Alert: What's Coming for Open Source CMS in April 2010

Welcome to the April installment of our what's coming from the open source 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.

Alfresco

Alfresco Software (news, site) is currently accepting registrations for their spring meetups in Paris, New York and London.

DotNetNuke

In March, DotNetNuke (news, site) released DotNetNuke Professional, Elite and Premier Editions version 5.3. New features for this version include:

• A new taxonomy system, allowing administrators to create an unlimited vocabularies of terms to associate with pages or modules (all versions)
• New user profile forms supporting templates for simple layout customization and allowing users to upload photos (all versions)
• A new messaging repository and API offering both real-time and batch delivery, with an inbox for viewing messages and administrative tools for message management (all versions)
• Page-level content change approval workflows (Professional and Elite)
• A new ribbon bar control panel (Professional and Elite)

Drupal

By March 15, just a month before DrupalCon San Francisco, Robert Douglass of Acquia (news, site) reports that there were over 1700 registered attendees, which exceeds the sum total of all previous DrupalCons. The conference program was also announced for the San Francisco Drupalcon.

Douglass also pointed out that the Drupal Association made its first full-time hire in March, appointing Jacob Redding as interim Managing Director for a period of six months. "His mandate is to increase the efficiency of the organization and work with the General Assembly to lay the basis for the Association to hire a full time Managing Director," said Douglass.

The Drupal (news, site) project itself also reached a new milestone this month with the release of Drupal 7 alpha 3. Changes since the previous alpha include:

• Now ships with jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery UI 1.8
• Some API changes for AJAX commands and forms
• Removed UI for translatable fields in favor of a contributed module
• Numerous additional bug, documentation, upgrade path, markup, security and performance fixes

GateIn

In March, the GateIn Project (news, site) released its first version, 3.0, since it was merged from its parent projects: open source eXo Platform (news, site) and JBoss Portal.

Hippo CMS

Coming in April from Hippo CMS (news, site) is a collection of new plugins. With their focus on the enterprise and social media integration, here's some notable examples:

• The auto suggestion plugin creates a list of suggested related documents based on document comparison, which can be accepted or rejected by the author
• The version comparison plugin for Hippo CMS 7.4 adds markup that allows editors to look for changes to updated documents
• Youtube and Flickr plugins for integrating social media
• The Tagcloud plugin lets you create hyperlinked tag clouds for navigating to related topics
• Add plugins to change the Hippo CMS interface's native language to French, German or Italian in addition to the defaults of Dutch or English

Updates are also coming to Hippo Portal through the update of the Apache Software Foundation's (news, site) Jetspeed Portal (news, site) project. New features for Jetspeed 2.2.1 include:

• A floating toolbox with panels for portlet selection, layouts and themes
• Portal Spaces (logical areas of a site that can be secured and used for collaboration)
• New navigation tools for spaces and pages

For a demonstration of the version comparison plugin, watch the video below:

Hippo CMS 7.4 preview: version compare from Arje Cahn on Vimeo.

KnowledgeTree

Coming up in April, KnowledgeTree (news, site) CEO Daniel Chalef will co-present with Lionel Fernandes of iNet Process (news, site) at this year's SugarCon on "Mashing Up Apps - SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree Connect in the Cloud.

KnowledgeTree is also a Silver Sponsor for the 2010 Open Source Think Tank, to be held in Napa, CA, April 15 through 17.

Joomla

As March winds up, the Joomla! (news, site) community waits for the release of Joomla! 1.6 and the new Beeze template. According to Angie Radtke, key features of this template include:

• Configurable output in XHTML versus HTML5
• Accessibility features
• Two different designs available
• Configurable position of the navigation column
• Modules can be displayed in accessible tabs
• Fade in and of modules
• Fade in and out of the column with the additional information

Magnolia CMS

In March, Magnolia CMS (news, site) released version 4.3 of its open source WCM. This release:

Alert: What's Coming for Open Source CMS in April 2010

Welcome to the April installment of our what's coming from the open source 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.

Are you hiring?    Post your job today ($45 for 45 days)!