Alert: What's Coming In Open Source CMS In 2010

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

The Questions

We posed a set of questions to participating open source CMS projects regarding their own plans for 2010, and their thoughts on where CMS in general is going for 2010. If you feel that your project was left out, we invite you to add your comments below and then send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact in the future. All open source content and document management projects are welcome.

Alfresco

Nancy Garrity with Alfresco (news, site) points out that January 2010 marks the project's 5th anniversary. For the highs Alfresco would like to achieve in 2010, she says that the expected ratification of the CMIS specification is a game changer.

An early adopter in the CMIS space, Garrity says of Alfresco, "We are planning an Enterprise release in early 2010 that supports CMIS 1.0, we will expand and refine the CMIS training that we have already begun to deliver and we are working on developer resources for CMIS applications."

Other items they have coming in 2010 include:

• Their next Enterprise release will offer their DoD 5015.2 certified records management module
• Further enhancements and improvements for their cloud application development toolkit
• Continued work with the Spring community to improve their Spring Surf Extension web application development framework
• Extending team collaboration development
• Greater support for virtualization in the cloud
• Alfresco-based WCM content rich applications

For their community, Alfresco is hoping to:

• Gain a broader foothold in the Spring community and watch their Spring Surf Extension evolve
• Prepare their community for CMIS, Surf development and cloud computing, developing community-wide resources for the purpose
• Form a committee made up of community leaders to implement a new process for community contributions
• Gain valuable feedback through the customer advisory group formed around their Enterprise offering

Regarding the economy, Alfresco is positive about 2010. Part of this bullishness comes from the fact that they believe the recession has changed the way corporations evaluate software purchases, making it harder to justify large up-front purchases and license fees and far easier to take the try before you buy approach offered with open source.

"Organizations of all sizes and industries are looking for immediate business value from solutions that are easy to deploy and work with their existing infrastructure investments — the CMS market is no exception," says Garrity.

dotCMS

Bill Beardslee from dotCMS (news, site) says that what he'd like his project to avoid in 2010 is, "A slow-down in bringing products to market. Everyone benefits when we can make decisions quickly, provide developers and the community with concrete direction and push the product to market the moment it is ready."

Features they'll be focusing on for 2010 revolve around the needs of larger enterprises, specifically CMIS and push publishing. "All large organizations struggle with integrating distributed applications and databases," says Beardslee. "Later in 2010, dotCMS will allow organizations to pair the most powerful content with commercial opportunities."

Regarding how the idea of CMS will evolve in 2010, in answer to what new challenges will come to the forefront, he answers: "Balancing the notion of a 'CMS in a box' with the realities that every enterprise requires customization. Many vendors are driving toward simplifying the build of a CMS, but at the expense of creating a solution that meets the needs of the business (and importantly, the visitor). If SquareSpace represents the 'CMS in a box' and Vignette represents the ultimate in customization, the middle ground will emerge as a fertile area of the market."

Finally, when asked what new ideas/concepts will be embraced, Beardslee says, "As the amount of content continues to grow exponentially, search will continue to grow in importance. Creating connections between content and providing contextual reference for content will define the success of many marketers."

When it comes to the economic climate for 2010, he characterizes himself as somewhat positive.

DotNetNuke

Shaun Walker, the founder of DotNetNuke (news, site) says that he hopes the project hits the following milestones in 2010:

• Surpassing 750,000 DotNetNuke sites in active production
• Exceeding 900,000 registered community members on DotNetNuke.com
• Surpassing 6,500,000 downloads

Other accomplishments he anticipates include:

• New wrappers for the free DotNetNuke that allow users to better leverage the RadControls toolset to achieve that "cool factor" for their dynamic sites
• Increasing localization capabilities with rapid adoption as they're added
• Continued rapid growth of the commercial DotNetNuke partner program

Walker's prediction is that cloud computing will drive continued CMS evolution in 2010, with many offerings evolving from stand-alone products to web-delivered services. He's also bullish on the growth of DotNetNuke in 2010, even if the worldwide economy has difficulties. "The slow 2009 worldwide economy drove interest in open source solutions like ours," he points out, "and will continue to drive our success in 2010 no matter which direction the economy heads."

Drupal

In a chat with Dries Buytaert of Drupal (news, site) he mentioned that the huge thing for 2010 is the release of Drupal 7, with its focus on usability and scalability. Also coming (though not necessarily at the same time) is a Drupal.org site redesign and relaunch, which will give a much better first impression to new Drupal users.

With the launch of Drupal distributions (Drupal with configurations and modules packaged with it for specialized uses), Buytaert expects Drupal to evolve from a platform into solutions throughout 2010. Adding Drupal Gardens and Buzzr into the mix to offer SaaS Drupal sites to the masses will increase that momentum further, as some clients discover that they're outgrowing the SASS version and need to move to a full Drupal implementation.

For trends in 2010 he feels that social software is more than just hype, social publishing will grow and that Drupal is uniquely positioned to ride the wave.

When it comes to what to avoid in 2010, Buytatert says that he'd like to introduce more process into Drupal development but not too much. The open source Web CMS keeps getting bigger and better and at a point you get slowed down without some process in place. But there's a definite line where too much process can also slow you down. So the challenge is to maintain high velocity and keep innovating while still growing and not collapsing under their own weight.

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Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.