Open Source

The Joomla! project recently released a new version of their flagship content management system, Joomla 3.1.4. This is a maintenance release with no security fixes. While most of the updates are technical and will likely only be of interest to developers and site maintainers, there are also a few user interface tweaks here and there. For example, this version will now show the Joomla username in the administrative area.

Specific feature enhancements for Joomla 3.1.4 include the following:

Alfresco and Acquia announced today a strategic partnership to deliver business critical content applications to their customers.With this relationship, Acquia builds on Alfresco’s open platform to extend the web experience applications that enable customers to quickly build content applications that span traditional documents, structured editorial workflows and dynamic multi-channel delivery. The combination is expected to give customers the freedom to combine content, community and commerce capabilities into unified digital experiences in order to drive business results.

Sometimes timing is everything and some would argue that I should have written this story weeks ago. Earlier this month, Rivet Logic announced the launch of Crafter Software Corporation, which offers commercial support and licenses for the Crafter CMS open source project (previously known as Crafter Rivet). I didn't jump on the story and CMS Report is probably one of the few CMS news sites that didn't talk about the Crafter Rivet spin off into Crafter Software. The honest truth, I just didn't want to rehash the press release on the day the announcement was made without offering some additional perspective of my own.

A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content types.

Tags are not just for articles but is also integrated tagging into other areas of the Joomla core that made sense. Extension developers will be happy to note that tagging in Joomla 3.1 also provides the necessary API changes to integrate Tags with extensions.  Extension developers will also have the ability to develop innovative ways to use tagging beyond what is in the core CMS.

For the past few years, CMS Report has generally not posted CMS announcements for new releases which only contained bug fixes and no new additional features. So, it's been rare for us to post the "point" release announcements for Drupal as Drupal only introduces significant new features in the new full version of Drupal (such as the forthcoming Drupal 8). However, Drupal 7.22 contains a lot of minor changes so we thought it was worth talking about. Drupal 7.22 was actually released a week ago, but I didn't have time to upgrade any of my Drupal sites until this week nor look at what was actually fixed until now. 

Some of the many "minor" changes in Drupal 7.22 include:

This week, I received an email from some marketing folks that Acquia was announcing they are open sourcing their mobile application code for posting content to Drupal sites. For those that don't know, Acquia is a commercial open source software company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal. This isn't the first time Acquia and other Drupal vendors have given code back to the Drupal community and you can be assured it won't be the last.

The first thing I did when I sat down to write this article was search the Google Keyword Tools for ‘Proprietary vs. Open Source CMS’. I wanted to see what kind of traffic this article might get. I got 0 searches per month globally.  A flip of the terms to the title I chose nets a whopping 22.  With < 10 in the United States.

My curiosity was piqued, so I checked ‘Open Source CMS’ and ‘Proprietary CMS’ and was not surprised with the 9,900 global searches for the former to 91 for the latter. This is out of 450,000 searches globally for ‘CMS’.

What I am surprised about is that more people aren’t looking for information comparing these two very different approaches to CMS.

Brett Profitt recently posted on the Elgg Blog that Elgg 1.8.12 has been released. Elgg is an open source social networking engine that provides a robust framework on which to build all kinds of social environments. Elgg can be found in a number of settings from campus wide social network to internal collaborative platform for small and large organizations alike.

Elgg 1.8.12 has been released with numerous bugfixes and improvements. Enhancements in this release of Elgg include:

I just spent much of my morning looking at all the great content management related stories CMS Report covered this past year. Below are the top ten stories of 2012 that we posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list are ranked based on the rate they were viewed since they were first appeared online. 

I went out for lunch with one of our customers last week. They are one of the largest magazine publishers in Canada and one of the first customers of our Magazine Suite.

I’ll leave real names out of it, but for the purposes of the article, I’ll call my lunch guest Ben. 

Ben is a media entrepreneur. He started a blog that became one of the most popular in Canada which was then bought by said publisher. He is now a VP.