Latest Web Publishing 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.

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

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.

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.

Just because DITA authoring tools are coming onto the market at the speed of a runaway train, does not necessarily mean that A) companies understand what it is they are actually using, or B) they do not want to understand it.

And it is this segment of the market that the latest publication from Toronto-based content management consultancy the Rockley Group (TRG) is targeting with DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers.

While the authors (Anne Rockley, Steve Manning and Charles Cooper) never claim that the 148-page overview of DITA will make an expert out of you, they do say that it will help answer the $40 million question: Is DITA for you or your company?

Just to put it in perspective: DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) is an OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard that breaks content into small bundles of information that can be used and re-used at will through company- or group- specific information.

An XML-based architecture, it was introduced in 2001. In 2005, it was ratified as an OASIS (news, site) standard and is becoming increasingly popular in the creation of all kinds of documents.

Initial reviews of the book appear to be good, but then they would because they appear on the publisher’s website.

But then that shouldn’t put potential readers off. A quick search across the Web shows just how confusing the subject can be, and anything that can untangle the mess of ‘explanations’ out there should be worth a look.

Download or buy it from publisher on Lulu.com, or flip through a free chapter online before you actually buy.

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.

As we watch the many drama's in the media, the drama of the media itself trying to survive and the many micro dramas of competition and collaboration in the content management space, it's fun to get points of view from different seats at the table.

Recently we had a chance to discuss the web publishing business, Drupal partnerships, new revenue models for publishers and the quality of modern journalism with Erik Schut, the President of WoodWing Software.

As a provider of Web Publishing technologies and a company that has integrated with the likes of Alfresco, Drupal and most recently eZ Publish, the company is in the thick of the modernizing efforts of publishers. Erik had some interesting ideas to share.

Over the years, the Drupal (news, site) web content management system has had the same problem as any other growing software project: deciding which features are important enough to belong in the core of the software.

One such candidate feature — which the Drupal team has discussed since 2004 — is that of enabling CMS administrators to define custom content types, or fields for the system.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK), an add-on module for Drupal, has handily taken care of this need for years. In Drupal 7, it will no longer be needed. But even more, we'll be getting some tasty semantic web features as part of the changes.

The eZ Conference and Awards kicked off today in Paris, France. The Norwegen open-sourcers are celebrating their 10th anniversary at this year's event, which for the first time, they are holding outside of Norway.

The choice of Paris is a nod to the growing importance of international markets in general and France in particular for eZ Systems (news, site). But that's not the only advantage of Paris. "Getting to Skien [Norway] is expensive and difficult. eZ has a lot of partners in France, and [the location] is good for them," says Bertrand Maugin of eZ France, and this year's event coordinator.

Today's program includes a late morning talk by Christian Lundvang of NXC on the CMIS Interface for eZ Publish, but for now it's the keynote address with Steve Powers, a senior Analyst with Forrester.

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.

If one thing's for sure, it's that it ain't exactly 'eZ' (sorry) to score major investments—especially in economical freak-out times like these. That's why all of our kudos for the day go to eZ Systems (news, site) for successfully romancing Hasso Plattner Ventures. Co-founded in 2005 by Hasso Plattner, the Germany-based venture capital fund was created to "support young entrepreneurs with the successful transformation of their ideas into marketable products."

eZ Systems is certainly in the expansion stage. The Norwegian company has managed to find and maintain a successful place in Europe and as we recently reported, has been making moves to beef up its North American team. Additional efforts include those made last year to extend their presence in Japan.

Ez’s main bread and award winner is eZ Publish, which enables its users to manage their digital content for use in Web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets.

“eZ combines an excellent technological solution with the advantages of an open source business model, as a look at their top tier clients shows, said Eran Davidson, CEO of Hasso Plattner Ventures. “We are confident that eZ Systems will continue to grow on a global scale during the next year.”

With all the crisp new cashmoney from Hasso Plattner, it’s hard to imagine that Davidson is anything but exactly right. Keep tabs on eZ here to see where they make their next move.

Back in December 2007, Six Apart announced that the Movable Type (MT) blogging system was going open source. The move was greeted with enthusiasm, but the momentum never really seemed to build from that point. Now a group of ex-Six Apart staff and other MT enthusiasts have taken matters — and the code — into their own hands. Say hello to Open Melody. Let's have a look.

Though WordPress 2.8 was just released, the team behind the ever-popular Web Content Management System has already thrown down another hand on the table. Over the weekend, the WordPress development blog announced that work on the first maintenance release of 2.8 has started. But you don’t have to wait for it.

WordPress 2.8.1 beta is already available for download, and addresses several hiccups. Notable issues that’ve been fixed in beta 1 include:

• Certain themes were calling get_categories() in such a way that it would fail in 2.8. 2.8.1 works around this so these themes won’t have to change.
• Dashboard memory usage is reduced. Some people were running out of memory when loading the dashboard, resulting in an incomplete page.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• A problem where the rich text editor wasn’t being loaded due to compression issues has been worked around.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• If you would like to automatically upgrade from 2.8 to 2.8.1 Beta 1, follow these instructions. Thanks for testing WordPress.

