Open Source

Our good friend Cheryl McKinnon, founder of Candy Strategies, tweeted us about the latest news from the Open Source Alliance of Canada (OSACAN). The alliance is a non-profit organization, founded to promote, foster and sustain the use of open source technology in Canadian government. Yesterday, OSACAN announced the establishment of a center of excellence to promote the use of open source technology in the Canadian public sector. 

For your convenience, attached is a copy of the press release regarding this non-profit center to be used for promoting the use of open source in government.

I do not know when it exactly happened, but a number of years ago I decided to become a pacifist. I am a pacifist that is in the war of open source versus proprietary. In my opinion, the debate over licensing and software development processes is only mildly interesting as it is the quality of the end product that matters to me most. I walk the fine line of being an advocate for open source and a defender of proprietary software. Admittedly I've confused a lot of people that have chosen to take sides in this war. However, there is always room for reasonable civil discussions of any topic when new data and new perspective is given.

In a brief announcement today, e107 Inc. announced the release of v1.0.2 of its popular website content management system. The 1.0.2 version of the e107 CMS includes some important security fixes as well as several new features:

Two years ago I began a process to consider how best to evolve CMSReport.com beyond where it is today. I've known for some time that I needed to take some risks, get out of my comfort zone, and perhaps change how I maintain and run the site. Given the opportunity and in the spirit of taking risks I've decided to no longer run CMS Report on Drupal. That's right, after running this site on Drupal for more than six years on Drupal I've decided to use another content management system.

The Joomla! Project recently released a new version of their popular open source CMS, version 2.5.5. Shortly after this release was made available some significant bugs were noted and the Joomla team quickly responded with Joomla 2.5.6 to fix the known issues. Site administrators are now encouraged to update their Joomla site with Joomla 2.5.6 and not Joomla 2.5.5.

Some of the new features introduced in Joomla 2.5.5 and now available in Joomla 2.5.6 include:

"From Friendster to Flickr to Facebook I’ve always been active on other sites, what we now call social media, but as my interest in those has waxed and waned I’ve always come back to my home on the web, powered by Open Source software on a domain I own. This is definitely the longest sustained activity I’ve done, and I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t continue the rest of my life, however long or short that may be."

- Matt Mullenweg, Ten Years of Blogging, ma.tt, June 16, 2012.

Every year, I find it an honor when I'm asked by open source projects to announce that they have entered been accepted as mentoring organizations into Google's Summer of Code program. I'm a big advocate of college education and I also understand the importance of a summer job to keeping those college bills under control. Open source projects and the Google Summer of Code provides this opportinuty for upcoming software developers. The Summer of Code is a "global program sponsored by Google that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects".

A few days ago, the Liferay product and engineering teams announced the release of Liferay Portal 6.1 CE. Last fall, during the Liferay West Coast Symposium, CMS Report was able to get a sneak peak of the features that Liferay Portal 6.1 had to offer. We were impressed then and we're even more impressed now with the changes that have been made since then.

Liferay Portal ships with broad product capabilities and provides more function than you would expect from a traditional portal. Besides having the capability as a web platform, Liferay Portal is also capable of supporting content and document management (including Microsoft office integration). Additional capabilities include:

• Web Publishing and Shared Workspaces
• Enterprise Collaboration
• Social Networking and Mashups
• Identity Management

Liferay issues their portal software under two licenses, an open source community edition and an enterprise edition. The Liferay community edition we're talking about in this article is specifically designated as Liferay 6.1 CE GA1.  In addition to the numerous bugs that have been fixed since 6.0 GA4, many new features and improvements have gone into this release.

The release of Joomla 2.5, a popular open source content management system, is expected to occur within the next few weeks. This release gives Joomla! fans a reason to celebrate and those new to the CMS a chance to consider Joomla! for thier next project. Like clockwork, the Joomla community is preparing the way by educating the masses on the new features and enhancements included in this version. I'm not an expert on the Joomla! development process, but I'm going to do my best here in summarizing the information that I've gathered so far on Joomla 2.5.

The problem I have with top ten lists is that inevitably there is a story that should have made the list but didn't. Last week, I posted CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2011 and wished I could have included additional stories. The articles listed were ranked by popularity based by how many times viewed and the rate that they were viewed through the year. Popular stories do not always signify well written articles and they aren't always an indication of my personal favorites.

In case you missed these stories the first time around, below are ten additional content management articles we published in 2011. Every article deserves a second chance to be highlighted or tweeted again.

• Book Club: MODX The Official Guide
• Open Source CMS, Market Share Report, and White Elephants
• Review of Drupal's Building Blocks
• Judging Five Open Source Content Management Systems
• Book Club: Pro Drupal 7 Development
• DotNetNuke 6 Released (Screenshots included)
• List of Fake Content Management Stories from April Fools Day 2011
• Drupal 7 has been officially released 
• Moodle 2.1 Released
• More than an Introduction to Accrisoft