Articles - Page 244

Not All Heroes Wear Capes. Here's Why CMS Is Your 'Unsung Hero' in 2025

janus-boye

As some of  you may or may not know, we recently switched from the acclaimed WordPress to a lesser known blog software called <a href="http://s9y.org">Serendipity</a> to run this site. There are many options when it comes to blog software and it bears the questions, which reigns supreme?
Sure, WordPress seems to hold the crown but for all intents and purposes we found it became bloated quickly with the number of plugins we had to install for the functionality we needed. We also found that the plugins were updating so frequently that we spent half our time running updates and less time writing posts. What are your thoughts?
What blog software do you prefer and why?
There are tons of them available. Everything from MovableType to ExpressionEngine (not technically blog software we know, but used frequently for one) is used for blogging. Not to mention the myriad of online services such as Blogger and TypePad.
We found Serendipity to be a nice blend between functionality and usability for our purposes and intend to use it on all of our sites, but as the saying goes, to each his own.
Please share with us your thoughts and choices on which is your preferred package, and why.

What blog software reigns supreme?

mike-johnston

The situation with Drupal themes has increasingly caused me frustration, it's pretty well known that in comparison to the majority of other content management systems, Drupal is really hurting in the theming category.
Sure there's the occassional OK looking theme but there aren't very many that may a person say “Wow, I really want to run Drupal and use that theme!”
So what is it that is creating this situation? Is it because it's difficult to theme Drupal or is it easy and people just aren't inspired enough?
Why do themes for Joomla! and WordPress and other platforms look so good in comparison yet, even though the community sizes are fairly similar, Drupal themes tend to be quite archaic or ugly (most, not all).
Yes, I know there are some that are decent looking but they are few and far between.
Perhaps it's due to the fact that Drupal tends to draw more of a coder crowd and less of a designer audience, so what can they do to turn this around?
What are your thoughts on the situation?
I don't want to turn this post into a “This theme is great, check out this link” but more of a discussion about what can be done to improve the selection because, whether you agree with me or not, it's lacking.

Drupal Themes - Why are there no attractive ones that are free?

After nine long months of development, ocProducts is very pleased to announce the release of ocPortal 4.2: combining countless usability improvements and new features (inc. a shopping cart).
v4.2 is a big step forward for this open-source CMS, because of the many improvements that have been made, including:
<ul>
<li>Online store/shopping cart</li>
<li>Export/import via XML files for site backups and transfers</li>
<li>True multi-lingual sites (translatable content)</li>
<li>Flash and Java-based uploaders</li>
<li>Cutting-edge semantics (“Web 3.0”)</li>
<li>Search-engine-friendly URLs (keywords in URLs)</li>
<li>An intelligent summary generator</li>
<li>Google site map generation</li>
<li>New social networking features</li>
<li>Reviews for content</li>
<li>New support-desk/enterprise features</li>
<li>And much more…</li>
</ul>
More information and download links are available on their <a href="http://ocportal.com/forum/topicview/misc/staff_chat__news/announcing_ocportal_42.htm">website</a>.

ocPortal 4.2 release includes cutting edge semantics

TYPOlight version 2.7.4 is available. The maintenance release fixes a few issues with the calendar extension, undoes the change to the breadcrumb menu and adds a safer and more reliable way to determine the HTTP host.
Upgrading is recommended. A full change log can be found in the <a href="http://www.typolight.org/changelog.html">usual places</a>.
Source: <a href="http://www.typolight.org">Typolight Website</a>

New version of Typolight Open source CMS available

Telerik, a leading vendor of development tools and user interface components for .NET, announced today the launch of a new marketplace for add-ons for its Sitefinity ASP.NET content management system (CMS).
The marketplace will allow the rapidly growing Sitefinity community to share and sell controls, modules, themes and templates for Sitefinity ASP.NET CMS.   In addition, the marketplace will offer a number of free tools and resources contributed by Sitefinity MVPs and community members that are available for immediate download including ‘Site Map’ control, ‘Tab Links,’ ‘What’s New’ control and many others.
Telerik also announced a community wide call for submissions to the marketplace. Developers submitting an add-on by the end of October will be eligible to win prizes including a free Sitefinity license. Submissions can be made at: <a href="http://www.sitefinity.com/marketplace/submit-module.aspx">http://www.sitefinity.com/marketplace/submit-module.aspx</a>
“We are really excited that Telerik is providing this opportunity for its partners and community in general,” said Steve Miller, CEO of Mallsoft, a web design and development firm located in San Diego, California. “We have a number of add-ons developed especially for Sitefinity CMS that we hope will generate some interest. We are also looking forward to being able to explore the work of other developers. With Sitefinity being such an open, robust platform and so easily extendable, we are sure there are some really amazing add-ons out there.”
“We think this will be a great opportunity for members of the Sitefinity community to not only showcase their work but also benefit from the work of others,” said Martin Kirov, Sitefinity Partner Manager. “Sitefinity CMS is well liked by developers for its flexibility and extensibility, so we are confident that the number of items available in the marketplace will grow rapidly.”