Shaking and Baking the Web CMS World

In case you’ve been living under a rock and totally missed the WordPress 2.8 release, we've got a wee bit of background information for you:

“Baker” was released earlier this month and heavily focuses on the visual and usability side of things, specifically themes and widgets. 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. 

Download it

In total, 2.8.1 includes 21 bug fixes (check the full list of bug fixes here), which isn't half bad for a beta. You can download the new version here, and instructions for automatic upgrade can be found here. 

A wave of excitement shot through the Internet as bloggers suddenly noticed that Amazon (news, site) had posted the source code for each version of the Kindle.

However, the code is really just the GPL'd Linux libraries and drivers (Debian Linux is the common speculation), and it's been available since 2007. The e-book reader part is in no way part of the source package.

While no license file is attached, the folder the code unpacks into is called "gplrelease," which might be a massive hint. Not to mention all that's in there is what would be required for them to release legally for the GPL portions.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon had hinted recently at a conference that Kindle books and Kindle readers were, to him, two separate businesses. Releasing a Kindle iPhone app was certainly one hint that he was serious. Another was his statement that he intended to give the Kindle device team competition by making the Kindle books available on even more mobile and computing devices.

But entirely releasing the Kindle source doesn't appear to be the way they're going to do it just now. Who knows, maybe later if Amazon decides it would rather offer their content on more devices and get out of the hardware business.

Following just days after the release of the optional Movable Type v4.26 release, Six Apart has announced another update to the blogging and social media platform. Apparently a few bugs and some performance related database schema changes slipped through the 4.26 cracks.

Key changes in version 4.261 include:

• The Schema Version is now updated to 4.00071, which was omitted in 4.26. This change will only affect users who have already upgraded to Movable Type 4.26, not those on 4.25 and below. The schema change adds indexes to several tables.
• A typo in a 4.26 commit where a user clicks the Cancel button on the Display Options flyout did not necessarily cancel the user's actions; the 4.261 fix corrects this behavior.
• Fixed the Schwartz (MT's job queuing system) error exposed as a result of a previous 4.26 commit: 'Can't call method "registry" on an undefined value at lib/MT/Component.pm line 558 during global destruction'.

Reminder: What You Got in v4.26

In case you missed our previous coverage, here's what came with the MT 4.26 update. Remember, this release was labeled as optional by Six Apart, but we'd say that it's a must have for anyone who's flexing the platform's muscle in a meaningful way.

Bug Fixes

Aside from resolving some bugs that got through the 4.25 QA process (or were deemed too insignificant), this release was all about improving existing features — no templates or plug-ins are affected. Breath sigh of relief now.

Probably one of the biggest crowd pleasers is a fix to how lists of articles were filtered by category name. Users can now parse categories within a mt:Entries tag that include whitespace or logical operators. This bug was actually introduced in version 4.25 and made a lot of people unhappy. So for much of the user base, this is a welcome update.

Here are a few more of the bug fixes (view them all here):

• Fixes to Backup and Restore
• Fixes to a bug where the comment response did not return users to the entry
• The method for parsing the categories within an mt:Entries tag has been fixed
• Security fix for mt-wizard.cgi (this is a non-critical security fix)

Performance Enhancements

Movable Type 4.26 is a recommended update for Enterprise 4.x customers is related to the performance fixes. Specifically, there are fixes to the database indices to improve query speed which should improve search significantly and improved reliability and performance of MT's open source job queuing system, TheSchwartz.

Other low-level changes that are said to improve performance include fixes to metadata saving and unnecessary reloading of the configuration while running MT under FastCGI.

Downloading the Update

You can download Movable Type 4.261 now, but as usual, make backups before applying any changes and read the release notes to make sure this is a fix you or your clients really need.

For MadCap (news, site), it looks like the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) initiative is still a go. The company, a software provider with a serious thing for integrated applications of the content management variety, first announced its support of DITA late last year.

This week, MadCap unveiled proof of that support in the form of updated versions of two of their offerings: MadCap Flare 5.0 and MadCap Blaze 2.0. According to the company, the newest versions of Flare and Blaze are” the first authoring software products to support transformation and publishing from the DITA standard—without requiring Java development or third-party toolkits…”

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Over the last few months, there has been a great deal of activity at the most senior levels of the US Government discussing the use of persistent cookies on federal agency web sites. If you are a Federal Web Manager or Web Analyst, you are painfully aware of the constraints on using cookies and the limitations it causes to a more accurate definition of unique visitor, and some of the more advanced segmentation features available in web analytics solutions.

As part of a greater effort to open up policy discussions, the White House, Office of Science and Technology Policy is taking public comment on the Federal Policy on Cookies as well as other issues impacting use of the Web.

What's happening in the world of web publishing this week?

• Twitter Makes the AP Stylebook
• Scribd.com Offers eBooks
• The Chronicles of Journalism

What ho! Is that a new version of WordPress (news, site)  we spy?

The answer is yes. But of course, you probably knew already; WordPress 2.8 was released for immediate download toward the end of last week. Just like most seasoned blogging platform fans, we’ve come to expect big things from the system. This time, the newest version not only fits the usual bill, it also presents some pretty stiff competition for other platforms like Drupal.