Articles - Page 251

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

janus-boye

This new venture offers commercial services from the core development team.
This is great news for those who currently run the platform or for those who are interested in starting a social network with this incredibly good software.
Having the expertise of the core development team on your side is a huge advantage for those looking to build or develop a new website in the future. Let's not forget that Elgg is one heck of a powerful system and with these guys backing you, you can't go wrong.
Some of the services they are now offering are:
Custom builds
<ul>
<li>They can build any type of social application branded and equipped exactly as you want it.</li>
</ul>
Plugin &amp; theme development
<ul>
<li>Great option is you need a specific module or a custom brand for your network.</li>
</ul>
Consultancy
<ul>
<li>On all aspects of Elgg.</li>
</ul>
Learn more @ <a href="http://www.elgg.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://www.elgg.com</a>

Elgg launches new site and offers Commercial Services

mike-johnston

This young man is the brains and brawn behind the single most popular blogging platform on the planet: <a href="http://wordpress.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">WordPress</a>. What's more impressive than accomplishing something this colossall? Well, how about being just <a href="http://ma.tt/2009/01/twenty-five/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">25 years old</a>!
Let's highlight some of Matt's accomplishments in his 25 years on the planet:
In 2003:
<ul>
<li> He formed WordPress by forking some code from b2/cafelog.</li>
<li>He co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group.</li>
</ul>
In 2004:
<ul>
<li>He formed Ping-o-Matic with Dougal Campbell.</li>
<li>Was recruited by CNET to work on WordPress for them. He dropped out of College at this point.</li>
<li>He announced bbPress, a forum software similar to WordPress in simplicity.</li>
</ul>
In 2005:
<ul>
<li>Left Cnet and launched Akismet.</li>
<li>WordPress.com became open to the public.</li>
<li>AutoMattic was announced.</li>
</ul>
In 2006:
<ul>
<li> Raised about 1.1 million for AutoMattic in funding.</li>
<li>The first WordPress conference occurred.</li>
<li>named #16 of the 50 Most Important People on the Web by PC World</li>
<li>Acquired Gravatar.</li>
</ul>
There's a ton more of course, such as WordPress.tv recently being launched and the acquisition of PollDaddy amongst others.
For someone who has just recently hit 25.. not a bad list of accomplishments.
We look forward to many more developments.
*date source: wikipedia

Focus on Genius: Matt Mullenweg

<img title="textpattern" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/textpattern.png" />You heard it right, a new maintenance release fixing bugs and glitches has been released by Textpattern. You can read about the specific fixes at the <a href="http://textpattern.com/weblog/332/textpattern-cms-408-released" target="_blank">Textpattern</a> website.
Here are some additional resources for Textpattern enthusiasts:
<a href="http://textpattern.com/featured" target="_blank">Textpattern featured sites</a> – This area of their website highlights specific sites based on Textpattern that have done well.
<a href="http://welovetxp.com/" target="_blank">We Love TXP</a> – This is a community-driven site that also highlights some fan favourites.
<a href="http://txpq.com/" target="_blank">The Textpattern Magazine</a>
And the obligatory screenshot:
<img title="Textpattern CMS" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/textpattern-php-20301.png" alt="Textpattern CMS" />

Textpattern has released version 4.0.8

Zikula is the reincarnation of the content management system formerly known as Postnuke. I'm not sure why the name change has occurred or what the objective was but perhaps we can find out from someone within the project. This is an interesting project that has seen alot more activity as of late. We'll have to keep a watch on it to see how it proceeds. Let's examine this new incarnation in this Zikula Review and see if it's up to par.
After downloading and unpacking the latest release, we begin the install process and are greeted with the following screen:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula1.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" /> Note the quick links on the left side to the install guide and documentation, this is good. After selecting the appropriate language, we are greeted with the license agreement as shown below: <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula2.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" />
Proceed after accepting the license:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula3.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" />
If you are greeted with anything other than the green checkmarks above, you will have to make the necessary changes requested.
We then enter the database details:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula4.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" /> And proceed.. Here you are allowed two options, basic install or complete. Complete installs all available modules included with the download and basic just those required to operate. It's nice that they provide the option as there may very well be some users that do not like or utilize some of the built in modules: <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula5.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" /> We are then presented with the option to select a module to add to the start page. The default TOUR module is selected and since we selected “Complete” we have a large number of options which we can select from: <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula6.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" /> I feel the need to pat someone on the back for providing at least 3 default theme options to choose from. This is a nice simple touch that needs to be seen more often. <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula71.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" />
Personally, I find the Seabreeze theme the most appealing so I selected that one. Here's the default look of the home page:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/zikula81.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" />
Not bad, much better than some of the other ones I've seen in previous reviews. Unfortunately, this is one of the few nice themes that Zikula has going for it that I know of. I've checked their theme repository and it's not very large or updated very often. Perhaps as they begin to expand in size, this will change but in the interim unless you are a designer, you may find it hard to find a large number of themes to choose from. Having said that though, I do believe most older postnuke themes should work.. although I'm not positive on that and haven't tried. If someone could confirm, that would be appreciated.
Here is the Admin Panel. It hasn't changed much from the Postnuke days.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/rsz_2009-01-09-1231535633_1280x800_scrot.jpg" alt="Zikula Review" />
The admin panel is pretty clean and easy to use, one thing I think needs to be done more on this system is it needs to be made more userfriendly in terms of verbage and perhaps popup hints as to what some of the menu items do. When navigating the admin panel, if you are new, it can get a little confusing to figure out where things are. It certainly serves its purpose but could be a bit easier.
Overall, I think Zikula is a good CMS that needs a bit more attention to get it on par with competing systems. It's nice but is lacking in module attention and themes. Would I recommend it? Yes, but only to people that have a bit of experience and aren't new. I don't think it's quite there yet for newbies.
I would love to see the default theme that the Zikula.org site uses in their themes listing for instance and I think that a few more like that will add the right touch.
Overall Ratings:
Community 8/10 – Pretty busy community with plenty of posts. Appears to be quite active.
Expandability 8/10 -Not a huge database of modules but definitely quite a few. Modules database needs to be cleaned up and some of entries re-worded to make the individual listings more understandable. Found it a bit confusing and overwhelming.
Themability 7/10-Themes are available but as I said earlier, I think it would be best if the Zikula team could create a few nice starter themes other than the usual Andreas, etc that are so common among CMS platforms. Uniqueness is a good thing.
Useability 7.5/10 – Perfectly usable, but a bit overwhelming for the new user.
<h2>Overall Score: 7.5/10</h2>

