Latest Open Source CMS News & Articles

DotNetNuke (news, site) is having a little party today to celebrate the landing of US$ 8 million in additional Series B funding for their open source .NET web content management platform.

The financing, led by new investor UV Partners and including August Capital and Sierra Ventures (existing investors), will — of course — help fund product development and marketing and sales initiatives.

2009 was a strong year for DotNetNuke, with a new version of their Web CMS platform, a revamped partner program, the launching of their commercial edition(s) and the acquisition of Snowcovered (catch all the news here).

With this additional funding, we should expect even more things from the open source company this year, even though as President and CEO Navin Nagiah says, they didn't really need the money:

DotNukeNuke had phenomenal market traction during our first year. We signed nearly 500 customers for our subscription products and closed nearly 40,000 transactions to 15,000 customers on Snowcovered.com, our online marketplace for third party add-ons. While we did not need capital given our revenue traction, we liked the partnership and the terms so we decided to close a new round. We welcome and look forward to working with UV Partners.

Need it or not, the funding will go a long way to expanding the existing platform and perhaps a move into new markets. We want to know what they will spend on the money on exactly. Come on DotNetNuke, leak the roadmap!

As promised late last year, and after weeks of public beta, Nuxeo (news, site) has released the GA version of its new Digital Asset Management (DAM) product.

In addition to extensible architecture and a decent feature set, one of the main selling points seems to be Nuxeo DAM’s compliance with the CMIS spec.

The Interactive Knowledge Stack, or IKS, has reached its second year. In that time they've made promising headway, but like the rest of the semantic web, they're really just getting started.

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Red Hat (news, site), one of the poster children of the Linux and open source communities, has launched a new online community to promote open source across various industries.

Some people are never content to sit back and enjoy what they've accomplished. Rob Klause is one of these people. He took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about working with the Executive Office of the President, Drupal (news, site) and Siteworx.

dotCMS (news, site) is getting ready to dot the i's and cross the t's on version 1.9 Community Edition release of their open source J2EE/Java Web CMS. You can see the progress by checking out the just released “Developer Preview.”

To give you a little taste of what to expect in the upcoming release:

• New UI built using the Dojo toolkit with UX improvements
• Improved multi-site management for large scale scenarios
• Interoperability via a CMIS interface
• i18n compliant admin tools for better internationalization
• Changes to roles and permissions model with substitution of groups for hierarchical roles and role membership
• New Form Builder Tool for web data collection

Trial download (still buggy, not recommended for production environments) can be found here. Currently in beta, the GA release of 1.9 is expected shortly.

Later this year, dotCMS also plans to release “the code-hardened enterprise version” of their product based on version 1.9 Community Edition.

Are you somehow not aware that Drupal 7 Alpha was recently released? Or are you just so busy that you don't have time to check it out for yourself? A Drupal (news, site) tutorial site has released a video preview.

Nuxeo (news, site) shared the news that their Galaxy program partner metaLogic Consulting Inc. (who is also an IBM partner of more than 12 years) has built software for migration from some of Big Blue's products to the Nuxeo open source Enterprise CMS.

While the software won’t be officially available until spring, it’s being demoed away starting today at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando, FL, until January 21.

Why migrate from IBM to Nuxeo you ask? One reason could be the fact that Lotus Domino Document Manager has been discontinued in 2009 and if you’re looking for a migration path, here’s this option.

Meanwhile, IBM is offering its entitled Lotus Domino Document Manager customers a migration to IBM Lotus Quickr that comes with either IBM Content Manager Collaboration Edition or IBM FileNet Content Manager Collaboration Edition.

As described in metaLogic’s blog post, the toolset they produced is designed for migration of email and documents from Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino Document Manager into Nuxeo’s repository. Customizable and configurable, the software can be used in either user-centric or server-centric way.

Hoping to present at DrupalCon 2010? The call for presentations is now open. This year's tracks are:

• Welcome to Drupal (news, site)
• Design, Theme and Usability
• Providing Professional Drupal Services
• Configuration, Set-up & Administration
• Under the Hood
• Leveraging Drupal for Your Business

In order to submit a session proposal, you need to have already purchased your ticket to DrupalCon and log into the conference site. Session submissions must be turned in by February 15, 2010. From there:

• The public votes on sessions from February 16 through March 1
• Speakers are notified on March 5
• The final schedule is posted on March 15

The conference itself begins April 17 with the Core Developer Summit and ends on Thursday April 22 with the Code Sprint. The event is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco — a fine city to keep yourselves entertained before and after the festivities.

Drupal 7 (news, site), much anticipated, is now out in Alpha 1 release and the call for testers is upon us.

This is the first time that version 7 of the open source Web CMS is being offered to the entire Drupal community, and of course, the rest of the world.

