Articles - Page 251

Agentic AI for Agencies in 2026

bmckeiver

The first alpha release of Drupal 7.x has been made available for testing.
Drupal is one of the most popular and largest community based open source content management systems available today.
The 7.x series promises some interesting changes to the CMS.
Here are a few of the changes that can be expected:
<dl> </dl>
<h4>Revamped User Interface</h4>
An incredible amount of work has gone into improving the user experience and administration interface. The new administration theme “Seven”, the overlay module, the dashboard and the configurable shortcut bar, all lead to a much more user-friendly interface. In-place editing is enabled for blocks and nodes by default, so modifying the content of a site becomes much simpler.
<h4>Custom Fields</h4>
Drupal 7 bundles in the ability to add custom fields, similar in functionality to the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module. However, fields are no longer limited only to content types; they can be added to users, taxonomy terms, and other entities. Fields also have support for translations.
<h4>Image Handling</h4>
Drupal 7 brings native image handling to core. Image fields may be added to content, and have image styles applied to them, such as scaling, cropping, and other effects.
<h4>Update Manager</h4>
Building on Drupal 6's Update module, which keeps site administrators informed when new module and theme releases are available, the new Update Manger module can also install and upgrade modules and themes.
<h4>Front-end “under-the-hood” improvements</h4>
A new render API allows for highly granular theming, core template files have been revamped to provide more semantic markup, Drupal 7 now has built-in RDFa support, includes jQuery UI and a new AJAX framework, and a new core theme “Stark” which exposes Drupal's markup directly for those who want to dive in and start theming.
In addition, Drupal 7 has several major accessibility enhancements, making it the most accessible release of Drupal to date!
<h4>Back-end “under-the-hood” improvements</h4>
A revamped database layer resolving nearly all limitations in the Drupal 6 database layer, automated testing framework, new PHP stream-based file API that supports private and public files simultaneously, revamped node access system, new hooks for more flexible system interaction, an Entity API, a job queue API, and many, many, many more improvements.
<dl> </dl>
You can download this release from the <a href="http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha1">Drupal website</a>.

First alpha of Drupal 7 is available

mike-johnston

Alfresco Software today announced the availability of <a href="http://bit.ly/alf32cloud">Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2</a>, the latest version of its industry-leading enterprise content management (ECM) product.
With this release, Alfresco enables cloud-based deployments, streamlines email management and archiving and enhances team-based content collaboration. In addition, the Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 Records Management module is the only supported open source solution to have been certified to the 5015.02 standard.
“Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 brings low cost content management and collaboration tools to both commercial and government organizations, and dramatically reduces the barrier to regulatory compliance,” said John Newton, CTO and Co-founder, Alfresco Software. “Supporting the cloud and IMAP standards allows Alfresco customers to address all of their content management requirements – records management, document management, Web content management, collaboration, email archiving or digital asset management – through one value-based solution.”
This release builds on Alfresco’s ability to deliver low-cost, innovative and interoperable open source ECM solutions. New features and benefits in Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 include: Enables efficient and easy ECM in the cloud:
<ul>
<li>Multi-Tenancy – Alfresco is the only ECM system that natively supports multi-tenancy, a critical component of multi-company cloud implementations as it maximizes use of hardware and simplifies administration of multiple instances of Alfresco.</li>
<li>Cloud-deployable – Alfresco now supports multiple deployment options from traditional on-premise to full cloud deployment ranging from a simple AMI to a fully-configured, fault-tolerant and load-balanced Alfresco cluster.</li>
</ul>
Delivers enterprise-class compliance at a dramatically lower cost: 
<ul>
<li>Records Management (RM) module– 5015.2 certified, Alfresco RM enables both commercial organizations and government agencies to address the strict legal requirements associated with managing key business records. The Alfresco open source RM module (available in February 2010 via the Alfresco Enterprise Subscription as a separate module) will enable companies to manage all document content with retention ranging from lightweight to 5015.2-compliant in a single repository, at a fraction of the cost of traditional RM solutions.</li>
<li>IMAP support for email client access &amp; email archiving – Simple ‘drag and drop’ support allows users to share key email messages with colleagues and team members. Unique transparent IMAP standard protocol support provides full access to repository services without a client install and can be accessed from mobile devices.</li>
</ul>
Scalable collaborative community management:
<ul>
<li>Collaborative content creation – Enhancements to Alfresco Share make it easier for teams to collaborate and work together, extending team collaboration from the extranet environment into the cloud through scalable moderated sites, group based site membership.</li>
<li>Rich user profiles – Alfresco enables users to employ social media techniques to navigate and find important information.</li>
<li>Portlet updates – New dashboard features, such as image galleries, a new forms engine, and activities filters make it easier for end users to configure project portals to suit their needs.</li>
</ul>
Simplified, high-availability administration:
<ul>
<li>Storage policies – Alfresco enables organizations to manage the physical storage location for content based on business polices as part of an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) strategy. This allows content to be automatically stored and moved between storage subsystems based on its business value, governance and compliance requirements and relative storage costs.</li>
<li>Monitoring and configuration tools – Based on the industry JMX standard, these tools, combined with the new Alfresco subsystems, allow the administration and reconfiguration of Alfresco without the need to stop and restart the server.</li>
</ul>
Web content management performance enhancement:
<ul>
<li>WCM authoring and deployment – Significant performance increases to improve deployment of Web site content to external web sites through highly-parallel Web site deployment and publishing. New open and flexible deployment architecture makes it simpler to deploy content to multiple delivery environments and allows easy integration into the web delivery tier.</li>
</ul>
Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2 is immediately available for all existing Enterprise Subscription Customers.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.2 Cuts Cost of ECM Compliance, Collaboration & Cloud Deployment