Zikula Review - A Look at the CMS formerly known as PostNuke

CushyCMS is a relatively new approach to content management that allows you to take any website and add editing functionality and management to it using a very simple and easy to use interface. Today we're going to examine this new system in this CushyCMS Review and give you an overall view of how it works as well as rate it.
In order to use Cushy, you do not install anything nor do you require another web host. You can use Cushy to manage your existing sites. To do so, simply add your site into Cushy and you've now got a usable interface for easy site management.
The way it works is simple, you visit the website <a href="http://cushycms.com/">CushyCMS.com</a>:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy1.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
One there, you login with your account and are presented with the Cushy Control Panel page:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy2.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
In this case, you can see I have a website added to it already, however, if you wanted to do add a new site, you could simply do so by selecting the add site button which will present you with the following page:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy3.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
Once here, you fill in the details of you existing site and Cushy will import them into it's control panel which then allows you to edit them. Once you've told Cushy where the site is and how to access it, you then add pages to Cushy like so:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy4.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
We then have to tell Cushy what parts of your pages you would like to have editable. You do this by following these intructions:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy9.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
Once you do this, you will be shown the pages detected by Cushy and be allowed to select which ones you would like to manage from the Cushy interface:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy51.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
Simply click on the page you'd like to add, and add a Page Name:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy61.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
Congratulations, you have assigned a page. Now all you need to do is click on the control panel button to get back to the main page and you'll see the page you just added:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy71.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
Now simply click on it's name and you will be dropped into the Wysiwyg editor and you can now start editing your site:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/cushy8.jpg" alt="CushyCMS Review" />
That pretty much covers it. You can read more about the advanced features at the <a href="http://cushycms.com/">CushyCMS website</a> and there is also a great video on their front page that explains in more detail.
Items that could be improved upon are the detection of editable elements, if the team at Cushy could figure out a way to auto detect editable areas without the end user having to modify their html and define it, they would have an exceptional product. As it stands now, however, it's still a very very nice interface and a very good option for those who have moderate html experience and just need a simple easy to use interface.
Try out <a href="http://cushycms.com/">CushyCMS</a> on your site, you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Overall, although this is very difficult to rate, I would say that Cushy gets:
<h2>8/10</h2>

CushyCMS Review - A New approach to Content Management?

Today we're going to take you through our Vivvo CMS Review. Vivvo is a commercial offering from Spoonlabs and is a well priced article publishing CMS primarily used for News, magazine or other sites where you publish large amounts of articles with pictures and other media.
Vivvo has been around for a while and has a very solid community and excellent support. Let's examine the install process and look at a few key elements of this system. We're going to review the Professional edition which was graciously provided by Boris @ Spoonlabs for review purposes.
First off, I'm unsure if this is a software concern or my host but when I first accessed our test URL, I was not greeted with the installer page.. instead I had to append it with /installer to get the installation going. Not a major concern but just something I wanted to point out. It would be best if it auto redirected on it's own.
I was then greeted with:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v1.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Once you've selected your language, you proceed to:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v2.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Looks like everything passed inspection. If you have anything come up with a red X it would be a good idea to get ahold of your hosting provider before proceeding.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v3.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Accept the license and continue:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v41.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Fill in your database details here.. make sure you append a database table prefix if you are using the same database as something else. Make sure you input your license number as well (you can get this by logging into your account at vivvo.net and you will see the license listed).
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v5.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Plug in the obvious information like your website name, admin info. One thing I thought was a nice touch here was that the system will not let you choose an admin password of less than 6 characters. This is a nice touch.. I think it would be even better if it enforced some rules to password conventions to help new users secure their installation a bit more.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v6.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Now comes the fun part. Let's click on the View website link and see what our fresh install looks like:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v7.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Looks pretty nice! We have a login section, some featured article examples and you can see there is a sidebar with some nice tabbed boxes. Vivvo also has a decent selection of themes which are available for purchase from their site as well as some free ones which are available at <a href="http://www.vivvo.net/resources/">http://www.vivvo.net/resources/</a>. There are some free layouts for content as well as plugins to incorporate some other features into the system.
Let's take a peek at the admin section:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v8.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
Well laid out, easy to find what you need and well labelled.. just the way I like it. I also like the embedded statistics to give you a quick overview of number of visitors.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v9.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
I wanted to point out the above screen has a very nice simple feature.. Meta description and Meta keywords. This is a nice feature to let you quickly edit these to help your SEO score without having to manually edit the template files directly.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v10.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
This screen is another nice feature, you can preset the image sizes directly! That's very handy and gives you a ton of flexibility, again, without having to edit files directly. Nice touch!
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/v11.gif" alt="Vivvo CMS Review" />
The above screen is the final one I wanted to show. This lets you easily edit SEO functions for each article. This is a really nice option and isn't often seen in a CMS where you can manually control your SEO options with ease. Good work Spoonlabs.
Overall, Vivvo is a really nice system. They've made it very easy to maintain a nice search engine optimized site with excellent content management and article publishing flexibility. The overall price of this system is very reasonable as well. Coming in at around two hundred dollars to start, which is very reasonable for this type of system. If you are a new startup looking to break into the world of article publishing or starting up a magazine or newspaper.. this system would be a very good selection.
There's an excellent community as well and support is prompt and efficient. What would help this system out a bit more is a wider variety of plugins and more free themes… personally, I'm not fond of buying themes for premium systems, as I think more free themes would make the investment a bit more appealing for some.. but some people may not have an issue with that. The cost of the average theme is on par with most other premium theme options for other systems (ie: wordpress and all).
Vivvo works well, has a nicely laid out and user friendly admin section and just seems to do the job well for the price tag they are asking.
Our ratings:
Community 9/10 (Solid community with prompt support.)
Expandability 7/10 (It needs more plugins and can't easily be used for much other than article publishing)
Themability 8/10 (Not bad. Some free themes and some paid ones but could use more free.)
Useability 9/10 (Very easy to use. 10 in my books due to the added functionality with SEO editing)
<h2>Overall Score: 8/10</h2>

Vivvo CMS Review

Power your CMS on AWS

Manage your websites & apps in the most trusted cloud.

