CMS Reviews, Web CMS Reviews

Perhaps the "2" stood for 2 years.

On July 12, EllisLab finally released EE2.1, the first non-beta version of ExpressionEngine 2, a massive change from the EE 1.x line that changes all the underlying code of the software itself, adds an impressive array of new features both large and small, and (EE developers hope) brings to an end a long plateau in the evolution of ExpressionEngine.

In the hyper-competitive market of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) web content management, vendors are desperate to stand out. Squarespace (news, site) differentiates its offering through in-line editing capabilities, an extensive embeddable widgets library, strong iPhone support and dynamic scalability behind the scenes. Sound like your cup of tea? Read on.

 If you don't want to go down the SharePoint route, Atlassian (news, site) could be the alternative you're looking for

Forget all that talk about the cloud and SaaS. Many just don't want to have to worry about their own hardware, OS, and software. If you're one of this benighted group, there's some new options coming your way. Read on to learn about one of them, Drupal (news, site) style.

Oracle acquired Stellent's content management system in a US$ 440 million deal that closed in December of 2006. Since then Oracle has integrated the Stellent assets into the Oracle Fusion Middleware line of products. Here's a look at what is now known as Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM).

For those who want to go their own way in the blogosphere and ignore the big guns of WordPress, Blogger.com, Movable Type or any number of other options, we take a look at BlogEngine.Net. This fella is an open source, server-based software package that aims to simplify the increasingly sophisticated world of online scribbling.

Umbraco is one of only a few open source web content management systems built on Microsoft's .NET technology stack. This CMS is no "out the box" solution. To the contrary, it's a content management system for .NET web developers. And while it's relatively straightforward to use, one must first deal with a steep learning curve.

We took a close look at the latest version of Umbraco (v4.01) and here's what we found.

Back in 2004 — yes, eons ago in Web time — we lamented over not having a blogging client awesome enough to make us do away with our browsers for daily publishing work. Although there were a few promising candidates, ultimately none of them yielded a good enough score on our terms.

Since then we’ve been keeping tabs on developments in the desktop web content authoring and management tool business, and things have certainly come a long way.

Adobe caught our attention anew just recently. Their release of Creative Suite 4, including Contribute v5.0 sparked hope that we might find a wonderful desktop tool in which to while away our days. Let's take a closer look.

With the number of on-premise SharePoint installs going no where but up, one has to wonder why Microsoft has also gone to the trouble of building an online (SaaS) version.

In an interview with Redmond's Director of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), Tom Rizzo indicated the move was in part to reach new customers and grow revenue more efficiently — keeping up with the Joneses also comes to mind.

SharePoint Online isn't for everyone. While it offers a nice bit of functionality that will support many organization's collaboration and document management needs, there are some things you can't do and you should be aware of these before you sign up.

Communities are fast becoming an important part of any business strategy — whether they are internal communities, customer communities, partner communities or some combination thereof.

The choices on technical solution are numerous — a recent Forrester report indicated there were over 100 community solutions in the marketplace today. This probably doesn't include solutions that come as part of a web content management platform. While we won't review all of them, CMSWire will take a look at some of the more well-known, and some not so well known solutions.

We encourage your feedback on our review process and suggestions for products to review. Submit your ideas to editorial team (contact info here).

The first community solution review we have for you hails from Sabre Holdings — these are the guys who bring us Travelocity and all those airline reservation systems we love to hate.

Recently released to the general public, cubeless is a hosted internal — or corporate — community solution. It is a simple community solution without all the functionality you typically see in the more well-known offerings, but that doesn't mean its not worth looking at. In fact, it may mean just the opposite — depending on your requirements.

Telligent's primary offering is Community Server (news, site), a social media and community solution. But it's not the only thing they have going. They also offer a web content management system called Graffiti CMS.

Graffiti CMS is a simple web content management system — the CMS in its name actually stands for "content made simple". Some consider it a blogging platform, but it contains features and functionality that you don't normally see in such as platform. And anyways, the lines between blogging platforms and web content management systems are rapidly blurring, n'est pas?

Our interest piqued, we took a look at Graffiti and here's what we found.

In an Iron Chef-like match-up, a team of developers from Drupal (news, site), Joomla! (news, site) and WordPress (news, site) had 100 hours to build a website based on a specific list of specifications and design. Then representatives of each team got to meet face to face to show off their hard work during the South by Southwest Interactive festival in a session called "The Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny."

It was a battle to the end, with a mix of good humor and serious competition among developers from the open source web content management community.

Digitalus CMS is a fairly new player in the simple CMS market. Their first open source Zend/PHP-based version 1.0 was released in August 2008.

Recently, version 1.5 came out and caught our attention with new features like simple globalization capabilities, web-based installer and the 960 Grid system page layout management.

Some of Digitalus features are strikingly simple, others definitely call for some geeky brains.

Vivvo is an Web Content Management System based on the popular LAMP stack of technologies. Built by Serbian software house, Spoonlabs, the product is designed to deliver and manage interactive publishing websites.

This PHP-based Web CMS features a modern AJAX-ified user interface, a clean and easy to use backoffice set of tools, and the ability to create your front-end website without having to write a line of code. Come along as we take a closer look under the covers.

Their website says it all: Clover CMS is a simple web content management system. Designed to provide basic content management functionality, the intent is to bring content management capabilities to organizations with only minimum requirements and a minimum of appetite for learning new technology.

What Clover Content offers is a straightforward way to create content for your website in a hosted environment, delivered to your website via two simple lines of code.

With this Quick Take Review (see more quick take CMS reviews), we show you exactly what Clover Content CMS is and isn't. Come take a closer look.

Our hearts are thumping and adrenalin levels are high as we tell you about the just-released Day's CQ5 WCM. To get as close as possible to a real-life experience, we went ahead and installed the software from scratch and played with it for a couple of days. It was a fun ride.

Without further due, let’s jump in and see what Day came up with after three years of WCM silence.

Every Content Management Solution Provider seeks to find and market what makes them unique. For Nstein, it's a little about their ability to produce a multi-lingual content management solution for the digital publishing industry. But that's not what makes them unique — they have a “secret sauce”. And it may just be the thing that pushes them ahead of an ever growing and growling pack.

What is Tridion? Or is it Trillian, Trideon or Tridian? What can we say, it’s tough being a Euro web content management vendor in the U.S. market.

After conquering most of Europe, SDL Tridion started its Web CMS quest in the U.S. in 2006 with their flagship CMS product — Tridion R5 — an offering that has received accolades from such critics as analyst firm, Gartner. R5 comes with a myriad of standard Web CMS features, like inline editing using SiteEdit and some unique functionality such as the Translation Manager.

This Quick Take Review is an overview of SDL Tridion R5.2 with a detailed summary, full of “meat,” at the tail end of this article.

Xythos is a provider of on-premise and hosted (SaaS) document management solutions for organizations both large and small. Their hosted product has a somewhat unique history in that is was designed and developed from the very beginning as a web-based service.

The SaaS version of their document management product, launched in December 2006, is the software we've got in our sights today. Xythos on Demand (XOD) is a full featured enterprise document management solution, and true to its name, it is delivered as a hosted service. Join us as we poke around in the binary guts of XOD.

Matchbin is touted as the world’s first ecommerce platform as a service that specializes in both product and service matching. They've created something called the Community Marketplace Multimedia Edition. This technical wonder bundle is a fully fledged social media system, web content management system and ecommerce marketplace rolled-up in one.