The WordPress development team have released version 2.9.1 to the public.
According to the release announcement:
“This release addresses a handful of minor issues as well as a rather annoying problem where scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly due to incompatibilities with some hosts.”
You can download this latest release from their <a href="http://www.wordpress.org">website</a>.

WordPress 2.9.1 has been released

The long awaited release of Movable Type 5 is now upon us. Released on January 5, 2010, this new release promises a number of exciting changes and enhancements.
Some of the main features:
<ul>
<li>A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.</li>
</ul>
Screenshot:
 
You can download this release from <a href="http://www.movabletype.com">Movable Type</a>.

Movable Type 5 has been released

Kentico CMS version 5.0 was <a href="http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Petr-Palas/December-2009/Kentico-CMS-5-0-Released.aspx">released</a> on December 23, 2009 and this is no small update.
The developer team have worked hard to integrate enterprise level functionality into this release and according to the changes, they've left no stone unturned.
This new release has been optimized to handle 1,000,000 users and 100,000 documents in the database as well and also allows for SQL server replication which is something that was missing in previous releases. This means you can now copy your database and run it over multiple servers to increase performance. This is a very welcome change.
In order to allow for maximum user acceptance and adoption, they have also integrated a new option that allows administrators to adjust the view based on roles. What this means is that users who do not have certain functions within the system, will simply not see those menus at all which reduces confusion and complexity and increases comfort levels.
A good examples of this functionality is shown in this screenshot:

That's really only the tip of the iceberg as far as changes go. A full list of the most exciting improvements is below:
<ul>
<li>Introduction of widgets (web parts)</li>
<li>New design with the ability to create your own skins</li>
<li>Active Directory import utility</li>
<li>Drag and drop functionality in the content tree</li>
<li>Side-by-side comparison of document versions</li>
<li>and many more…</li>
</ul>
You can see all of the changes in the <a href="http://www.kentico.com/Download/Version_History.aspx">version history</a>.

Kentico CMS 5.0 offers enterprise level functionality

Feels like Christmas today with all of the releases happening and Injader is no exception. They have announced 2.4.3 is available for download.
Key features of Injader CMS 2.4.3 include:
<ul>
<li>URL mapping – the way Injader handles links has been given a major overhaul in this release. Pages should load slightly more quickly.</li>
<li>Automatic redirects – if you change to a different link style, all requests to the old link style will be automatically redirected.</li>
<li>New link style – a date-based link style has been added.</li>
<li>Custom excerpts – if you use excerpts in your theme, you can now override the automatically generated excerpts (limited to a set number of characters) and type in your own excerpt for each article. If a custom excerpt is not available, the auto excerpt will be used instead.</li>
<li>Custom ordering – areas now contain a new “custom” ordering option. If you choose this, you'll be able to use a new “order” field on the Post Settings tab when editing an article. Simply enter the order for each article and that order will be used on the site.</li>
</ul>
Injader's website is <a href="http://www.injader.com/release-news/injader-243-released/">here</a> and you can download the release from their sourceforge page <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/injader/">here</a>.