Telerik launches Sitefinity CMS marketplace

<a href="http://www.ez.no">eZ Systems</a> is pleased to announce the immediate release of eZ Publish 4.2, the exciting new version of its market-leading Open Source Content Management System.
The new release brings important improvements to the heart of eZ solutions, the eZ Publish engine, as well as major advances and new features for eZ Flow and eZ Find. A new extension, eZSI, makes its debut in the 4.2 package providing full support for the Edge Side Include standard to eZ Publish.
<h3>Usability for editors and end users</h3>
eZ Publish 4.2 includes a new release of eZ Flow, an eZ Publish extension enabling the building and management of rich and vibrant Media portal pages through implementation of a constant content flow to visitors. The new release offers an unprescedented choice of pre-made blocs for eZ Flow.
The options, which include Media Carrousel, Google Map geolocation, Online users, Last Commented content or Search blocs, immediately provide eZ Flow users with a wide range of templates and functionalities for their sites, no development required.
eZ Publish 4.2 offers editors a better integration between eZ Flow and the standard eZ Publish administration interface. Editors are now able to control content flow in eZ Flow portal pages from the administration content management interface. The built-in content rating feature improves Usability by enabling visitors to actively contribute and rate. Improvements to the eZ Toolbar front-end editing ease the management of Web sites, further contributing to the overall Usability of the solution.
<h3>Scalability and Performance for high traffic portals</h3>
eZ Publish 4.2 offers an extremely scalable and highly competitive platform to meet the needs of the most demanding and visited online portals. This is the result of a continuous effort to increase the speed and reliability of eZ Publish. As the Web continues to grow at a tremendous rate, eZ is committed to improving its solutions and pushing the limits of what a CMS can provide. Facilitating easier and faster setup for high traffic web sites will be a continued priority for future eZ releases.
Apart from various general enhancements and optimizations in the eZ Publish kernel and cache systems, eZ Publish 4.2 brings two very innovative new features in this area, the new DFS Cluster system and Edge Side Include (ESI) support. The new NFS Cluster system provides a smooth native deployment of eZ Publish on several servers using a shared file system. This improves performance and reliability, but also simplifies the setup and deployment of the solution, avoiding the very sophisticated and complex system-level settings which were required in previous versions.
Martin Kautz, from Madsack Online, says “The new Cluster Handler has enabled us to better deal with the needs of the online version of our daily newspapers. eZ provided good service in this respect, proving that the solution they offered was the right choice for our business“. Madsack is a German News company that use eZ Publish for 9 daily newspapers. They were an early adopter of the new cluster system.
The eZSI extension integrates ESI calls in eZ Publish pages. ESI is a simple markup language used for dynamic Web page assembly and delivery, making it possible to assemble pages from blocs requiring different refresh rates and update frequencies. The direct result is faster development and increased performance–typically for Digital Media portals and their home pages. The eZSI extension is intended for developers who need to leverage the ESI standard, combining eZ Publish with compatibles delivery technlogy such as Varnish http caching system or Akamai Content Delivery Network.
<h3>Improved integration of new generation Search</h3>
Search has become a cornerstone of Content Management infrastructures. eZ Publish 4.2 simplifies the setup and use of eZ Find with new or existing eZ Publish projects. eZ Find is an enterprise-grade search solution developed by eZ Systems, and based on the award-winning Apache SolR project. Full text search, external data source search, faceted search, automatic content relations, these and other features have made eZ Find a must-have for clients who need to maximise visitors' paths, and optimize their search capabilities.
The 4.2 release offers a number of powerful possibilities for integrating eZ Find with eZ Publish:
Predefined templates for eZ Publish and eZ Flow are now available, implementing faceted search. These interfaces can be used as is, and are also delivered as examples that illustrate faceted search technique. Developers will be able to customise and extend the examples to build faceted searches structured specifically to their project and metadata. Thanks to the new elevate support feature, editors will be able to push “sponsored results” to the top of results provided by eZ Find. The business editors' creativity is the only limitation to the possibilities that this feature provides. Orient traffic to your most impressive content, or even implement a sponsoring model with business partners whose content recieves increased traffic through the elevate support feature. Elevate support is provided in addition to the already existing relevancy tuning solutions.
Finally, eZ Find includes a new level of granularity in the indexing and search processes, providing improved search relevancy, and enabling efficient search on localised and translated content.
<h3>Systemwide : Microsoft support, improved ajax framework, CMIS Interoperability and a large set of refinements and enhancements</h3>
In addition to the principle new features introduced above, eZ Publish 4.2 offers significant improvements at the system level. In reaction to the lastest releases of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7, eZ Publish 4.2 has capitalized on the significant progress made by the Microsoft Platform in managing and running PHP based applications. For the first time, the Microsoft platform is a serious alternative to LAMP for PHP applications. Should your organization decide to implement a Microsoft platform, eZ Publish is positioned to provide support for your project.
The much-awaited eZ Core library, which provides for efficient organization and layering of Ajax developments onto eZ Publish, is featured in the 4.2 release. eZ Publish is also unveiling a <a rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" href="http://projects.ez.no/nxc_cmis_client" target="_blank">beta version of their CMIS library</a>, thanks to a contribution from the NXC eZ Partner. The CMIS standard aims to define interoperability between content repositories. As the standard has not yet been finalized by the OASIS consortium, a final version of this very promising connector will be delivered in a future release. However, the library does currently have the capability to connect to any software on the market that currently implements the standard.
And finally, at a system level, the 4.2 release includes hundreds of software refinements that improve the overall quality of eZ Publish.
Source: <a href="http://ez.no/company news/new_ez_publish_release_usability_scalability_and_enterprise_search_with_ez_publish_4_2">News Release</a>

