Web Content Management Systems (CMS) News & Articles

WordPress (news, site) made a small announcement today regarding whether or not the GPL applies to themes. 

WordPress refers to the GPL as their Bill of Rights, but we like to think of it as a free software license. The GPL is a popular licence that grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition, and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved—even when the work is changed or added to.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress writes, "We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license." But just to be double sure, he recently consulted the Software Freedom Law Center for their opinion. Mullenweg's results were summed up on the WordPress blog in one simple line:

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."

Of course, cutting out CSS and JavaScript from WordPress would get kind of hairy and horrible, so the final verdict from the WordPress team is that they will continue to only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible.

In order to recognize and celebrate a few of the folks creating 100% GPL themes as well as providing support and other services around them, WordPress has a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes here.

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.

Call it rubber-necking or whatever you want, but when one company buys another company in this business we want to know the details.

Such is the case with the announcement that Pennsylvania based Really Strategies (news, site) has just bought out DocZone (news, site), a Dutch-based SaaS XML content management provider under — you guessed it — undisclosed terms.

The Joomla Web CMS project — as many of you well know — is based on the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means, among other things, that the Joomla project generally has an ethos of encouraging collaboration, community and free software.

The Joomla team confirmed in 2007 that both Joomla v1.0 and v1.5 were released under the GPL license. Now, the Joomla folks have taken things one step further.

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.

WoodWing (news, site) released two updated versions of its language-improving Smart Speller and Smart Hyphen plug-ins for Adobe's Creative Suite 4.

In August of last year, the CNW Group, a provider of news and information distribution services for communication professionals, launched their social media release, the evolution of their multi-media release which includes print, audio, video and Internet and a little more.

Now they go another step in supporting the needs of communication professionals with the release of the CNW MediaRoom, an externally hosted website that integrates into a company's website, providing the ability to quickly and easily provide communications like press and social media releases.

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.

FatWire (news, site) is back in the news. These folks have been busy lately. In between "rescue" plans and moves towards worldwide "domination," the web content management vendor also had some time to work on two new releases — Engage 7.5 (content targeting) and Analytics 2.5 (content optimization) — which bring major architectural changes involving open source-based technology.

Apple may make beautiful products but it resembles North Korea in how it communicates with the world.

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.

OK, you can toss WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 1 to the wind. Why? because even though it was released only five days ago, the popular blogging platform has just announced the release of 2.8.1 Beta 2. 

Along with the release comes a side note from the WordPress team which states: "We especially suggest, recommend, and beg that plugin developers test their plugins against beta 2 and let us know of any issues."

The notable bug fixes in Beta 2 include: 

• Translation of role names fixed
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
• Switched back to curl as the default transport
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload

You can review the full list of tickets fixed here. 

WordPress Baker

“Baker” was named after Chet Baker, an American jazz trumpeter. Accordingly, the new version of WordPress is pret-ty jazzy. The feature that grabs the most attention is arguably the Themes Browser, which allows users to browse, filter and install themes all from the WordPress dashboard. Such a feat no doubt raises the usability bar for many a Web CMS, including Drupal, whose themes are reportedly less than easy to install without a certain level of tech-savviness.

Want it? Download version 2.8.1 Beta 2 here, and check out the changes since Beta 1 here.

As we said earlier today, it’s a non-stop flow of news from Autonomy (news, site) so what’s one more?

This post’s news hails from the Meaning Based Marketing side of things. Introduced earlier this week, the new module is called Autonomy Interwoven Multichanel Optimization, and reportedly combines the capabilities of Web content management, contact center, and advanced analytics.

According to the company release, the new module provides organizations with three primary capabilities: active “listening” across all customer interactions, testing across all formats of customer interactions and delivery of a targeted customer experience based on understanding. Autonomy claims this translates to organizations being able to respond to all forms of customer interactions across multiple channels including social media, the Web, contact center, email and in-store.

The module comes after a report by Forrester Research, which found U.S. online consumers who move from channel to channel are largely dissatisfied with their experiences.

