Open Source

Years ago, I quickly discovered there was great public interest in comparisons of open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. When you throw WordPress into the mix and you can attract an even greater audience. Despite how much traffic such headlines draw people in, CMS Report has been pretty selective when we provide or point to such articles. There is some uncertainty whether there is genuine value being provided in feature comparison articles which is why I've shied away from them in recent years.

Over the weekend, I spent some much needed time doing some maintenance work for my wife's photography site which runs on WordPress. One of the concerns I had with the release and automatic update of WordPress 3.8 is how it might impact the Photocrati theme package my wife uses for the site. So far, I haven't found any issues related to the WordPress 3.8 upgrade. I am a little concern we may have an issue with the Photocrati gallery not allowing her to add additional photos to a current gallery, but as far as I can tell this is a separate issue.

A couple years ago, if you would have asked me what I thought about Joomla! I would have told you I think they've lost their way. Their community of developers seemed to be searching on how best to innovate and take risks with a well established stable content management system. I feared that the open source group was stuck looking back and that all we could expect was dull incremental changes to their CMS. Despite the fear, I knew better. Open source communities have a way of reevaluating their priorities and creating spectacular results where you least expect them to do so.

Yesterday, The Joomla! Project and Community announced the availability of Joomla CMS 3.2.0 Stable. Since the release of 3.1.5, over 1085 commits have been made to the code base with 50 different people contributing to commits. But this release has a lot more than just bug fixes and includes a host of long awaited features for the open source content management system.

Some of the new features in Joomla 3.2 include:

Nuxeo, the provider of a content management platform for business applications, today announced the availability of Nuxeo Platform 5.8, a major Long Term Support version of the open source content management platform. With advances in workflow, content synchronization, and REST APIs, this version is a major step forward for developers and product managers who build content-centric applications to manage business information.

Rivet Logic Corporation, a leading consulting and systems integration firm, announced today the availability of two plug-ins to integrate Liferay Portal and Crafter CMS. The plug-ins seamlessly integrate Liferay with Crafter and are designed to enable the creation of rich digital experiences that improve customer and employee engagement.

"There's no right way to do it, but there are wrong ways, trust me, I know, I've done them all. Doing it wrong can harm people and it can really hurt the community. What you all have built together is remarkable and it's worth considering how you extend it further and find ways to continue to collaborate, both as Drupal, and maybe even more importantly as a broader PHP community."

- Amy Stephen, Molajo Developer and Consultant, Comment to "Backdrop: Forking Drupal" by Laura Scott, Pingv.com, September 11, 2013

While Drupal 8 has been been under development for two and a half years, I haven't talked much about it. I learned long ago that it doesn't do much good to talk about an upcoming release of a CMS until the software crosses over from what most of us would consider "vaporware."

I just finished reading Dave Scalera’s post on the Acquia blog “Open Source lies: Confessions of a former Commercial CMS Salesperson” and it got me thinking about the Open Source vs. Proprietary thing.

I know, here we go again

What I’ve come to realize is that it doesn’t matter what’s better. It matters what people believe is better.

The month of August starts out with a bang for WordPress fans. We knew given Matt Mullenweg's State of the Word speech that it was only a matter of time when WordPress 3.6 would be released. Starting yesterday afternoon, site administrators such as my wife (it runs in the family) were quickly greeted with a notification that the WordPress update is available.

Yesterday's launch gives WordPress sites the availability of a new blog-centric theme (Twenty Thirteen), "bullet-proof" autosave and post locking, a revamped revision browser, native support for audio and video embeds, and improved integration with Spotify, Rdio, and SoundCloud.