Latest Open Source CMS News & Articles

After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia (news, site) has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

Installing everything needed for a CMS can be quite daunting, so it comes as welcome news that eZ (news, site) has developed an all-in-one installer for those just starting out or switching in the open source CMS world.

Welcome to July 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

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.

The initial vision for Plone 4 was so complex that it wasn't slated for release until 2010. In order to allow for smaller, more focused releases, Plone (news, site) Founder Alexander Limi announced at the Plone Symposium at Penn State that the Plone Roadmap has been revised. What was originally Plone 4 has been split into Plone 4 and Plone 5.

Once upon a time, a company called Resolve Digital went on a quest to find the perfect content management system. After looking high and low, far and wide, the company finally called off the search party. Sadly, they were empty handed.

But all was not lost. Instead of settling for something less than perfect, Resolve Digital decided to take matters into their own hands and build an all-new CMS from the ground up. After 5 years under the hood, RefineryCMS is not only up and running, it’s also up for grabs. 

The world is not enough. Following the recent opening of its U.S. office, the open source ECM vendor Nuxeo (news, site) keeps expanding its global reach with a new partnership announced today.

Kisiwa, the content management solutions firm, signed an exclusive strategic and distribution agreement with Nuxeo to provide sales, professional services and support in Southern and Eastern Europe, Russia, Middle East and Africa.

Hangin’ around the Switzerland area this September? Be sure to mosey on over to the Magnolia Conference for an open source good time.  

The conference, held in Basel, Switzerland, will consist of keynotes and sessions with business and technical topics in regard to Magnolia CMS (news, site). Speakers include Pascal Mongold and Boris Kraft, Magnolia's CEO and CTO, respectively. Additionally, some folks from Day Software, Aperto, and several other companies and institutions are scheduled to make an appearance as well. The whole shebang will then close with an "Unconference-style" event run by the attendees.

Here's a closer look at the schedule:

Presentation Day, September 10th

During Presentation Day, participants of Magnolia Conference will gain the knowledge they need to build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies.

Community Day, September 11th

Community Day will be an Unconference. This means that attendees themselves will be responsible to propose talks, vote for talks, present, share, question, inquire and otherwise make the event.

For more information on the event, including a detailed schedule of speakers, head on over here. If you aren't going to be anywhere near Switzerland but would still like to get out and shake some hands, check out our complete list of events for something a little closer to home. 

The next major version of Joomla (news, site), Joomla 1.6, is available in pre-release. If you're an extension maintainer, a site builder or just someone who really can't wait to check out the next generation of tools, here's a look at what this initial release has to offer.

The Plone (news, site) project has launched a user feedback system for collecting Plone improvement ideas. This tool allows Plone users to suggest, discuss, and vote on ways the open source CMS can be improved.

While the project doesn't promise that every idea will be implemented, they intend to use this system to understand what Plone users want to see added and improved. In particular, the team recommends that anyone interested in contributing to the project should take a look and see what ideas are the most in demand and sound like something they may want to work on.

If you find something and end up working on a significant new feature or change, then you'll pull together a Plone Improvement Proposal, or PLIP. This PLIP will be reviewed by the Framework Team assigned to the major release you're aiming for (as an example, the deadline for Plone 4 PLIPs just passed).

For more information:

• See the FAQ "How to suggest a feature for Plone"
• Submit and browse Plone improvement ideas
• Read the official idea system launch posting

With eZ Systems (news, site) starting its eZ Conference and Awards bash today, it warms up with news of a new integration deal for its open source web CMS eZ Publish with WoodWing's (news, site) publishing solution.

We imagine the creation of Bluenog’s (news, site) flagship solution went down a little like this: Someone was tired of switching between their portal, content management system and business intelligence tools, so they threw all three into a melting pot, stirred it up, and *BAM!* out popped Bluenog ICE.

OK, so maybe that’s not how it went. Whatever the case, the recipe is still a stellar one, and the recognition the company’s received certainly proves it. Today at Boston's Enterprise 2.0 conference Bluenog announced that ICE is back for another round, this time as version 4.5. The new software includes an Enterprise Wiki, secure group calendaring features and enhanced centralized administration.

Wendell Challenger is an "uber bike geek" and a graduate-level science student studying topics related to evolution. He's also one of the volunteer writers and photographers for Momentum Magazine, a free bi-monthly publication for urban cyclists available in twenty cities in the US and Canada.