“Regardless of which pairs they start with, customer experience professionals need to design experiences that provide users with the three C's: choice, consistency, and continuity,” Adele Sage, Forrester analyst and author of the report wrote.

Will Autonomy’s new module provide the missing link? Follow our coverage closely here and tell us what you think.

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

Tony White of the Gilbane Group began his talk on the evolution of the Web CMS market with an observation. White, apparently something of an early-bird, spotted 22 people in his hotel lobby at 6:30 a.m. this morning. Over half of the people there were taking advantage of the free wifi to browse the Web, while only one person was reading a newspaper. He asked the attendees to imagine how different the behavior of his fellow early risers would have been even as little as five years back.

In a fast-paced talk, White went on to share some of his observations as a consultant specialist in Web CMS. He resumed the market briefly as a wide spectrum from low-end point solutions to complex enterprise platforms, with almost no correlation to price, and warned attendees of putting too much trust into analysis that assume a correlation between cost and quality, as it may not be the case.

Most web content management systems come with a spell checker. Some of them, however, hide the feature away as a little button in a mass of menus. In the rush to publish, it is easy to forget about it. As modern language becomes increasingly mangled and full of jargon, it can be hard for a grammar checker to figure out what you are trying to say.

Take a look at a new tool in the "intelligent" grammar and spell check space. After the Deadline (site) is a smart spell, style and grammar checker that supports the TinyMCE editor and has a WordPress plugin.

Julien Pauthier presented an review of Prisma Presse's adoption of eZ Publish. Prisma Presse is the second largest media group in France with 20 print magazines and numerous editorial websites. In 2006, Prisma had no strictly on-line editorial, and the various sites were classic in-line PHP implementations, each publishing content in a catch as catch can manner.

Casting an eye over the scene, Prisma decided they needed a centralized Web CMS solution which would be scalable (but they weren't certain to what extent), modular and based on common technology that is supported by most hosting providers (i.e., LAMP).

As the editorial staff did not have a preference for the content structure, they also wanted something which solidly organized the content. Prisma decided that an open-source solution would fit their bill. Interestingly (and oddly), Prisma thought scalability would be less of an issue with open source, due to the non-proprietary nature of the CMS.

After an initial period of testing, Prisma went on-line with major sites (gala.fr, voici.fr) working from a centralized eZ Publish based CMS. Initial challenges included increased hosting costs (voici.fr receives 225,000 UV/day), and difficulty finding external expertise and support.

Internally, setting up their CMS required formalizing their editorial workflow, establishing restrictive development guidelines, and an estimated 6-month period to bring an experienced PHP developer up to speed with the eZ Publish CMS.

Some of the ways Potier has seen the installation pay off for Prisma are in reduced maintenance and support costs due to centralization, a shorter roll out time for new sites (femmes.com was brought out by Prisma in 40 workday man-hours), and a reduction in training hours for editorial staff due to the shared backoffice among all their sites.

Here at the eZ Conference in Paris I had an opportunity to speak with Roland Bennedetti, eZ Publish Product Manager. Given the company's previously heavy focus on web publishers I was curious if the theme remained the same — whether eZ Systems considers eZ Publish a media-focused Web CMS.

According to Roland, "Media is important, because it's going to be the big driver for the evolution of Web CMS, but eZ doesn't target media over other sectors."

When asked if he could see how some people might get that impression, the response was that  "maybe our literature gives that impression, but that depends who we are talking to.

"For example, the non-profit sector is big for us, because we are open source. When we address a non-profit client, we obviously don't talk about the same things as when we talk to clients who are in finance. They have different goals. It's like this. Media is important, but eZ doesn't target a specific sector in that way."

The company has found success in the publishing sector, with a significant number of European electronic publications running on the platform.

At one of their previous gatherings — perhaps it was 2007 in Paris — CMSWire staff saw a slide with the message something to the effect of " We're 200% Focused on Media". It seems the focus has been successful and now perhaps the company is seeking to branch out further.

Percussion Software (news, site) released CM System 6.7. If the product name doesn’t sound familiar, get a little background here on the rebranding move that took place when version 6.6 came out.

So, what’s new in 6.7 you ask? It is all about the package.