Open Source

The Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware project has released Tiki 6.2. This release includes fixes and updates only. Tiki encourages all sites to upgrade to this latest release. Tiki Community members have made over 240 code contributions for this release. Review the release notes and https://dev.tiki.org/tiki6 for complete information about this release.

Active development continues on the 6.x branch, which will become the LTS (long term support) version, following the release of Tiki 7 (planned for April, 2011). Please see https://dev.tiki.org/Version+lifecycle for more information.

You can download Tiki 6.2 (and all Tiki releases) from https://tiki.org/download.

"In a space currently dominated by proprietary technologies, managing the long-term preservation, provenance, and accessibility of digital content is often downplayed or ignored."

- Cheryl McKinnon, CMO of Nuxeo, From information overload to Dark Ages 2.0?, OpenSource.com, October 29, 2010.

Last fall, I once again had the privilege of participating as a member of the judging panel for Packt Publishing's Open Source Awards. For the 2010 event, I participated by voting for the category of Open Source CMS Awards. In that award, the winner was declared by the panel to be CMS Made Simple, with SilverStripe as first runner up followed by MODx as second runner up.

I received a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. Each of the judges on the panel, selects and ranks their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors including performance, usability, size and support from community, accessibility, ease of configuration, customization, scalability and security.

It has been my history to be transparent to all with how I rank each CMS as my vote will have some differences to those of the panel. This time around, I find myself hesitant and under personal protest with me providing information on how I ranked the five content management systems.

I question whether we're doing any good by declaring one CMS as better than another CMS. Dean Barker discussed on his blog some time ago this same uneasy feeling you get when you judge a CMS without having some reference to real world requirements. None of these content management systems would I consider losers and all of them remain worthy of future consideration. Yet, I'm disturbed that people will look at the numbers and interpret the results in a ways I never intended my rankings to be used.

My rankings for the Five Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. SilverStripe
2. mojoPortal
3. MODx
4. XOOPS and CMS Made Simple (Tie)

I'm not a firm believer in ties when it comes to ranking content management systems. Yet, this year I did just that for XOOPS and CMS Made Simple. All five content management systems that were reviewed I would consider as a candidate for a future project. None of the CMS would I consider a "last place" CMS so I refused to do so. It is also important to note that neither Drupal, Joomla!, or WordPress competed in this ranking as previous winners in this category duke it out in the Hall of Fame category.

What a great year 2010 was for content management. Open source CMS projects seemed to have grown up this year while proprietary systems appeared to continue in their evolution. While social publishing systems may not have conquered the traditional content management system, the CMS definitely took notice by integrating as many social media features developers could come up with.

Below are the top ten stories of 2010 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. The stories in this list were ranked by the number of views per month since the articles first appeared at CMS Report. 

Top Ten Content Management Stories of 2010

1. Someone does another Drupal vs Joomla comparison
2. Open Source versus the Enterprise Solution
3. Ten Content Migration Tools to SharePoint Platform
4. Drupal themes go nuclear with Fusion
5. SilverStripe CMS becomes the first Microsoft Certified open source web app
6. Denial of Service on an Apache server
7. Guidelight Business Solutions video of DrupalConSF 2010
8. Sharepoint 2010 vs WCM Platforms
9. We Hear You: Our spam filtering needs to be improved
10. The MODx Revolution 2.0 Interviev

As you can see, stories on Drupal, Joomla!, Sharepoint, SilverStripe, and MODx brought a lot of visitors to the site. Not all the stories listed above would have been one of the ten I would have personally picked, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking. I personally, don't like "versus" articles yet readers seemed to flock those articles. Unfortunately quality of writing doesn't appear to always matter as there were some very well written articles we posted in 2010 that didn't make this list.

The year 2011 will undoubtedly bring change and new stories to the world of content management systems. I think the year will also be a year of decision for the direction we take CMSReport.com. I feel as if this site of ours is stuck somewhere between our roots as a niche blog and a potentially popular CMS news site. I'm hoping we make some changes in the new year that all our readers can appreciate and value.

The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of its second promotional video:

How about a *real* multi-language solution?

In this video, recorded in March 2010, Philippe Cloutier, a Tiki consultant, talks about the multilingual features and capabilities of Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. He explains the differences between the Tiki multilingual approach and other wiki systems.

Cloutier is a long-time Tiki contributor and programmer. In this video, he discusses the fully integrated multilingual platform that Tiki offers as well as his vision for the future of translation and mutli-lingual wikis.

In addition to facilitating page content translation, the core Tiki interface is available in over 45 languages. These translations are contributed by members of the Tiki Community.

The video can also be viewed below.

Let me start by clarifying a few things:

1) I work for a CMS vendor, for an enterprise CMS.

2) I am also a big fan of open source.

Yet, I am attempting to write this article with all bias aside; with all generalizations thrown out the window. Without feeling like I am trying to justify this article, I think it is also worth mentioning that the CMS vendor that I work for produces a product that I would avidly use even if I didn’t work for them.