Usability, Scalability and Enterprise Search with eZ Publish 4.2

The <a href="http://www.typo3.com">TYPO3</a> Core Team announces version 4.2.9 of the TYPO3 Enterprise Content Management System.
The TYPO3 core team has just released TYPO3 version 4.2.9, which is now ready for you to download. It is a maintenance release of the current stable branch 4.2 and as such contains only bugfixes.
For details about the release, see: <a href="http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/TYPO3_4.2.9" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/TYPO3_4.2.9</a>

TYPO3 CMS 4.2.9 released

Hotjar - Spot what confuses

Spot what confuses your users with Hotjar & AI

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Nuxeo Expands Global Team With Addition of Cheryl McKinnon as Chief Marketing Officer
Open Source Enterprise Content Management Pioneer Kicks Off Aggressive Staff Recruitment Program.
<a href="http://www.nuxeo.com">Nuxeo</a>, a leading provider of open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software and services, today announced Cheryl McKinnon as Chief Marketing Officer.
McKinnon brings to Nuxeo more than 16+ years of related industry experience. This key hire is the first of at least 15 new positions announced to accelerate sales, product development, and engineering capacity in both Boston and Paris.
“This is an extremely disruptive time in content management in part because of the tremendous ability of open source to drive rapid innovation. Open source allows vendors, customers and partners to work together to bring better solutions to the market faster,” said McKinnon.
“My move into the open source segment of the ECM market is the next logical step for me. Customers are under pressure to derive value from technology investments at an unprecedented rate. Content management is no longer a frill in today's knowledge economy — it's core to business. Nuxeo's open source ECM platform lets customers focus on their business, invest their limited resources to get their requirements met quickly and efficiently.
Nuxeo ECM is easily tailored to their needs without any obligation to purchase and adopt non-essential extras. I'm excited to be part of Nuxeo as they embark on a global expansion and hiring program. Working with a seasoned management team, we'll help Nuxeo customers become lean, competitive leaders in their own knowledge-economy industries.”
Most recently, McKinnon was Director, Program Management – Enterprise 2.0 at Open Text, an enterprise software company and leader in enterprise content management. She also oversaw the company's collaboration content management and flagship ECM products.
Prior to Open Text, McKinnon worked at Hummingbird, which Open Text later acquired, and PC DOCS. “Cheryl has a broad spectrum of ECM experience and is a superb marketer, strategist, trend spotter and evangelist, which makes her the perfect match for Nuxeo at this point in our growth,” said CEO Eric Barroca.
“Nuxeo's open source technology has a deep feature set and rich functionality that rivals far costlier, cumbersome and complex proprietary ECM systems. With 350+ customers, tens of thousand of downloads, nearly 65 percent of sales outside of France, and a strong demand from the North American market, Cheryl will be instrumental in helping Nuxeo evolve into a global force.”
McKinnon is actively involved with key industry associations such as AIIM and ARMA. She is a noted speaker, having presented at events throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and published thought-leader on topics such as information governance, compliance in the era of Web. 2.0, demographic shifts in the online workplace, and unique information management needs of public sector. McKinnon holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Winnipeg, Master of Arts from Carleton University and has completed required coursework towards a PhD at the University of Ottawa.

