Software Development

Agility recently announced an update to their Agility CMS which they've labeled under the "May 2012 Release" header. The Agility May 2012 Release offers a complete revamp of their digital asset management system, a whole new system for generating image galleries and thumbnails, and the ability to store and retrieve file and image assets in Agility's new Azure-based content delivery network.

In discussing the redesigned digital asset management system, Agility's Joey Varty blogged about the new features in this release and he highlighted what impressed him most.

You now have sections for Media (which matches the old "Documents" section), a new Image Galleries tab, and a Recycle Bin.

One of my favorite things is the new "Show As Grid" option, giving you thumbnails of all files and images in a folder.  Take a look at the new media selection dialog:
 

You'll notice that the selection dialog looks almost exactly like the Media page.  That's on purpose, of course, and your most recent folder and viewing styles are remembered by the system.

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".

I've mentioned on this blog a few times that CMSReport.com was never really meant to be a business or publication. It just happened. Six years ago, I started this journey I'm on with just my fascination for information systems and the little knowledge I had obtained on my own about content management systems. I was hungry to learn more and I started this site simply as a place to store my personal notes, bookmarks, and possibly share ideas with a few others. As many of you know, a lot has happened since the early years and I've been at crossroads for how to take CMS Report to the next level.

Jahia 6.6 raises User Experience building to a new standard and further enhances the strengths of the platform 

Washington DC, USA - Jahia, provider of Java-based open source next generation CMS solutions, announced today the new version of its flagship CMS product in version 6.6 with two major areas of improvements: the platform management and Jahia Studio, its visual integration tool to build highly customized and personalized User Experiences.

Jahia Studio, a new standard of User Experience Building

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.

CMS websites are now the norm as the preferred content management and delivery solution. Nevertheless, many CMS web applications face scalability issues. However, when a CMS is put in the cloud, it theoretically resolves the scalability issue to obtain a complete benefit.

But, if a cloud platform is not configured to match the particular needs of the CMS, it will need to work harder. This will result in higher loads than what is actually needed to serve the incoming traffic. Therefore, in most cases, it is sensible to cache the static content. The issue that one faces here is whether the cloud is able to tell the difference between a user who has signed into an application and is therefore being served with dynamic content and the one who has not yet signed into the application.

At the same time, a CMS presents many other challenges other than scalability due to the paradigm shift from the traditional model of sharing files from a central repository.  The reason behind this is that websites no longer operate isolated or in standalone mode. They must be able to interact with a range of other business applications that range from ecommerce business solutions to CRM databases to a range of reporting as well as analytics tools. To cut a long story short, websites have become increasingly data and content hungry because of their complex nature and the requirements of their users.

Managing such websites is now a full-time job.  Earlier in the traditional hosting scenario, the site owner had to figure out how to look after the application, but also the servers, backups, databases, and others.  Now, the platforms are specialized, so handling a web application which was a full time job can now be addressed by a person who can pay full-time attention.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm currently playing catch-up in discussing all the good books sent my way this past year. Many of the books have been sent by the authors and publishers themselves for review and some of the books I've bought on my own dime. There should be no further evidence that I'm a procrastinator in posting book reviews than this particular review of Todd Tomlinson and John K. Vandyke's Pro Drupal 7 Development. This book was published almost a year ago, and I'm only now finding the time to blog about this book.

OpenCms 8.0.3 is now ready and available for download.

OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions. This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 8 contains a greatly improved user interface for content managers and numerous other enhancements.

With OpenCms 8.0.3, many important and useful additional features and improvements have been added to the core system and a number of issues that persisted in the 8.0.2 release have been fixed.

The National Governors Association is the first to embrace the new version of Jahia’s open source CMS in replacement of proprietary solution

The XOOPS Development Team is pleased to announce that a new version, XOOPS 2.5.2 RC, is available for download.

This release is focused on fixing bugs from previous versions and on security. As a result, over 60 bugs have been fixed, as well as several new enhancements have been added, among them:

• improved Captcha system
• improved Protector module with links to stopforumspam 
• improved PM (private messaging) module

For more info and download please click here