Content Management Matters ™

Packt Publishing has announced the finalists for each category of its 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. Last year, Drupal was the overall winner, pushing the ’06 overall winner, Joomla!, to the second place.

This year, both are finalists in two categories. But there are many other contenders that may change the final results.

Acquia, the commercialization entity that resulted from the Drupal project, has finally released a private beta of Carbon -- its commercial Drupal distribution. They've only been talking about the project since the end of April.

Tell Drupal how they are doing by taking the State of Drupal 2008 Survey. The results will be presented by Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s founder, at DrupalCon Szeged 2008 conference in Szeged, Hungary, on August 27-30, 2008.

The goal of the survey is to better understand what Drupal needs to work on and how to prioritize all of that. It is mostly targeted towards Drupal developers. So, don’t delay, speak up and tell Drupal what you want!

Also, check out the Drupalers and survey-takers’ rants and ramblings about the survey and Drupal in general here. Quite a read...

When the results are released, we shall see if Buytaert was right in his predictions for Drupal to be “one of the “big three” Open Source CMSs at the end of 2008.”

Are you running an open source WCM website that needs a little social interactivity? You can get with it KickApps. The SaaS social media solutions provider has been working hard to provide their services to open source content management solutions like Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. You can learn all about it at the Linux World Expo in San Francisco next week.

Water & Stone, a web development company specializing in Open Source technologies, released a popularity survey of open source content management systems. In the analysis of 19 of the most prominent open source content management systems, Water and Stone evaluated CMS’s on the basis of Rate of Adoption and Brand Strength, as well as a variety of other viability indicators and trends.

Loopfuse and Acquia have announced the availability of the Loopfuse Integration module for Drupal. The module links Drupal installations to the commercial Loopfuse OneView automated marketing product. The module, funded by Acquia and Loopfuse, was developed to connect the Acquia website to OneView, and has been donated to the Drupal community and is available to download at Drupal.org (link below.)

Mention web content management and open source in a single question today and you commonly get two words back: Drupal and Alfresco. These are the two most well-known open source content management solutions in the market today. It seems that Forrester has not been too busy dishing up Enterprise 2.0 predictions to recognize this.

Drupal was only one of a few open source solution providers who had a booth at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Although open source didn't appear to be adequately represented at the conference, there has been a great deal of blogging on open source social computing solutions for the enterprise and specifically on Drupal's ability to play a leading role.

Acquia presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week, and Jeff Whatcott, who manned the Acquia stand, writes in a blog entry that most of the corporate types swinging past his booth had no idea what Drupal was.

Acquia's mission, or course, is about changing all that, and making the open source Social Publishing (... as they insist on calling it...) platform a viable Enterprise content management/community product. If you remember, the company told us at Drupalcon Boston in March how they intend to achieve that. The first step consists of professional wrapping of the Drupal product, and will come in the shape of the subscription-based 'Carbon' product. Carbon consists of Drupal 6.x core and about 30 modules, some of which have been developed by the Drupal community and then vetted and tested by Acquia, with a sprinkling of modules developed by the company itself. The result is calculated to be analogous to a Red Hat enterprise subscription; a cast-iron, bug-free and supported version of a community-built product.

Like many other open source CMS platforms, Drupal needs more than just standard themes available to their users. There are a number of places to find Drupal themes, including the latest offering from DrupalShark.

Joomla, one of the foremost names in open source web content management is upping the bar for the competition. The early release of Joomla v1.5.3 comes on the tail of one of their major competitors, Drupal, having been named in Webware’s Top 100 last week. Is Joomla responding to being left out?

Drupal, recent winner of a Webware Top 100 place is at it again. The open source Web Content Management powerhouse has created a new addition to their framework. It’s going to mean either more frequent releases or (ideally) better releases.

Webware has announced its top 100 list. Some of the results were shocking…some surprise winners, some surprise non-winners and some that we all knew would make the list -- can you say WordPress?

Drupal is a big business in its own right, but it's also spawned a formidable industry of its own -- template and theme retailers. The newest addition to the fold is TopNotchThemes, which has just launched its first all-Drupal high-end theme store. From what we've seen so far, it looks pretty promising.

Not only does Dries Buytaert get selected as one the top young tech entrepreneurs by BusinessWeek, but one of his newest ventures -- Acquia, has been chosen to launch their company at the Launch Pad - Venture Capital Edition during the web2.0 expo today in San Francisco.