Nuxeo Hires Ex Open Texter for CMO Role

Price and security are not considered important for a CMS.
The features offered and ease of use are what customers hold in highest regard when looking to purchase a content management system (CMS), but surprisingly, price and security are not considered particularly important factors, according to new findings released today.
The CMS buying poll, carried out by web design consultancy and CMS provider, <a href="http://www.webcredible.co.uk/">Webcredible</a>, revealed that the practical aspects of a CMS were by far the most important to potential buyers, with almost half of respondents identifying functionality/feature set (22 per cent) or ease of use (21 per cent) as the key factor in a purchase.
In addition, 16 per cent of respondents said that the ability to customise the functionality of a CMS was the key consideration when making a purchase, largely because customisation is identified as critical to longevity.
The research also revealed that despite the current price and online security-conscious environment, price and security were not seen as important in a CMS purchase with eight per cent and five per cent respectively, identifying them as the key factor.
With thousands of different CMS products available for both web and internal content and for businesses ranging from small to medium-sized to large enterprises, there are hundreds of brands active within the CMS marketplace.
However, the findings surprisingly revealed that brand name is a reasonably important consideration in a CMS purchase, with 13 per cent of respondents identifying it as the most important factor.
The research polled more than 1,000 online users between June and September 2009 on what would be the key factor in purchasing a content management system.
After features, ease of use, ability to customise and brand name, the license – whether open source or proprietary – was identified as the next most important consideration in a CMS purchase with nine per cent of respondents choosing this.
In addition, just one per cent of respondents identified the support on offer as the key factor and five per cent said that none of these would be the key factors when purchasing a CMS, citing factors such as working in all browsers, and providing correct HTML code as important.
Trenton Moss, Director at Webcredible comments, “The CMS market is one that crosses numerous sectors and business sizes and it seems that because of this diverse target market, the practical aspects of a product are crucial. The features on offer and the ease of use of a CMS are the most important considerations largely because the features are key to fulfilling user needs and an easy to use product can be used by somebody who is not particularly technically minded, which may be needed particularly in smaller businesses.
It is however, surprising that price and security are not considered particularly important with a CMS, especially in a time where many companies budgets are being squeezed and online vulnerabilities and attacks are still rife.”
 This CMS buying research polled 1,021 visitors to the Webcredible website between June and September 2009.

Functionality and ease of use are key factors in content management system purchases

With 200 new fixes and enhancements, Tiki 3.2 is now available.
Features and functions improved in this release include modules, plugins, newsletters, browser support, calendars, overall interface and language, and many more.
For the list of major enhancements since Tiki2, please see: <a href="http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki3">http://doc.tikiwiki.org/Tiki3</a>
— TikiWiki CMS/Groupware is a full-featured, tightly integrated, open source, multilingual, all-in-one Wiki+CMS+Groupware, written in PHP and actively developed by a very large international community. Major features include articles, forums, newsletters, blogs, a file/image gallery, a wiki, bug &amp; issue tracker (form generator), a calendar, RSS feeds, a category system, tags, an advanced user, group and permission system and more.
About Tiki: <a href="http://tikiwiki.org/">http://tikiwiki.org/</a>