#ffffff

Today we're going to take a look at the latest release of PHP Fusion: Core Edition 7 in this PHP Fusion Review. This is an interesting release and has been long awaited as version 6 has consistently been in the running for the PacktPub CMS awards that are held every year.
I'm very eager to see what kind of improvements have been made. Let's examine some of the changes since version 6.
There is a new Smiley admin panel. The user group admin panel has been rewritten to be easier to use. Forums rewritten to include several new features such as forums polls, mass thread deletion, new admin interface, etc
This is just a teeny number of the changes, there is a nice feature comparison available here:
<a href="http://www.php-fusion.co.uk/infusions/features/index.php" target="_blank">http://www.php-fusion.co.uk/infusions/features/index.php</a>
Let's take a look at this new offering shall we?
After copying the appropriate files to your host (local or otherwise) you start the install process by visiting <a href="http://myhostname/setup.php">http://myhostname/setup.php</a>
You will be greeted with this screen:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion1-300x146.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
Once you've selected your locale (and do note that you can download additional ones from their website as well) you will proceed to this screen:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion2-300x212.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
On this screen if you notice anything not marked as green then you need to change permissions on the specified files. Be prepared to involve your hosting company if you do not have shell access or are unfamiliar with how to do this via ftp client. Once you've gone this far, proceed to the screen below:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion3-300x142.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
Once you've completed these and if the installer can successfully access your database you should get the next screen:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion4-300x107.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
Once you've successfully done this stage, there's not much left.. so let's continue:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion5-300x165.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
The above screen is where you put in your admin settings. Note that it will not allow you to have the same password as both admin and login so you will have to differentiate the two (which is a good security move anyways and it's nice that they enforced it).. You will also note specific password rules should you try to put something in that's too easy.. which is another good feature.
We then proceed to:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion6-300x123.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
As suggested, it's a good idea to delete the setup.php file at this point so that a potential hacker cannot restart the setup process and potentially “pooch” (that's a technical term btw) your existing setup.
Overall, i'd say their install process is quite simple compared to some other CMS installs i've witnessed and it's a great improvement over previous versions. PHP Fusion has always been the best Portal based CMS i've ever used and continues to improve as they work hard to make it easier and more useful than ever.
Now you get to see the results of your actions.. What does your new homepage look like? Well here it is:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion7-300x175.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
Visually, it's a very attractive new look for them and in my opinion, much nicer than the default look that they had in previous versions. Let's examine a few more screens. Once you log into the system, either as an administrator or a user you'll receive a menu in the right sidebar that will look similar to below. Note that if you are not an admin, you will not see the admin panel choice here. There is also a nice shoutbox setup ready to go for you as well.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion8-179x300.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
Let's see what the Admin Panel looks like:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion9-300x204.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
With a very nice layout and easy to use tabs and icons to represent the various areas, this is one of the better admin panels and much improved over previous versions. I think the labelling of the icons is much improved and a lot easier to understand.
The newly re-designed user admin screen:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion10-300x96.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
and the Sysadmin panel:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/phpfusion11-300x156.jpg" alt="PHP Fusion Review" />
One of the main downfalls this CMS suffers from is it's somewhat pidgeon holed into a portal type of CMS.. this isn't necessarily a bad thing though as there are plenty of them out there and they are definitely needed. There are a few themes that have taken PHP Fusion beyond this look but it's not as easy as some of the other platforms in this aspect.
Overall, this is a great new version of this already much touted CMS and i'm very pleased to say for a Portal, I can't think of anything better. Theme wise, there are tons available through a number of sources and modules are a plenty as well.
Overall, my ratings are:
Community 8/10 (Good community with quick response to issues and plenty of frequent visitors)
Expandability 7/10 (Outside of a portal, it's tough to use it for much else other than this type of site)
Themability 8/10 (Plenty of themes available and more coming daily)
Useability 9/10 (Pretty easy with a very low learning curve)
<h2>Overall Score: 8/10</h2>

PHP Fusion Review

One of the most prominent blog software platforms with one of the biggest communities in both the blog and CMS world, WordPress is a force to be reckoned with. Or is it? WordPress has been around for a long time and has/is growing like mad. It's like a weed. Except one you don't want to pull out of your garden because it keeps getting prettier, better and nicer. Today, we'll examine this popular platform in this review of WordPress 2.5.
Let's look at the ridiculously easy install. This is the first screen you see. Brings new meaning to the term “keep it simple stupid” doesn't it?
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp1_1.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" />
WordPress then gives you the precursor screen below that tells you basically what to expect on the next couple screens.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp2_1_.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" />
Now that you've been informed. You can fill in the info below:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp3_11.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" />
Enter your Blog title and email below: <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp4_1.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" /> Bam, done. Now that's a total of 4 screens to get installed. Insanely easy, very quick and ridiculously simple. <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp5_1.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" /> Now log in with admin details provided on the screen above. And you can change the password after your first login. You have to love the sense of humor the lads at WordPress have. <img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp6.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" /> After logging in you get to the admin screen or “dashboard”
Ok let's take a breather and review the dashboard. Here's where wordpress really shines. You want a blog that makes your life easy? You've found it. WordPress 2.5 has auto update capable plugins.. just click on the plugin link.. wordpress will automatically tell you if there's an update available and let you automatically download and install it. No effort required. Where do you get the plugins? Well they have 2200 as of this review. Yes, 2200. and it's a BLOG platform for crying out loud.
Need themes? There are thousands.. literally. You can't type anything in google without tripping over a wordpress theme about it. The control center has one click theme switching (with screenshots). Installing and updating a plugin consists of clicking a button.. The dashboard provides you with the latest wordpress news and the Wysiwyg editor just works beautifully.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp7.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" />
Where does wordpress fail? I guess the default theme could use some work:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/wp8.gif" alt="review of WordPress 2.5" />
Can you tell I'm smitten? Seriously though.. for a blog platform… You simply cannot find a better solution than WordPress. Some will claim it's also very capable as a CMS.. while I think it would struggle in that area, mainly due to lack of forums integration and lack of CMS like themes (wordpress does LOOK like a blog after all).
Community? Massive. WordPress has a community larger than most CMS communities. Support is amazingly quick and there are tons and tons of sites with hints tips and more to get the eager blogger any info they need quickly. With the size of the community and the number of people using it, it's quite possibly the best supported blog platform that exists today.
Would you use it for a portal? Perhaps not. However, for what it claims to be able to do, it does it and more with ease.
Our ratings are below:
Community 10/10 (I said it before and I'll say it again, massive with a huge number of support sites around)
Expandability 9/10 (For a blog platform, very expandable. The only thing lacking is forums or some kind of discussion platform)
Themability 10/10 (Can't touch wordpress for themes.)
Useability 10/10 (Fabulous dashboard, easy install and simple theme switching, auto updating plugins. nuff said)
<h2>Overall Score: 9/10</h2>