When it was decided to build Momentum's, um, momentum, by bringing its free content onto the Web, Challenger took on the project. Free and open source seemed a no-brainer between his scientific background and the free, community nature of the magazine. At Open Web Vancouver 2009 (news, site) he shared his experience.

Squiz (news, site), provider of MySource Matrix, the Open Source Content Management System from down under, is all about being supportive. To prove it, the team behind the name announced that it now offers its shoulder to anyone in need, at any time, from any place.

The new Global, 24x7 Service Level Agreement (SLA) is designed to provide assistance via a ‘round the clock support desk for any aspect of the MySource Matrix system. Support is provided on a per-system basis, regardless of location or language. Meaning? As Squiz puts it, “Backoffice users from Victoria to Venezuela can simply pick up the phone at any time of day to get a system fault resolved.”

Standard Squiz SLA offerings also include a 99.9% system uptime guarantee and a complete system warranty.

“We’re introducing our Global 24x7 SLA in order to make Supported Open Source CMS an easier choice for large multi-national organisations and to help them reduce the complexity of managing a distributed web CMS environment,” Said Squiz CEO and founder John-Paul Syriatowicz. We know that this new support offering makes a standard, commercially licensed CMS SLA look arcane and hopelessly expensive by comparison.”

Need more convincing on the "arcane" and "hopelessly expensive" bit? Check out the inner workings of our Australian friends here.

We’ve covered their previous version — Hippo CMS 7.0 — in some detail. It was a major release with serious changes to the content management system’s core.

This 7.1 release does not bring significant news, but does introduce some changes that Hippo CMS users should take into account.

Hippo (site, news) says the focus of this version is on stability, usability and performance.

Alfresco (news, site) is one of the most well known open source enterprise content management providers. With over 1.4 million downloads of their solution already and a number of marque clients for the Alfresco Enterprise, they should be happy to continue business as usual.

But, as usual, they aren't. This week they have announced a partnership with ParaScale, a cloud storage software provider, to offer Alfresco "Content as a Service".

New versions of the Linux kernel typically come and go without a lot of fanfare except in the communities most affected by the latest bug fixes and other changes. However, with the release of Linux kernel 2.6.30, the broader open source community has reason to smile.

Most of these reasons involve consumer-friendly features.

Calling all Joomla (news, site) fans! Back in January of this year, a seed was planted. That is, Joomla core team member Sam Moffat posted a blog entry that spawned comments around the desire for a better way to connect the Joomla community—specifically, users and developers.

A handful of similar posts followed on the Joomla blog, and the response from the community went from seemingly mild to “overwhelming,” as their website states. The result? The brand spankin’ new Joomla Resource Directory (JRD), which was pre-launched in May and finally went live earlier this month.

Bringing their new offering to the table along with much enthusiasm, the team claims that there's no easier way to find developers, service providers, and other valuable resources.

"We think this will be a great way to connect end-users and service providers in the Joomla Community," said Wendy Robinson of the JRD Team."Most small businesses can't afford to advertise on the Joomla.org sites and this will provide them wide exposure. With close to a million visitors and 14 million page views a month, the JED has proven that there is wide interest in products related to Joomla."

So far it looks like the majority of Joomla fans are pleased with the new directory, if only, perhaps, because they now have something to tide them over until the much anticipated release of Joomla 1.6.

Interested? Head on over to www.resources.joomla.org.

Two Java-based portal projects are merging code bases in order to create a best of breed result through their combined strengths: eXo Platform SAS (news, site) and Red Hat's JBoss (news, site).

The goal? To merge JBoss Portal, eXo's Portal and eXo's Java Client Repository (JCR) into a single project that strikes the right balance of robustness and usability.

One can get a little confused when a vendor has a few different names for their solution. MODx (news, site), an open source web content management system, is one of these that, if you aren't really familiar with the product and grown with it, you might not fully understand why they have two different names for MODx: Evolution and Revolution.

Let's have a look at the difference between the two and talk about the latest Release Candidate for MODx Evolution.

With the release of v7.5 of the open source content management system, OpenCms (news, site), it looks like they gone through previous versions, underlined all the problems they could find, taken in-hand all reported bugs from their community, and fixed them.

Also added is a collection of new features that weren’t there before and a significant upgrade to the OpenCMS Content Relation Engine (CRE), adding some new features to something that was already quite nifty.

Developed by Alkacon Software with the help of the OpenCms community, the thing to take really note of in this release is the improvements to the CRE.