Injader CMS 2.4.3 released

A new release candidate for TYPOlight is available for testing. For obvious reasons, this is not recommended to use on production sites but if you are willing to assist them with testing, it would be greatly appreciated.
A full change log that itemizes what has been done since release candidate 1 can be found here: <a href="http://www.typolight.org/changelog.html">TYPOlight changelogs</a>.
One of the key changes is an Improved Events list:
<blockquote>
Similar to the improved news lists, the event list interval can now be set dynamically by changing the parameter name in the URL. The module responds to “year”, which displays all events of the specified year, to “month”, which displays all events of the specified month and to “day”, which displays all events of a particular day. In addition, you can configure the news list to only show past or upcoming events, which replaces the upcoming events module (removed in version 2.8.RC2).
</blockquote>
You can learn more about TYPOlight or download the release from <a href="http://www.typolight.org">their website</a>.

New release candidate for TYPOlight 2.8 available for testing

Looks like WordPress has another release close on the heels of 2.9 which was released a <a href="/wordpress-2-9-has-officially-been-released/">couple of days ago</a>.
Apparently, this is due to a bug in certain versions of PHP's curl extension. Right now this maintenance release is in beta until they determine for sure that it resolves the issues correctly without creating further ones.
From the announcement:
<blockquote>With these versions of curl, scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly. To fix this problem as well as a handful of other, lesser issues, we are quickly releasing 2.9.1, the first maintenance release of the 2.9 line. Help us get 2.9.1 ready to go by testing 2.9.1 Beta 1.</blockquote>
You can grab the release from the <a href="http://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/wordpress-2-9-1-beta-1/">release announcement page</a>.

WordPress team releases 2.9.1 beta 1 to address PHP Curl bug

CMS Summit 26

Find out at CMS Summit 26, May 12 - 13 in Frankfurt, Germany

What's ahead for CMS in the agentic era?

#ffffff

The open source content management system, <a href="http://www.s9y.org">Serendipity</a>, the platform that runs this very site and our sister site, <a href="http://ww.linuxcritic.com">Linux Critic</a> has been upgraded to 1.5.
(note: after we wrote this article, there was a bug found so the newest version is actually 1.5.1)
Additional details from the release announcement:
<blockquote>
This version mainly addresses login security by changing our method how passwords are stored to use salted SHA1 checksums instead of plain MD5 checksums. This makes password retrieval (rainbow attacks, see <a href="http://blog.s9y.org/archives/205-Serendipity-Snapshot-New-login-hashing.html">special blog posting</a>) through the database virtually impossible. Another thing is improved PHP 5.3 compatibility.
For users of our Bundled WYSIWYG-Editor <a href="http://www.xinha.org/">Xinha</a> users now have the ability to easily customize the appearance of this panel through a “my_custom.js” file inside the template directory (a draft of such a file can be found as fallback default in the htmlarea/subdirectory).
One cool new feature for developers is that now also templates can register themselves inside the plugin API hooks to execute specific things, that don't require installation of an event plugin.
Other news include:
<ul>
<li>new event API hooks</li>
<li>fixed PDF nail generation</li>
<li>ability to auto-scroll on borders when Drag/Dropping plugins</li>
<li>UTC server time zone support</li>
<li>improvements in the Smarty functions to easier use Serendipity as a CMS for individual entry output.</li>
<li>quicksearch improvements for doing a wildcard-search when too few searchresults were found on a fixed searchterm</li>
<li>support for Typepad anti-spam server-checks, additionally to Akismet</li>
</ul>
Minor improvements since the 1.5-beta1 release:
<ul>
<li>more PHP 5.3.0 compatibility improvements</li>
<li>Disallow uploading any files that contain “.php.” in the filename for extra security with Apache MimeMagic-Modules</li>
<li>expermiental PDO:SQlite support</li>
<li>usability improvements for the comment moderation panel (bottom-navigation, removed border increase)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
Grab your copy today at the <a href="http://s9y.org">Serendipity website</a>.