A Review of WordPress 2.5

<img title="openedit" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2021/07/openedit_vv9jiq.jpg" />Our latest interview is with Openedit founder Christopher Burkey. Openedit is an interesting project that was founded approximately 10 years ago and utilizes java as it's base. We always find it very interesting to get a chance to talk with people who have been indepth in the industry for quite sometime as there's always an opportunity to learn something new. So sit back, grab a coffee and enjoy the read!
Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
CC: You began development of Openedit approximately 10 years ago, is that correct? What prompted you to begin this project?
CB: Yes, many people don’t realize we have been developing OpenEdit for over 10 years, using our own development team, as well as developers from the OpenEdit Community. OpenEdit began with a multi-year project for General Electric Aircraft Engines. The project required us to develop a web application, which would allow GE to capture technical data on jet engines. Each feature of OpenEdit had to be self-contained with as few interdependencies as possible. The idea was to allow any feature of OpenEdit to be able to interact with, or even within, other parts of their application. From this, OpenEdit evolved into a web application framework used to create and maintain dynamic websites and custom web applications, most notably, Digital Asset Management, Content Management and Ecommerce.
CC: Why did you choose to go open source and what other services does your company provide in order to remain profitable?
<img style="max-width:150px" title="Christopher Burkey " src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/chris-140x150.jpg" alt="Christopher Burkey " />
CB: Sharing knowledge and allowing developers to have the source code in hand empowers them, it drives innovation. Most of the features in OpenEdit were developed for and by organizations with specific Content Management and Digital Asset Management requirements in their work environment. OpenEdit users have seen that open source provides freedom of setting up their systems as they wish and freedom in the long term. A software company can give their software away and make money on services or add-on’s. Or perhaps a company can sell the software for a high initial price and provide support for free. When a company sells software and support, many times, it results in the customer becoming frustrated, because they don’t understand the reasoning behind paying for a software they have no control of and also paying for its support and services. OpenEdit sells installation services, project work and hosting – there is no charge to download, use and upgrade OpenEdit.
CC: What is the primary objective and/or target market of your product?
CB: Our primary market is Marketing and Creative Services departments within large firms. OpenEdit offers the best web based, open source Digital Asset Management and Content Management software used across the enterprise. Our focus is on workflow, search, management and collaboration, multi-media, repurpose of assets, PDF and image format conversions. Today, OpenEdit is used by marketing and creative services departments having thousands of users and managing millions of digital assets across the enterprise.
CC: What separates Openedit from similar platforms? Is there a specific functionality that makes it stand out?
CB: OpenEdit is the most feature rich platform for DAM and CMS. We offer the only Digital Asset Management solution that includes a full Content Management System, integrated Blogging, eCommerce, Events Calendar, Multi-language support and Social Networking tools. Every feature of OpenEdit is all-inclusive, we don’t charge for add-ons 
or even upgrades for that matter.
CC: Given the current state of the economy, what objectives does your company have for 2009 in order to “stay afloat” during these difficult times?
CB: Our approach is to keep focusing on Digital Asset Management integrated with Content Management. Make sure that our clients are treated like royalty and that OpenEdit is flexible enough to keep up with the latest feature requests from our target market.
CC: If there was one thing you would change about your platform what would it be and why?
CB: The one thing we would change is to package our product better. We want to make multiple flavors of OpenEdit that match the needs of certain groups of clients. We believe in permission marketing within software. What that means is if a customer gives us permission to sell them something then we should provide a version of OpenEdit that is tailored to their needs. For instance, OpenEdit comes with all of our feature sets but narrowing down or expanding those features for specific types of users will make OpenEdit more appealing to that audience. As an example, we have a solution available online today, it’s directed toward large marketing departments but we also want to make an eCommerce flavor of OpenEdit that is packaged for photographers to sell prints of photos online.
CC: What do you feel is the most overlooked feature or functionality of your product?
CB: The most overlooked feature of OpenEdit is the Debug Mode. This mode allows users to change any part of any web page within their site. The changes that they make are stored in a separate folder structure so it is easy to track what has been customized for a specific client. This allows us to support hundreds of installations of OpenEdit with customizations and still be able to upgrade them regularly without too many problems. With Debug Mode developers can provide continuous integration and quick, agile development.
CC: Where do you see the future of the content management system industry going?
CB: Our philosophy has always been that CMS and DAM is a great fit for one another. OpenEdit began with a pure content management solution, in which General Electric could capture data and it naturally evolved into the inclusion of a Digital Asset Management solution, this direction continues to prove itself.
We have already seen growth in the interest of open source CMS and DAM for 2009. Search methods will continue to change, so individuals can search the way they want, rather than being forced to search a specific way. Social networking is something we see our CMS and DAM users have an interest in. The Web Browser makes a great desktop replacement, thus online document editing capabilities will see continued growth. Corporations need a suite of integrated web based document management and editing tools that they can host and use within their entire enterprise.
CC: Where do you see Openedit fitting in with this future?
CB: OpenEdit is an extensible and flexible enough platform to be used within a huge variety of enterprise environments. Every business has custom needs, which is why OpenEdit was built from the ground up based on real work agile development. OpenEdit is a major force in the future of CMS and DAM and will continue to add and refine our features as CMS requirements grow for our users.
CC: Do you plan to offer SaaS options for Openedit?
CB: OpenEdit has offered reliable and inexpensive hosting for clients who do not have their own servers for over 10 years.
CC: What are your favourite implementations of your product? Can you share some websites that use your product that you find interesting or innovative?
CB: My favorite implementations include:
<ul>
<li>Slamdance Film Festival – uses all the parts of OpenEdit for a very low cost implementation. OpenEdit hosts this one: 
<a href="http://www.slamdance.com/">http://www.slamdance.com</a></li>
<li>Proyecto Piloto – I like this one because it is in Spanish and was put together and maintained by non-technical users and it features lots of images: <a href="http://www.proyectopiloto.cl/">http://www.proyectopiloto.cl</a></li>
<li>WWE – World Wide Entertainment – This is an eCommerce site that is used to sell licensed media to their partners. This site requires a login.</li>
</ul>
You can see a list of our clients on our website <a href="http://www.openeditdam.com/">http://www.openeditdam.com</a>
CC: How do you feel Openedit compares with other open source projects in the ECM market such as Alfresco for instance?
CB: The most striking difference between OpenEdit and traditional CMS's is the use of a database. Most CMS's start with a database then they build editing and management tools around the data. OpenEdit starts with the HTML User Interface and the data is defined on the fly as needed. This allows us to create entire web applications stored within a file sub-directory. It is very intuitive and flexible 
to create new applications just by creating more folders. It is not intuitive for users to have to create or alter database schemas each 
time they want to create a new simple web application.
CC: Can you provide us with some insight as to future modifications or upcoming changes?
CB: In the immediate future OpenEdit is working on data mining tools that will help a business search across all of their media repositories. We plan to provide detailed summary reports and navigation tools to simplify searching for all digital files, such as video, images, documents, brochures, logo’s, etc.
CC: Do you have any parting comments for our readers?
CB: OpenEdit has proven itself to be a powerful CMS and DAM solution for many companies and organizations. The OpenEdit community is of the utmost importance, as they keep coming up with innovative ways to use OpenEdit.
The progression from a content management solution into one which also integrates full digital asset management capabilities seemed obvious to us years ago. Integrating the management, collaboration, sharing and reuse of all digital assets across web content management and digital asset management is achieved using OpenEdit.
We always welcome any sort of feedback about OpenEdit, please feel free to post here in our online user forum <a href="http://www.openeditdam.com/OpenEditDAMblog/index.html">http://www.openeditdam.com/OpenEditDAMblog/index.html</a>
The OpenEdit developer website can be found at <a href="http://www.openedit.org/">http://www.openedit.org</a> and our website devoted to OpenEdit DAM and CMS is <a href="http://www.openeditdam.com/">http://www.openeditDAM.com</a>
We think that Java is the best tool for Enterprises, that’s why we use Java and Object Orientated development to build OpenEdit. We feel that choice has been advantageous by allowing our team to re-use and constantly refactor our code for over a decade without ever starting over. Our competitors who are using PHP, Perl and proprietary software systems such as Microsoft, seem to have to re-architect every few years to avoid endless mounds of confusing spaghetti code or to adapt to new technology such as Ajax. Java has been great for our clients and OpenEdit.
Thanks for this opportunity!