Angela Byron (aka Webchick), Drupal 7 project co-maintainer, talked about three queues she wanted testers focused on prior to today's release including:

1. Looking for "seriously" critical bugs related to API breakages, the broken upgrade path or missing security updates, and any user-facing bugs that don't make D7 look all that fantastic. Look for details on her D7 alpha hit list.
2. Getting documentation on API changes up to date. Angie is hoping that developers make good on their #D7CX pledges so that the updates of modules from 6.x to 7.x isn't stalled.
3. Final reviews of the user interface text.

Of course as hard as the community may work, all these things have probably not been complete, but the Alpha 1 release has come out just the same. This release is being treated as a stable release, so no new changes will be made unless they are non-API-breaking bug fixes.

To make the release even more special, it comes on the 9th anniversary of Drupal. Says Dries Buytaert:

Exactly nine years ago, I released Drupal 1.0.0. When I shared my hobby project with the world, I expected no more than a dozen people to actually use it. It took a large community of people to make Drupal successful, but today, Drupal has hundreds of thousands of friends. Thank you to everyone who has been and is contributing to Drupal. Rock!

So happy birthday to Drupal. Now head over to the Drupal Project website and get your D7 Alpha 1 download, or just select form here:

• 7.0-alpha1 release: Download | Notes
• 7.x-dev snapshot: Download | Notes

Kaltura (news, site) is making a number of moves lately with its open source video platform. After being listed as one of 10 Innovative Application Companies Under $100M to Watch by IDC you probably expected to start seeing things happening. And happening they are.

When Dries Buytaert founded Drupal (news, site), he intended it in part to be a platform where he could test out and play with new technologies. Drupal, for example, was an early adopter of RSS. With the pending release of Drupal 7, this goal isn't changing, and the Drupal 7 team is asking for feedback from the "pedantic web community" on how its implemented some new features.

Alfresco (news, site) got friendly with IBM Lotus today via a (soon to be available) integration of the Alfresco Enterprise CMS with IBM Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal.

Drupal (news, site) has long considered itself a social software solution as much as a web content management system. That may ring even more true not only for Drupal, but Joomla (news, site) as well, as Google announced that both open source WCMS now integrate Google Friend Connect.

eZ Systems’ (news, site) 2010 New Year's resolutions are all customer-serving: look-and-feel editing, XML export and collaboration in eZ Publish 4.2 open source web content management system.

Martin Aspeli of the Plone (news, site) project recently sat down and evaluated a "whole slew" of web content management systems. From there, he's digested his observations and shared them in the form of a fairly extensive writeup. While it's obviously Plone-centric, there's a lot that applies to anyone who's trying to choose what Web CMS they want to work with.

For those of you who have followed the whole "is it dead or not" discussion on Telligent's Graffiti Web CMS, well there seems to be a final answer.

A very short announcement on the Telligent blog says that Graffiti has made the move to CodePlex as an open source solution.

Graffiti has a strong developer following, and we encourage those involved with Graffiti to continue to provide peer-to-peer support for one another. Users and developers can continue collaborating together to enhance the product. We look forward to seeing the innovation the open source community will bring to Graffiti.  We are especially thankful for some of the community members that stepped up and offered to help shepherd the project.

Hmmm, well this is all interesting. How many times did we ask Telligent what its plans were for Graffiti, only to be told that although there's nothing formal defined, Graffiti was still very much alive and well.

Now it's not that we expected Telligent to reveal all its plans before they were officially made, but many did see the writing on the wall — if you go by the comments on our review of Graffiti.

Now licensed under the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL), Graffiti v1.2 is available on CodePlex with some "extra" assemblies still on the Telligent website — a website that needs to be cleaned up as it still talks about different license versions.

It is also interesting to note that Telligent's own website doesn't use Graffiti Web CMS, but instead uses CS Publisher, now called Scribus CMS.

Anyway, time to put this baby to bed. Happy downloading!

DotNetNuke (news, site) is having a good year. They have picked up a new marketplace for their .NET open source Web CMS and application development framework, added several new editions to support commercial clients and beefed up their developer support.

Add to that the latest version of DotNetNuke (5.2) which includes some very feature friendly Telerik RadControls and you would say they deserve an "A" for effort.

But they have one more piece of news they want to share with all of us. And that is that their Fusion partner program has really taken hold since it was launched three months ago. In fact, the program now includes 9 Gold Partners and 6 Certified Partners.

The program enables solution providers to deliver implementation services around the professional editions of DotNetNuke, supports the company's push to be the most used .NET Web CMS on the market.

DotNetNuke has chosen to focus their efforts on being the back-end for managing web information — the web application framework — and not to specialize in any particular area of web content management (like Interactive Marketing).

Will this focus be the right move as s continues to be redefined and re-imagined? We'll be watching closely in 2010 to see how they do.

If there's one thing near and dear to a writer's hard little heart, it's content. Unfortunately through much of the history of the web, content is always the last thing people worry about when building a site. Content Strategist Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder of BrainTraffic.com, aims to change all that.