Serendipity CMS sees 1.5 upgrade

Described as the open source social engine which powers all kinds of social environments, Elgg, was first created back in 2004 and built to run on the popular php/mysql combination. <a href="http://www.elgg.org">Elgg</a> is easily installed once a database and its proper credentials have been created.
In my test install, I created a new website at my web host and FTP'd the necessary files to install Elgg 1.6.1 to the root of my new site. One thing that was different in this install compared to others I've tested is that Elgg requires you to create a data directory the system uses to store uploaded files, profile icons and photos that sits outside the root of the website.
Not a big deal, just something to note as you follow Elgg's <a href="http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Installation" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">installation documentation</a>.
<h3>Administration</h3>
Once installed, I was perplexed with a sparse login page that sported basically a blank page and login box. I retraced the installation steps in my mind trying to remember if I had created an administrator account. If you're like me, you don't necessarily read all the documentation every time. Finally I registered as a user just to see what would happen. The message “You have successfully registered for New Elgg site.” appeared. Then, after logging in, a new message told me that my administration account had been successfully created. Of course, I could have saved some angst on my part by actually reading in the configuration documentation that the first user account is the administrator account. Lesson learned.
Elgg presents the administrative account with a site management interface that is very gray, but decently organized. As prescribed by its creators, I navigated to the tools administration page and enabled all of the widgets provided by the typical installation which includes such standards as pages and blogs, but also niceties like captcha, notifications, content reporting, garbage collection, and validation emails. From the left navigation bar in the administrative area, all management functions are easily accessible. And, while it's not eye-grabbing, the interface is functional and easy to understand.
 
<h3>Dashboards</h3>
In addition to my administration account, I created two more user level accounts. Mike1 was added via the administrative panel and Mike2 was created by a typical front-end registration on the site itself.
Both methods worked as advertised and each member was provided a dashboard from where they could add and edit the amount of information displayed. The default dashboard comes blank but the site administrator has the option on determining which of the base widgets are pushed out to the subsequent dashboard of each registered user. I can see where an admin would want to push basics out like pages, friends, activity, and the file widget just to get things started. The individual member has full control of their dashboard so they also have the privileges of removing widgets they don't want as well. As Mike1, you can see that I added the pages, friends, activity, group membership and wire posts widgets. What's nice about this system particularly is that I can click Edit page and simply drag the /widgets to the appropriate channel position, save, and I have new widgets to work with. If you've worked at all with WordPress, the channel management feature in Elgg will feel familar.
 
<h3>Pages</h3>
To add a new page, a member simply navigates from their Pages widget to the More Pages link. This link goes to the Pages home where you can add a new page and/or edit your welcome message that will appear on your pages home.
You can also reach your pages by navigating the top navigation bar from Tools &gt; Pages to arrive at the pages home as well. Regardless of which path you take, you arrive at a nicely organized interface that offers a clean, basic method to add content pages. Pages have the ability to accept comments from other members, have sub-pages, as well as the ability of the author to set read/write permissions.
I do have one gripe regarding the editor. I use the tab key a lot to advance to the next text field or box, but in Elgg's editor I have to depress the tab key 16 times to move from the page title text box to the body of the page. Then five more times to get from the body to the tag text box. This feature I could definitely live without.
 
<h3>Blogging</h3>
The blogging widget also comes with the default Elgg installation and in my test, I created one blog entry for users, Mike1 and Mike2. Neither could see the other's blog from their dashboard under the Activity widget until they either became friends or visited the homepage of the website where the widget Latest Blog Posts displays all of the latest posts from members. Each member is provided an interface that includes links to not only their blog but to their friends blogs, all site blogs, and of course, the ability to write a blog post link.
If the user decides to write a blog post, they will find that the new post interface is nearly identical to the new page interface. The only difference I could see is that when I user creates a new page, edit permissions is assignable and with blogs, only viewing levels can be assigned.
One feature that I either wasn't able to figure out or isn't available with the default installation was how to add the blog widget to either of my user's dashboard. It would be nice to have something similar to that of the pages widget only for blogs.
Currently, at least from the experience I had, you can only access your blog homepage from the top navigation bar going from Tools &gt; Blog. If you know how, please comment and let me in on it.