Openedit Founder, Christopher Burkey Interview

We were very pleased to have a chance to interview Dries Buytaert, founder of the legendary <a href="http://drupal.org/" target="_blank">Drupal</a> content management system. He shares his thoughts on its success, future and how it came to be in this intriguing and indepth discussion. We had so many questions, that we are only publishing part one while he works on the second half.
Here you go.
CC: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, Dries. We'd like to cover a few areas during this interview.. specifically Drupal and your latest venture, Acquia.
Can you tell us a little about your background and how you became involved in the world of Content Management Systems?
DB: I was a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium around 1999. I was doing web development with CGI and server-side includes, but I wanted to learn more about technologies like PHP and MySQL. Also, at the same time, we had the need for an internal messaging system at our student dorm. So, I wrote a simple message board. Then when I graduated, I decided to move my internal message board onto the internet.
CC: Our understanding is that Drupal originally started as a BBS system, having been very involved in the BBS realm ourselves, we find this very interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about how it came to be and was it as popular as a BBS as it is today?
DB: Drupal began as an internal message board that I used to manage my student activities. We just used it in my student dorm to communicate about dinner times, etc. Once I graduated, I began transforming it into a news and discussion website: <a href="http://www.drop.org/">www.drop.org</a>.
After a year or so, I released the software behind drop.org as Drupal 1.0.0, and Drupal officially came to be on January 15, 2001. Contributors still celebrate this as Drupal’s birthday every year.
CC: According to sources, Drupal’s name came about by accident. Is this true? Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the name?
<img title="Drupal Content Management System" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/drupal-141x150.jpg" alt="Dries Buytaert" />
DB: Yes. Initially, I wanted to register the site under the Dutch word “dorp” which in English means “village” or “small town”. While registering the domain, I made an error and typed “Drop” instead of “Dorp”. I was shocked to see that Drop.org was still available, so I decided to keep the domain. As such, the first Internet website powered by an online version of Drupal was Drop.org. Drupal did not get its name until I released it as open source software in early 2001.
CC: Did you ever expect Drupal to get to the level of popularity it is at today?
DB: Not at all, I started all this as a hobby and quickly got out of hand. After I moved it to the public internet, I continued to build on it for over a year and added a lot of features. But, it continued to be an experimental platform to learn from and apply new web technologies such as RSS feeds and content and user rating.
I increased my experiments and development and drew the attention of an audience that was also interested in the future of the internet. This audience provided suggestions and was also active with state of the art web technologies and they increasingly began providing me with feedback. At a certain time the feedback took on such a level that I thought I should provide the engine to them so they could start there own experimenting and applying there own suggestions to it. This is how it got moved to Open Source, and also how the community started.
I must say though that I felt good making it available to the Open Source community. I had looked at other similar systems such as phpnuke but with my background in computer science I could really say that the architecture and design were much better. People were asking for modifications but I thought it was really well and worth of being seen, especially compared to other state of the art Content Management Systems written in PHP. So made available without too much expectations but it got the reputation after all. I of course continued to work hard on it.
CC: What do you feel are the core strengths of Drupal and why?
DB: The core strength of Drupal is definitely the open source community that is behind the project. I am constantly amazed by the innovation that comes out of the thousands of dedicated Drupal contributors. There are thousands of add-on modules that can be used to successfully power online communities, blogs, and collaboration environments. Furthermore, Drupal’s modularity makes it much easier to use and extend than traditional content management systems.
CC: With the numerous other open source projects on the market today, what separates Drupal and helps it stand out from the pack?
DB: Drupal has been a pioneer from the start by embracing new technologies and being on the front lines when it comes to web development. But what separates Drupal is its modularity – the combination of a core package and then task-specific modules that can be added as needed.
This modularity was part of Drupal’s initial design. I was sort of shocked that most of the other systems didn’t have a modular design — to me, with my background as a computer science student, that felt like a very natural thing to do. I was also involved in the Linux project back then, working on wireless network drivers. That’s also obviously a modular system, so I may have gotten some inspiration from there as well.
Drupal’s modular design makes it attractive to both technical and non-technical users. If you look at Content Management Systems, they have eliminated the traditional role of the webmaster. This role has evolved more into a role of content editor.
My vision for Drupal is to do the same for the developers (role). I think there is a lot of room to eliminate the traditional web developer, eliminating might be a bit too strong, but re-define the role of the web developer at least. The way we try to accomplish this in Drupal is with a modular approach so users can build web sites quickly without having to do any programming, in other words one does not have to be a true developer to build a feature rich and interactive web site. I hope we can make a big step forward with this in the next five years.
CC: There are some who say that Drupal is trying to do too much too quickly… and its hard to keep up. Specifically, if you visit the Drupal site today there are 4 versions that modules are being created for. What is your response to this?
DB: A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source project, including nearly 2,000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality. Drupal’s thriving, vibrant ecosystem is the very reason that Drupal is so successful – it is its greatest strength. However, it’s true that Drupal can be overwhelming to those that don’t have the time or resources to invest in staying on top of Drupal’s latest offerings, updates, etc., which is why I founded Acquia. Acquia addresses these challenges by packaging some of the best software from the project and by providing continuously available support.
CC: What are the largest sites you are aware of that run on the Drupal platform and why do you think they chose it?
DB: A diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including Lifetime Television, MTV UK, Universal Music, SonyBMG, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Amnesty International and tens of thousands more. I believe there are 2 primary reasons people have chosen Drupal. The first is the Drupal community – it consists of thousands of passionate, talented people who believe in the future of the Web and invest their time and energy to contribute to the project. Second, Drupal’s modular architecture makes it a flexible platform to build great websites.
