobs)
• Introduction of re-Captcha
• Expanded support of ccLite community currencies
• Integration with social networks such as Facebook
• Improved WYSIWYG support

Tiki 6 has been designated as the Long Term Support (LTS) version, replacing Tiki 3 LTS. Tiki 3 will reach end of life when Tiki 7.1 will be released (planned for April 2011). See the Project Roadmap for details.

To download Tiki, see https://tiki.org/download. Refer to the Tiki 6 release notes for additional information.

We are very pleased to present you X3, the new Xoops Engine for the next generation of XOOPS powered web application development.

This new Xoops Engine was long time in coming. During that time, we went through different phases of trials and errors, but we believe that we finally have the best combination of features and technologies to strategically position XOOPS as one of the top Web Application Platform solutions.

The new Xoops Engine has been re-designed from the ground up to take advantages of third-party frameworks like Zend Framework and Smarty 3.

Why did we rewrite XOOPS?

XOOPS is one of the most successful Open Source CMS and portal solutions, constantly placing in top places in various competitions, and receiving various awards. But it is showing signs of aging, that would require major rewrites of the Core.

In order to keep us focused on creating a flexible and extensible development engine for developers and a high performance application platform for end users, the development team has decided to use industry-standard frameworks. By doing so, we can focus our limited resources on aspects that make XOOPS unique and special, while leaving standard functionality to be addressed by off-the-shelf frameworks. This way we can take advantage of latest internet developments already included in those frameworks - it's like getting suddenly a whole new team of some of the best and brightest PHP and RIA programmers joining XOOPS!

After much research, we've selected a couple of frameworks at this stage:

PHP: Zend Framework
Template: Smarty 3
JavaScript: jQuery

Meanwhile the multi-engine mechanism of the Xoops Engine will ensure the possibility of adopting other excellent frameworks in the future, like Yii Framework, Dojo Toolkit, etc.

Brett Profitt just announced the release of Elgg 1.7.4 via the Elgg blogs. While the majority of changes in this release are bugfixes, there are two notable changes in Elgg 1.7.4 related to Twitter and user validation.

Brett writes about the new features:

More than a dozen members of the Tiki Community met in New York City October 3-6 for the last major code sprint before Tiki 6. Many others participated virtually through Tiki's integration with BigBlueButton.

Although much of the event was focused on preparations for the Tiki 6 release, additional work was completed, including:

• Continued integration with Kaltura video-editing platform
• Work on the Tiki TV project for collaborative editing
• Public presentation of Tiki at the Casa Frela Gallery to the local NYC community and online Workshop on Tiki Workspaces
• Planning for Tiki 7
• Discussion on the future of trackers, spreadsheets and accounting

Tiki Community members also took the opportunity to meet with BigBlueButton and Kaltura team members during the Open Video Conference and participate in the OVC hack labs. Special thanks to the Kaltura Team!

TikiFest particpants at OVC (left to right): Assaf Chaprak (Kaltura), luciash d' being (Tiki), Jonny Bradley (Tiki), Nelson Ko (Tiki), Étienne Lachance (Tiki), Robert Plummer (Tiki), Denis Zgonjanin (BigBlueButton), Kimberly Fink (Tiki), Unidentified (Kaltura), Lindon Barnfield (Tiki), Philippe Cloutier (Tiki), Zohar Babin (Kaltura), Marc Laporte (Tiki), Jason Levitt (Kaltura). Photo provided by luciash d' being."

The participants also made time for socializing and camaraderie, including the celebration of Tiki's 8th birthday. Complete details of the event, including pictures, are available at https://tiki.org/TikiFestNewYork6.

Packt Publishing recently announced the finalists in each of the categories for their 2010 Open Awards. While award categories for content management systems are still included, this year Packt is also adding additional flavors of open source projects to be judged. The new award categories include awards for most promising open source project, e-commerce applications, graphics software, and JavaScript libraries.

The Voting for the winners in each of the categories ends on November 5, 2010.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges in each category to be announced on November 15, 2010.