Every vendor, whether they are enterprise or open source do research on their competition. Although the internal information that these vendors have are usually pretty good, there is not a lot of thorough comparisons readily available on the net. When I look on the web, all I see are generalizations. I want to get rid of this, drop biased opinions and give you the hard, honest truth. Sure, I can only talk from my experience, and I have not used every CMS under the sun, but I have had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of using a diverse range; enough, I would say to be able to stoke the fires. To back this up if someone asked me:

• What is the best photo editing software? I would give an honest answer of Photoshop. But Paint.net is free and so is Gimp, I hear you say. Although expensive, it is the best tool for the job.
• What is the best Media Player? I would say VLC! But Microsoft had dedicated teams to build Windows Media Player, I hear you say! Doesn’t matter, VLC is free and the best tool for the job.
• What is the best Developer Environment? I would say Visual Studio? But I don’t use .net, I hear you say! Great, because you should choose the best tool for YOUR job…..the whole point I am trying to get across with this article.
• What is the best FTP Client? I would say FileZilla!
• What is the best browser? There is no ONE tool for the job.

I think it is important to first define what the two systems are in order to be able to thoroughly compare the two options.

• Open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. The public is allows to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology.
• Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of its owner. The purchaser, or licensee, is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, but restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.

From a high level perspective you could argue that both have advantages and disadvantages. It is only when you analyze the functionality of the two systems when the decision on what way to go is made that much easier.

Birmingham, UK. 19 November 2010 - Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Hall of Fame Award in the 2010 Open Source Awards. Hall of Fame CMS is a category introduced to the Award last year, which features a competition between the previous winners of the Open Source CMS Award; Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress.

With this award, WordPress has gone from winning the Open Source CMS Award last year to winning the Hall of Fame CMS category, reserved for the biggest projects in the Content Management Framework industry.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg told Packt, “On behalf of the entire WordPress community I'm honored to accept this award, it's a great recognition of all the hard work and effort we've invested into WordPress. We envision a day when every man, woman, and child will be able to have an effortless beautiful website powered by Free software."

CMS Made Simple is the winner in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Award category of the 2010 Open Source Awards. CMS Made Simple has won this Award for the first time in the past five years, having been a presence in the Award since 2007. Packt also announced  SilverStripe as first runner up with MODx in the second runners up position.

I had the privilege of sitting as a judge in this year's Open Source CMS Award category. My vote was a little different from the official award ranking where I would have placed mojoPortal, another 2010 award finalist, in a runnerup position.  I may have been the only judge that may have ranked mojoPortal in the top three positions. As I've done similarly in past years, in the near future I'll post how I judged the finalists in this category. However, it is now CMS Made Simple's well deserved moment and I won't take the spotlight away from them with my personal ramblings.

Attached below is the official press release I received from Packt Publishing announcing CMS Made Simple as the winner of the Open Source CMS Award. Congratulations to all those involved int he development and support of this great open source CMS.

Yesterday, I received an email from SilverStripe Co-Founder, Sigurd Magnusson. For all the years I have been corresponding with Sigurd, I don't think I've ever seen him as excited as he was this time in breaking the news. SilverStripe, a web development company delivering open source content management systems (CMS) has achieved Certification for Windows Server 2008 R2 for version 2.4.0 of their flagship product, SilverStripe CMS. This is a world first, as the software is the only truly open source web application to achieve certification on the Windows platform.

What is a little different about this story is that it is not only SilverStripe's press relations people making a big deal about this story. Microsoft is making a big deal about the accomplishments of SilverStripe. Andrew Gordan, Microsoft's New Zealand’s Platform Strategy Manager writes:

A large amount of the innovation in the software world is happening on the web and in the cloud, and in addition to that, we are seeing increased awareness and acceptance of open source software on the Microsoft Windows platforms.

Microsoft's Certified for Windows programs are well known for indicating software and hardware products that have been thoroughly tested to work well on Microsoft Windows and as of today, SilverStripe CMS is the first Open Source web application to complete the comprehensive testing necessary to achieve "Certified for Windows Server 2008 R2" status.

In his own blog post, Sigurd mentions that the certification for SilverStripe has been a long but rewarding road. A large proportion of the SilverStirpe's  community and clients use Microsoft servers, databases, and other technology. Over the past three years there an effort has been made for the SilverStripe CMS to work with Microsoft's operating system, web servers, and SQL Server database product.

Packt Publishing announced that Pimcore has won the Most Promising Open Source Project Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Most Promising Open Source Project Award  is a revamped category for the Award this year, featuring Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, the founding member of Pimcore. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects. The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community.” Added Marc Delisle, system administrator and one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

While Pimcore occupied the top spot in the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category, TomatoCMS came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by social networking software package BuddyPress.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has five more categories left, including the Open Source Graphics Software category, for which results will be announced from November 16th through to November 19th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit Packt's Open Source Awards site.