<h3>Summary</h3>
In addition to the page and blog widgets, the default installation provides recent bookmarks, twitter integration, group membership, activity, wire posts, and file management. All performed well and I was especially fond of the wire posts where you can make a quick post similar to that of Twitter and tell everyone who is a member of the sight special news or make an announcement. Even though I focused mainly on the default widgets, there is a slew of add-ons available at the <a href="http://community.elgg.org/mod/plugins/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Elgg community site</a> offering everything from sitemaps and polls to Facebook, MySpace and AdBrite integration.
I like simplicity and this seems to be a running theme throughout Elgg. While my review was focused more or less on the management of content that the user creates via pages, blogs, I only scratched the surface on my test of Elgg and look forward to working with it more to see what it can really do.
<h4>Pros</h4>
<ul>
<li>Comparable to some commercial offerings.</li>
<li>Easily extensible with a vast collection of widgets.</li>
<li>Easy to navigate and administrate.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Cons</h4>
<ul>
<li>Tabbing in the editor was tough to work with.</li>
<li>Look and feel of the default install fell flat.</li>
<li>Remember, the first account is the administrator account.</li>
</ul>
Website: <a href="http://www.elgg.org">http://www.elgg.org</a>
<h4>About the Author</h4>
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Michael Childress has been a system analyst and writer for 10 years. He currently writes for CMS Critic and is a full-time analyst.

Elgg Social Networking CMS - Review and Commentary

Over the weekend, a <a href="//www.typolight.org/news/items/major-security-hole-in-the-typolight-install-tool.html">major Typolight security hole</a> was identified that allows hackers to bypass password authentication and gain access to Typolight sites.
In an email sent to the Typolight community, the Typolight team has made it quite clear the impact of this security hole and why they want people to patch immediately.
We would like to applaud the Typolight developers for their honesty and the time they have taken to explain to people why they need to patch right away. It's clear the Typolight team does not mess around when it comes to security and that's should make those using their CMS feel like they have made the right choice.
More about this security hole and how to fix it can be found here: <a href="http://www.typolight.org/news/items/major-security-hole-in-the-typolight-install-tool.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">http://www.typolight.org/news/items/major-security-hole-in-the-typolight-install-tool.html</a>

Major Typolight CMS security hole identified

WordPress 2.9 has officially been released to the public today. With a number of awesome improvements, this makes for one of the best upgrades to date.
Some of the key improvements from the user standpoint include:
Global undo/”trash” feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash). This also eliminates those annoying “are you sure” messages we used to have on every delete.
Built-in image editor allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images to show them who’s boss. This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
Screenshot of image editor: Batch plugin update and compatibility checking, which means you can update 10 plugins at once, versus having to do multiple clicks for each one, and we’re using the new compatibility data from the plugins directory to give you a better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress. This should take the fear and hassle out of upgrading.
<a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Embeds">Easier video embeds</a> that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv (and more in the next release).
<ol></ol>
You can see the full announcement of this releases on <a href="http://wordpress.org/development/2009/12/wordpress-2-9/">WordPress.org</a>

WordPress 2.9 has officially been released

Two new releases of the extremely popular open source content management system, <a href="http://drupal.org">Drupal</a>, are available for public consumption. These new versions cover both the 5.x series and the 6.x series.
You can preview the <a href="http://drupal.org/node/661600">Drupal 6.15 release notes</a> as well as the <a href="http://drupal.org/node/661598">Drupal 5.21 release notes</a> to see the full list of changes.
From the announcement:
Drupal 5.21 and 6.15 were released in response to the discovery of security vulnerabilities. Details can be found in the official security advisory:
<ul>
<li><a href="http://drupal.org/node/661586">SA-CORE-2009-009</a></li>
</ul>
To fix the security problem, you can either (1) upgrade Drupal or (2) patch Drupal.
We strongly recommend you do a full upgrade (which is also detailed in the security announcement) as the patches do not contain the additional bug fixes that went into the releases. Applying the patches will leave your site in an unversioned state and confuse the update status module, which will keep reminding you to upgrade to 6.15 or 5.21. Please read the announcement for details on the patch.
If you still prefer to patch Drupal, apply the <a href="http://drupal.org/files/sa-core-2009-009/SA-CORE-2009-009-6.14.patch">http://drupal.org/files/sa-core-2009-009/SA-CORE-2009-009-6.14.patch</a> file to your Drupal 6.14 codebase or <a href="http://drupal.org/files/sa-core-2009-009/SA-CORE-2009-009-5.20.patch">http://drupal.org/files/sa-core-2009-009/SA-CORE-2009-009-5.20.patch</a> to your Drupal 5.20 codebase.

Two new Drupal CMS releases are now available

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