CC: How does someone decide whether to install Drupal 5 or 6? It seems that in order to use the majority of available modules, one must use the 5.x edition? What do you say to this?
DB: As with any software package, someone building a website in Drupal must map their requirements to the modules and capabilities available. From the beginning, I chose not to preserve backward compatibility because doing so requires that you drag historical baggage along, and in interpreted languages like PHP, this comes at a significant performance cost.
Our mission has always been to make Drupal fast, small, clean and on the bleeding-edge of technology. In the early days I focused completely on the aesthetics of Drupal's code. I spent days trying to do something better, with fewer lines of code and more elegant than elsewhere. And with me, many others. It was the right thing to do. Over the years, we've seen a lot of innovations happen that would not likely have happened while preserving backward compatibility – the node system being one of the most prominent examples.
Developers always had free reign to implement their ideas in the best possible way. It is something that Drupal has in its favor compared to many other content management systems. It's been interesting to see how Drupal has spread and how it has grown to be more flexible and cover more niches than many other systems. If anything, this needs to be attributed to the fact that we haven't cared much about backward compatibility, and our single-mindedness to get the technology right.
Over time, the vast library of Drupal modules is upgraded to support each major release – given the number of modules, this, admittedly, takes time. As part of this process, we seek to bring popular modules into Drupal core to ensure that capabilities that everyone uses are brought into the core upgrade process.
CC: Can you provide us some details on future development initiatives? Any new changes coming down the pipeline?
DB: We are currently working on Drupal 7 and I named Angie Byron, aka webchick, as my Drupal 7 co-maintainer at Drupalcon Szeged in August of this year. We are focused on improving Drupal in a number of ways – adding features in core, improving usability and performance, creating a test framework and adding lots of tests and simplifying the upgrade process.
Longer term, I see tremendous opportunities for the semantic web and search. For Drupal, this means making Drupal emit structured information. Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal's database and doesn't surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can't pick it up as a product, and they'd fail to include it in their world-wide product database.
Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.
CC: Tell us a little about Acquia and why you formed this company.
DB: Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to the advancement of the core technology and offering products, services, and technical support to simplify the deployment and management of Drupal websites.
As a thriving open source project, Drupal changes at such a rapid rate that it can be challenging to find the most useful and relevant modules, keep systems secure and up to date, and find real-time expertise and support to quickly resolve issues. By reducing or eliminating these issues, Acquia improves the effectiveness of organizations already using Drupal and brings the power of Drupal within reach of more organizations who are exploring Drupal for the first time.
CC: How successful have you been so far with this initiative? Who are your biggest customers?
DB: Acquia just launched the general availability of Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network on September 30, 2008. We’ve had more than 4,000 downloads of Acquia Drupal since we launched. We’ve received significant interest in subscriptions to the Acquia Network and have a handful of beta customers already leveraging the Acquia Network including Adobe, which is using Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network to power Flex.org.
The feedback we’ve received so far has been extremely positive supporting my initial suspicion that commercial grade support will lead to increased adoption of Drupal – especially in the enterprise.
CC: What makes the Acquia version of Drupal different from the readily available version we all know and love?
DB: There are thousands of modules available for Drupal. Acquia Drupal is simply a packaged collection of some of the best software from the Drupal project to simplify the process of getting started with Drupal. For experienced Drupal developers and users, it speeds the process of assembling the pieces to start building a website, and it provides a supported foundation should the developer, or in many cases, their clients decide they want to purchase commercial technical support.
The code – Drupal core and all the community modules – in Acquia Drupal is the same code that is available on Drupal.org. Its GPL-licensed and available for free to anyone who wants to use it. Our engineering team works closely with the community module maintainers to contribute back any and all patches we write, making them available to the entire Drupal community whether they choose to use Acquia Drupal or not.
CC: Is your goal to move Drupal away from Open Source and more into a Commercial product offering?
DB: No. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Drupal open source community members have made Drupal the innovative and widely popular social publishing system that it is today. The Drupal community is the foundation for the company and is dependent on the continued development by Drupal community members.
Acquia does not want to take Drupal away from the open source community. Rather, Acquia is stepping up as a community member to collaborate in Drupal code development, increase the industry profile for Drupal, and introduce convenient packaging, support, and remote network services that will make Drupal even easier to adopt and use. Additionally, Acquia Drupal is offered as a free download and all software included in the distribution is licensed under the GNU Public License and contributed back to the Drupal open source project.
CC: Can you tell us a little bit about each of your offerings: Carbon, Spokes, Caliper and Yellow Jersey?
DB: Acquia Drupal (previously code named Carbon) is our commercially supported distribution of the Drupal social publishing system. It is a packaged collection of some of the best software from the Drupal project offering an advanced starting point to quickly begin building social publishing Web sites that blend static pages, blogs, wikis, discussion forums, mashups, and custom content types.
The Acquia Network (previously code named Spokes) provides the essential support and remote network services to efficiently operate sites with Acquia Drupal sites. All subscribers to the Acquia Network gain access to the Acquia Network’s subscriber forums, remote network services such as software update notifications, uptime monitoring, Mollom spam blocking, and Acquia Drupal documentation. Caliper was the code name for the Mollom spam blocking service we are offering through the Acquia Network. Additionally, premium subscriptions provide Web-based ticket management, as well as email and telephone support. The Acquia Network functions as an operations portal for managing Acquia Drupal sites and connecting to Acquia support channels.
Finally, Yellow Jersey is the code name for the training and certification program we are developing. For more information on Yellow Jersey, as well as the future roadmaps for Acquia Drupal and the Acquia Network, check out the community section of our website, <a href="http://acquia.com/community" target="_blank">http://acquia.com/community</a> and share your thoughts about where we are headed.

Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert Interview

After many a poking and prodding and finally having to show him some whisky to get him off his pirate ship, we finally managed to snag some time with Franz Maruna of Concrete5. Be prepared for an entertaining read.
CC: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today, we know it's hard to find time amidst developing to break for some good quality questioning ?
FM: <a href="http://www.concrete5.org/" target="_blank">Concrete5</a> is revolutionizing content management. It’s so easy to use – people can’t believe it. Finding the time to talk to people about c5 always easy and fun. Thanks for listening!
CC: Tell us a little about yourself and how you came to get involved in the CMS world.
FM: I have a background in both software engineering and liberal arts. I was programming by first grade, running BBS’s in the 80’s, and doing multi-media art throughout. When I went off to college to study art and philosophy, I had pretty much burned out on computer science.
Strangely, in school everyone was making “pages” about their cats and girlfriends, and sharing them on the internet – which to me had really only been a way to &lt;pause&gt; well… make long distance calls for free. It quickly became clear that a technologist with an eye for design would be in demand. I dropped out of college, and I started as a web production programmer. Through the years I have done absolutely every job in the spectrum of rolls that now go into delivering top-notch websites.
In the early days we were using Server Side Includes and then simple header calls to make our lives easier. Over time the web became more of a middleware, and now a browser based development environment. Concrete5 is the result of years of these trials and tribulations.
CC: What is Concrete5 CMS and how did it come about?
<img title="Concrete5 Content Management System" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/concrete51-141x150.jpg" alt="Franz Maruna" />
FM: Concrete5 is a building material for great websites. It runs in PHP and MySQL on your live web server. It adds a toolbar at the top of your website, so you can easily make changes and additions as you browse. It does this with out creating restrictions around what a designer and developer can dream up.
It started as an internal toolkit we developed for some client work in 2003. We sold it as a commercial product, and after a complete interface and architecture overhaul, we gave it away for nothing under the very flexible MIT open source license this summer.
CC: Who are the other key players in the organization?
FM: Concrete wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for Andrew Embler, our brilliant CTO. Every day he battles client challenges in new projects, trouble shoots servers and systems that are already built, maintains the core c5 code base, and periodically listens to me dribble on and on about what we’re going to do next. That man deserves an award. I’m sure he appreciates that you’re reading this instead of him.
There’s a long list of freelancers and employees who have contributed over the years, but we really also owe a lot to Ryan and &lt;coughs&gt; el Nino – as well as Matt, our interface designer.
CC: What makes Concrete5 different from myriad of other CMS' on the market?
FM: There are so many CMS’ today because it is a real need that isn’t yet being well served. People desperately want to express themselves as freely online as they can with a pen and paper. If FrontPage, a blog, and MySpace templates is as good as we can do; we’ve failed. It’s impossible to do a market comparison in a couple of paragraphs, but there’s a few huge differentiators that make us unique:
It’s TOTALLY open source. The MIT license because it lets you do ANYTHING you want short of suing us. If you’re building a startup, and you want to get a jump on the competition but truly own all the code you write – our MIT license makes that very easy. As a developer you don’t have to submit your code back to the project. For all I care you can package c5 up exactly as it is today, call it ‘cement6’ and go sell it on CDs in Wal-Mart. We also went ahead and chose SourceForge for hosting the files, so this decision can’t really be un-done later. C5 is free. Period. We strongly believe in the power of free information, so after years of pretending we didn’t, this complete openness makes us feel great.
It is middleware based, not a “publishing system.” A lot of solutions like FrontPage or Contribute let you edit your website locally and then “publish” up to the live site. We think that is awkward at best, and misses a huge opportunity for interactivity and communication with your audience. If you can’t easily put a form on a page, you’re just making a brochure on the web.
It wasn’t something else first. A lot of what the world uses as CMS actually started as a specific app. We use WordPress for our corporate blog today, because it’s a great blogging platform. That doesn’t mean it’s great for everything else too. The same can be said for any number of news portal apps that are considered general CMS.
Concrete was always designed to be a site building toolkit. We’ve got a flexible permission system and a very intuitive user experience, so we’re not giving you app you have to hack into something else. I remember working on a Mambo project years ago where I was asking myself “gee should I handle these pages with ‘sections’ or ‘topics’ – they seem to basically be the same.” That’s not good. C5 is the building material that brings blocks of content and functionality together into ANY type of website you choose, with ease.
All these other apps are GI-Joes and Barbies – great for playing one type of game. We’re Lego’s – go get creative!
It’s written in the best platform for the web. I know I’m gonna step on toes with this one, but I don’t care. LAMP is still where it is at. Don’t believe me? Go ask Twitter how Rails is doing, ask Friendster about Java, and if you feel a need to ask Microsoft… well, meh. I don’t know why people think PHP has gone out of vogue. It still serves almost all the porn on the web, let the biz dev wankers make idle promises about that! &lt;pauses for laughter&gt;
Now to mitigate the flame war I’m starting, let me point out I think smart programmers with good communication can make a stellar application in anything – even Cold Fusion…And vice-versa is true; no language guarantees a great product without a great process… But, PHP is free, it’s everywhere, it’s fast, it’s OOP (yes c5 is object oriented) and it has stood the test of time as a basic part of the web’s infrastructure. We want to be right there with it as part of the glue that holds the web together.
Most importantly, we have a unique perspective we’ve put into c5. Fundamentally we think there will always be two types of parties working on a web site – the builders and the owners. A builder might be the neighbor kid with a hacked version of Photoshop in his basement, or it could be Razorfish; their goal is to get in and out successfully.
Owners have to live what these builders made. They need it to last for years, not months. They need it to change with them as their
businesses and organizations change. They need to actually be able to use the thing in new ways without being afraid. We think most of our competition serves one side of this equation or the other, and few demonstrate deliberate thought about that conundrum. C5 serves both sides very well. 
CC: You recently were honored with Project of the Month @ Sourceforge. Why do you think that is?
FM: I hope SourceForge appreciated our passion and dug it. This isn’t some business we’re hoping to flip in 18 months, we genuinely think the web could have the same impact on the world as the printing press did, if it gets easier to use.
I also think they played with the app and were impressed. I’d encourage everyone to take 5 minutes to mess around with the shared demo at concrete5.org/demo – you’ll get why it’s compelling pretty quickly. We’re only a 3 month old project, but we’re growing fast, I believe <a href="http://sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">SourceForge</a> saw an opportunity to help some good folk trying to do a great thing. We appreciate the honor very much.
We’re very appreciative about being here too, CMSCritic is a great site that is as comprehensive as you can get in this huge space.
CC: What drove your decision to take what was once a commercial product and make it open source?
FM: Sleeping at night, or lack of it. I just had my second kid. I wasn’t doing anything meaningful, just selling software like my dad. It was time to make a difference in the world. It was always a pleasure seeing the faces of our clients’ light up when we sat down for training at the end of a project and it ended up being just 30 minutes of “hey if you want to change that, just click it. – good luck!” I wanted more people to have that experience, and I didn’t want to run a web shop with 50 employees.
CC: Do you have any regrets with this move? How has it impacted you from a financial standpoint?
FM: I have absolutely no regrets, going open source easily ranks in the best half a dozen decisions of my life so far.
Giving away free software is expensive. Producing Open Source Software (by Karl Fogel) argues that it actually costs more to get to market going open source than going commercial. I don’t know if that’s true yet, but having done both, I can tell you it is quite different. ? So buy a c5kit on our site, or choose us as your hosting provider! Help feed a generous developer!
CC: There are so many big names in the CMS market today, how do you see Concrete5 performing in the next year in comparison?
FM: Being big doesn’t help you deliver great software; in fact the opposite is true. Typically big ideas come from small teams in basements and garages. We’re in a really unique position here – we’ve had the benefit of being a commercial product for years, but we never had so many clients on previous versions of concrete that supporting and updating their installs became overwhelming. We’ve got all the passion of a garage team, but with the experience of a jaded old web shop under our belts. We also don’t have $7m of someone else’s money we have to spend quickly, and make a 20x return on. The way I see it; we’re in an enviable position.
I hope we continue to see exponential growth over the next 14 months. Being the underdog right now is a real pleasure, and keeping the flexibility to act quickly is important to me.
CC: What are your favorite Concrete5 driven websites?
FM: I love the promise behind <a href="http://schoolpulse.com/" target="_blank">SchoolPulse.com</a>, the design behind <a href="http://monsoonworks.com/" target="_blank">MonsoonWorks.com</a>, and the purpose of <a href="http://jtfp.org/" target="_blank">JTFP.org</a>. You can check out a bunch more at getConcrete5.com
CC: If you could change anything about C5 what would it be and why?
FM: I would stop time, go to a beautiful house on the beach with Andy, and write a thousand pages of documentation around how to best use c5. I guess we don’t need the house on the beach, and that does read a little weird now that I’ve written it, but I still think it’d be nice.
CC: How can the community help?
FM: Help yourselves first – design themes or build new blocks, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do with projects that have been open source for much longer. We have a marketplace in the works where you’ll be able to sell your work, or give it away for free.
Help others get going. People need help with everything from installing to building. Start playing around so you can become an expert early, as the market for c5 developers is now emerging. Tell us what we should be doing differently. Send us links to your c5 sites. Tell your friends to check out c5.
CC: Are there any themes or plugins available for C5?
FM: C5 is built around a Themes, Blocks, and Apps architecture that makes it inherently easy to customize without compromising further extendibility.
People around the world are already making stuff for c5 as I type. We’ll be launching a marketplace for them before the end of the year. We’ve got a forum app and an eCommerce app that we’re porting from the previous version of concrete and hope to launch on the marketplace quickly.
CC: What other services does your firm offer? Is CMS your only product offering?
FM: We sell a few smaller software products including AjaxFTP and FlashFloorPlan. We do some high-level support work for other web shops that handle most of the client facing c5 opportunities we hear about. We still do build some web apps and online communities for experienced entrepreneurs, so if you’ve got a big idea you should certainly ask us what we think about it.
CC: Can you provide a sneak peak into upcoming features or changes?
FM: Some small improvements around validation in the blocks that come bundled with the core. The big thing we’re working on now is multi-language support for the dashboard and editing UI. We’re also working on that marketplace &amp; community I mentioned.
CC: Any parting comments?
FM: We’d like to thank CMSCritic for giving us the opportunity to pontificate. Keep up the good work.