TikiWiki CMS/Groupware 3.2 has been released

The <a href="http://nucleuscms.org/item/3053">Nucleus CMS</a> core development team has released Nucleus CMS v3.50. This release has serveral improvements and a lot of bug fixes.
Two new plugins are delivered with the core System: NP_Text eases the translation of Skins and NP_SecurityEnforcer improves the security of the core. Some new skinvars are added. The first step to an universal SQL API is done. Some changes are made to make Nucleus CMS compatible to PHP5.3.
You can find a full list with the new features in the <a href="http://nucleuscms.org/item/3053#more">extented part</a> of this item. An online version of the change log can be found <a href="http://digi-foto-blog.de/nucleus/documentation/history.html">here</a>.
There are no urgent security fixes in this release so that you have not to hurry up. But we recommend to update so that your blog software is up to date and work with all plugins.
<ul>
<li><a href="http://nucleuscms.org/upgrade.php">Upgrade to Nucleus CMS v3.50</a></li>
<li><a href="http://nucleuscms.org/download.php">Download Nucleus CMS v3.50</a></li>
<li><a href="http://forum.nucleuscms.org/">Nucleus Support Forum</a></li>
</ul>
List of all new features in Nucleus CMS 3.50:
<ul>
<li>Officially end support for PHP4, though no effort has been made yet to implement any PHP5-only things, so it is likely to work in PHP4 still.</li>
<li>Start moving toward use of complete sql_* api for access to database. This should allow easier use of other backend db engines, like pdo or sqlite, but only MySQL will be officially supported in 3.5. Plugin developers should start making their plugins support the sql_* api once 3.5 is out and builds an install base. (supportsFeature SqlApi)</li>
<li>Ping removed from core completely into NP_Ping</li>
<li>NP_Text included and installed by default</li>
<li>New API events to allow for some password checking and failed login attempt limits</li>
<li>NP_SecurityEnforcer included with core to make use of above events</li>
<li>Plugin help file now links to english and japanese plugin repositories</li>
<li>New variables:
<ul>
<li>&lt;%catiscurrent%&gt;, &lt;%currentcat%&gt; – Category List, yes if category is currently selected, otherwise no</li>
<li>&lt;%sticky(itemid,template)%&gt; – skin var, simple sticky (or display item anywhere)</li>
<li>&lt;%archiveyearlist(template,category,limit)%&gt; – skinvar, list archives by year.</li>
<li>&lt;%otherarchiveyearlist(blogname,template,category)%&gt; – skinvar, list archives by year for given blog</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Active check in admin page for new nucleus version including alert if newer version is available.</li>
<li>selectSpecilaSkinType() function added to globalfunctions to permit selecting a special skin part in an index file</li>
<li>New variable $CONF[‘ActivationDays'], settable manually in config.php, to customize how long users have to activate account. default is still 2 days.</li>
<li>Some changes to handle oddities of PHP5.3</li>
<li>Various bug fixes.</li>
</ul>

Nucleus CMS 3.50 has been released

The folks at Ellis Labs are accepting applications for the ExpressionEngine beta program for 2.0. This is the second phase of the beta testing process for EE.
If you are interested in getting involved you can fill out the  <a href="https://secure.expressionengine.com/extra/beta_application">ExpressionEngine 2.0 Phase Two Beta application.</a>
In order to apply you have to be a registered user on the <a href="https://ExpressionEngine.com">ExpressionEngine.com</a> website. You also need to fill out the <a href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8iTw5ibZvRc2B99W2_2fJYvQ_3d_3d" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">How I Use ExpressionEngine Survey</a> which will provide you with a secret word that lets you apply for the beta program.
I'm not sure if they want your first born either, but just in case, be prepared :).
Doing the survey will enter you for a chance to win one of these fine mugs:

Good luck.

Sign up for phase two of the ExpressionEngine beta program

CMS Market today released the first version of UShorten, the automatic shortlink generator for Joomla! This release brings features similar to other major CMS's like WordPress and Drupal allowing any Joomla site to create and publish unique shortlink URLs for each page on their site.
Generation of shortlink's is fully configurable with different parameters for the length of shortlink, base domain– which allows for redirects from even shorter domain names, and allowed character-set.
Standard features include the insertion of the rel=”shortlink” tag on all pages for which a shortlink is available. Advanced configuration options allow for preventing shortlink generation based on their long URL or Joomla! component as well as reserving shortlink names for later use (faq, news, etc). Additionally, basic hit-tracking is included for monitoring usage of shortlink URLs.
UShorten Home Page:<a href="http://www.cmsmarket.com/extensions-directory/navigation/site+links/ushorten"> http://www.cmsmarket.com/extensions-directory/navigation/site+links/ushorten</a>

UShorten - The Automatic Shortlink Generator for Joomla!

Power your CMS on AWS

Manage your websites & apps in the most trusted cloud.

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