To be honest, I've had problems getting excited in the past about XOOPS as a CMS or as an open source community. There just didn't seem to be a whole lot of buzz about this CMS and I was seriously thinking about dropping it from my personal "top 30 list" found to the left under "CMS Focus".
Here at CMSReport.com, I use a slightly modified version of the Zen theme. Jeff Robbins is currently working on expanding his ideas via a series of default templates and variables added for the PHPTemplate engine. This work is currently under the project name Zengine. Lullabot.com recently underwent a new site design using Zengine and I guess there has been a number of comments for the site's new search tab. Lucky for us, Mr. Robbins has decided to share with us how to code in the search tab.
A couple weeks ago, I found on my doorstep Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1. The book was sent to me by the book's publisher, Packt Publishing, in hopes that I would review the book on the Joomla! content management system here at CMSReport.com. While I do not promise to review every book or Internet link that comes my way, I always appreciate the opportunity to do such reviews. In this case, I was eager to review the book since I have lost track of the new features introduced in version 1.5 since Joomla!
This is a fantastic article found on ZDNet UK not only about open source content management systems but the issues that traditional publishers are now facing in either competing or adopting with today's Web CMS. The article is written by Mike Barrett and is titled, "CMS evolution, publishing revolution?". The author writes:
CiviCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.
The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7:
"Brad" from Joomla! wrote "RobInk hit the big 10k posts today." at the Joomla! forum. He goes on to write:
There is a thread going where you might like to add you congratulations etc.It’s incredible to reflect upon just how many people have been helped by Rob’s posts, as well as the posts of all those who help out. Did you know, we have 28 members at the moment who have 2000 posts and above, and more than 70 with 1000 posts or more. Now that is CONTRIBUTING!
A special congratulations to Rob, and to everyone else THANKS for your continued help and support.
For some time I have wanted to promote and write about a new Drupal site that went online recently. The site carries a similar mission I've tried to have with my own sites where those from competing projects, products, and organizations can come together for discussion. In this case, a site with the desire to build a "place for those of us interested in open source solutions and community issues". The site is OpenSourceCommunity.org.
osCommerce, an open source shopping cart, is one more step closer to reaching a 3.0 release. Although the journey to completing the osCommerce 3.0 software continues to take users and developers on a very long road, Alpha 4 was released to the public on March 30th. As a reminder, alpha releases of osCommerce are for "testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release". In other words, you shouldn't use the software for a "live" store.
We've already talked about the new features added in earlier alpha versions of osCommerce 3.0 so there is no need to mention them in this article. New features in Alpha 4 that have been added to the shopping cart since Alpha 3 include:
I'll be honest, I'm envious of those people that are able to attend the Open Source Content Management System Summit (OSCMS). As Boris Mann pointed out in his post, the interest in the conference was so overwhelming that registration closed as quickly as it opened. I sat on the fence in my decision to go or not to go way too long that I was flat out of luck. That's alright though. I wouldn't have wanted to take up someone's seat who may have been more deserving of attending OSCMS. While I spend a lot of time writing about CMS, a lot of the people in the crowd spend a lot of time creating their project's CMS.&nbs
As most of you probably know by now, Jeff Robbins from Lullabot and Drupal genre recently released "The Drupal Song". What you may not know is that Wordpress and Joomla! also have their own songs. Well this fact hasn't gone unnoticed by Amy Stephen in her own blog in which she says it's time to vote for the top song of the week.
OK. Normally, I am adverse to pitting one open source content management system against the other, but it appears we have no choice. As of today, we have three songs and only one can be the #1 Open Source CMS Song of the Week. It is time to pick the winner. Sorry, it’s how it works. I didn’t make the rules. If you object, you need to contact Casey Casem.
WordPress community member Devin Reams released his song and video back in January. Joomla! community member Anand Omka released his Joomla! song back in November and the video was released last week. Today, Jeff Robins released his Drupal song and Dries Buytaert announced the video will be shot on location during the OSCMS conference at Yahoo later this week.
Any has invited the open source communities to vote for their "favorite song" and as far as I can tell, the vote will take place through comments at her blog. What? Wordpress and and Joomla don't have their own poll module built into their core? But alas, we're not voting for the best CMS here but instead the best song.