Concrete5 founder, Franz Maruna Interview

WordPress is perhaps the best known name in the world of Blogging, CMS' and Open Source and most certainly is a massive entity with over 4 million blogs alone on WordPress.com and countless millions of downloads of their open source cms platform.
All of this in thanks to one young man (and his team of crack developers of course), Matt Mullenweg. We recently had an opportunity to ask Matt a few questions, and here are his replies:
CC: With the recent injection of funding into your company, can you tell us a little about what your plans are and where you plan to take Automattic now that you have some solid funding?
MM: There aren't really plans to change our direction significantly from what it was before. We raised funding because things were working well, not because we wanted to do the opposite of what has worked thus far.
CC: With the recent aquisition of Gravatar and the past formation of Akismet, WordPress, BBPress and your other projects, you've positioned yourself and your company AutoMattic into quite the comfortable niche market. It's obvious that WordPress has become somewhat of the darling of the blog market, if not the CMS market as well. What drove you to make these choices in life and do you have further plans to enhance your offerings with further acquisitions or are you comfortable with where you are in the market today?
<img title="WordPress Content Management System" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/mcm_22771-141x150.jpg" alt="Matt Mullenweg" />
MM: Generally the decision to acquire something vs just building it is a matter of time, cost, and how much momentum the existing service has. With Gravatar, for example, it was trivial to replicate technically but already had a great community and was already built in to a million places.
CC: There have been numerous articles touting WordPress as the future of Content Management Systems. What is your view on this? How do you define content management and how it relates to your platform?
MM: I'm not crazy about the term content management. I don't wake up and say “I want to manage some content today!” I want to blog. I want to podcast. To the extent WordPress is a competitor in the CMS space I think it's because we try to re-examine common assumptions that traditional bloated CMSes make.
CC: What do you see as the future of the blog platform?
MM: I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that rich media like slideshows, audio, and video are going to be a big part of it.
CC: What is the future direction of Automattic? Where do you see your company taking you in the next few years?
MM: With Automattic our goals are somewhat modest: to continue to grow our personnel in an organic fashion and keep up with the explosion of usage in our main products like WordPress.com.
CC: What prompted you to write BBPress? I understand it was written over a couple of days back in 2004. Do you foresee any future merging of the two platforms?
MM: Nope, bbPress and WordPress will always be separate, though I think their integration could be better. I wrote bbPress because after a ton of research I couldn't find anything out there that fit my needs. For example as far as I know bbPress was the first forum system to use CSS instead of tables for layout. It was basic stuff like that.
CC: It's no secret that you are a promotor of Open Source software. What prompted you to choose this route?
MM: I've benefited so much from Open Source in my life it just seems fair to give back.
CC: If you could change one thing about your product or it’s offerings what would it be?
MM: At the data layer I'd like if the database names and organization in WordPress were a little more consistent, they sometimes vary in capitalizations and such because of the legacy of b2.
CC: What makes WordPress better than the numerous other open source CMS and Blog platforms on the market today? What differentiates your product?
MM: I don't think it's any one feature or thing, it's the thousands of plugins and themes available for the platform. That community is impossible to duplicate.
CC: Can you give us a sneak peak of upcoming features we can expect?
MM: In 2.7 look for a redesigned dashboard, drag-and-drop reorganization of the dashboard and write pages, and a built-in plugin browser and installer.
CC: In what ways can WordPress/Automattic use our help as users?
MM: First and foremost would be to introduce the people you care about to blogging and help them with the technical management and upgrades of using WP.
Second I would say that our support and documentation teams could always use more help. However little you think you know, there's always someone out there that knows less and could use your help. Plus doing support is the single best way I know of to learn WordPress inside and out.
CC: Thank you very much for your time, Matt. We look forward to speaking with you again soon!
Matt's personal blog is at <a href="http://ma.tt">Ma.tt</a>

WordPress CMS Founder, Matt Mullenweg Interview

Liferay, Inc., provider of Liferay Portal, the world’s leading enterprise open source portal, recently announced the availability of Liferay Portal Enterprise Edition (EE). The new commercially licensed version of the award-winning open source product, which is offered by subscription with guaranteed long-term support and maintenance, provides organizations a low risk alternative for adopting and maintaining cutting-edge open source technology.
Liferay Portal EE is made available via Liferay’s Enterprise Subscription and Support, a combined support and maintenance subscription that also provides business-critical service level agreements up to one hour response times, 365 days a year and 24 hours a day. In addition, a longer support period provides stability and ongoing updates to organizations seeking to use a single version of the portal over several years. Each enterprise version will be supported with ongoing bug fixes and security and performance enhancements made for the life of a subscription. Liferay Portal EE’s inaugural release includes over 200 enhancements in the areas of security, performance and persistence.
“Enterprise Edition addresses a previously underserved market segment: enterprises seeking the optimal balance between long-term stability and cutting edge technology,” said Bryan Cheung, Liferay’s CEO, “Liferay Portal EE offers an adoption and maintenance strategy for customers unaccustomed to the open source software model, offering the benefits of cost reduction, innovation and flexibility but at a lower risk and with higher predictability.”
Liferay’s Enterprise Subscription and Support offering is rounded out with a customer service portal, web-based incident tracking, an enterprise knowledge base, and a web-based update repository where organizations have direct access to service packs for their version of Liferay Portal EE. Software indemnification and legal indemnification is also available. For more information, please visit <a href="http://www.liferay.com/products/ee">www.liferay.com/products/ee</a>.
The open source distribution of the product, Liferay Portal Standard Edition (SE), will continue to be offered freely to the public under the business-friendly MIT license. Those seeking to download and test-drive the very latest features of Liferay Portal can still do so at <a href="http://www.liferay.com/downloads">www.liferay.com/downloads</a>.

Liferay Portal Released in Enterprise Edition

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