The Plone community has raised the bar on their flagship content management system with the release of Plone 4. With the unveiling and release announcement of Plone 4, this is proving a busy week for fans of this CMS that runs on the Python-based Zope application server.

"Plone 4 is much faster, requires less memory, and performs well even when serving up massive files. ", says Plone co-founder and Firefox User Experience Lead Alexander Limi. “They [Plone users and developers] also didn't want us to sacrifice what we do well to get there — and we haven't. Plone 4 is not just more powerful — it continues to improve in areas Plone has always been known for: usability, security, and a CMS that is easy to install, upgrade, and looks great right out of the box.”

Some of the significant changes and improvements in Plone 4 include:

• Notable performance improvements
• New theme
• Search and indexing improvements
• Group Dashboards for a Customized User Experience
• Massively improved handling of large files & media
• New, faster folder implementation
• Improved management of users and groups
• Dynamic forms framework based on jQuery Tools
• Improved first-run experience
• Smooth upgrade experience
• Reduced memory footprint
• Upgraded infrastructure

Interestingly, the announcements and even the Plone 4 download page discuss the "under the hood" improvements available in the CMS in preparation for Plone 5. That's right, they're already talking about Plone's future with Plone 5.

For addttional details about the Plone CMS be sure to visit Plone.org.

I'm not much of a programmer but I can appreciate the value of a good programming language when I see it. While I know Python and dabble with PHP, I've always appreciated Ruby and Ruby on Rails. There is something about the Ruby development scene that perks my interest in this programming language.

Ruby on Rails 3.0 was just released this week. The development of Rails 3.0 has been two years in the making. David August writes:

In case you haven't heard, WordPress 3.0 was released last week. This is probably the first time I've been behind in blogging about the official release of a new major version of WordPress. However, since I told you all about WordPress 3.0 coming soon a couple weeks ago, I felt there wasn't a need to rush and tell you to go get WordPress 3.0 and try out all it's new features including taxonomy and multiuser integration. Instead, I spent this past week seeing how others reacted to WordPress 3.0.

As a fan of open source content management systems, its been rather pleasing to see some of the larger technology publications spend more time talking about applications like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. For the tech press, WordPress 3.0 was no exception with some of the major players such as Computerworld, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all making sure they spin out an article reviewing this latest version of WordPress.

What may surprise you though, is that open source CMS is just not an interest of computer geeks. Slowly but surely, open source CMS is the talk of business folks too. For example, both Fast Company and BusinessWeek made sure that they included articles this past week on WordPress 3.0. In the Fast Company article, Francine Hardaway writes some classic things to why business should pay attention to WordPress. Some of my favorite lines from her article, "6 Reasons Small Businesses need WordPress":

• "WordPress can do anything you need it to do, and for a small business, that's a gift usually reserved for expensive sites."
• "Plug-ins for WordPress are the business-to-business version of apps for the iPhone."
• "WordPress no longer looks like a blog. For small businesses who wouldn't know a blog from a bag of potato chips, WordPress is a website, otherwise known as a content management system."

These are all some fantastic words from Hardaway and I think they show that applications such as WordPress are making a significant impact in the business world. I wouldn't call WordPress an ECM, but it most definately walks and talks like a CMS for the small business folks. If you haven't taken a look at WordPress in quite awhile, I'd encourage you to take a new look at this application.

Below is the summary video from the WordPress folks introducing you to WordPress 3.0. Enjoy.

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.

Tim O'Reilly is the Tuesday keynote speaker at DrupalCon 2010. His talk was on open source in the cloud era. I had some WiFi issues that slowed my typing down so I've embedded the his slide presentation at the end of this post.

2:30 PM: What is wrong with government? "We need to do more than shake the vending machine." O'Reilly is giving examples of people doing things themselves. Do it yourself on a civic scale...the heart of Gov 2.0. Drupal is an example of do it yourself spirit. O'Reilly's putting Drupal back into the speech on how people come together to build something better.