Content Management Matters ™

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?

There's a new Joomla tutorial website in town. It's called MyJoomlaCast.com and it's jam-packed with tutorials for Joomla developers of all levels.

For those of you overwhelmed by the notion of dipping your feet in the CMS waters, the folks at joomlaforbeginners.com are here to make your learning experience as easy as possible -- and free.

A Harvard Website was hacked recently, with 125 MB of records stolen and later uploaded to BitTorrent for Peer-to-Peer distribution. gsas.harvard.edu was still down at the time this article was researched (it's back up now).

The site was a local Joomla installation. A variety of simple Joomla! hacks have been identified and shared around the web in recent weeks. Most of these claimed vulnerabilities exploit weaknesses in 3rd party modules, which exposed some SQL Injection gaps. It is not yet clear whether the Harvard Grad. School of Arts and Sciences site fell victim to such an attack.

The recently released Joomla! 1.5 gets a new presentation extension this week -- a particularly pretty photo gallery component which has a number of useful features.

FlippingBook presents jpgs and swfs in a book format, complete with animated turning pages.

JumpBox, provider of virtual appliances to simplify server software deployment, has just released six new appliances for open source products. The JumpBox library has been bolstered with new applications for Cacti networking graphing system, phpBB bulletin boards, ProjectPier project management, TikiWiki, PmWiki, and MoinMoin- another Wiki product.

The total number of JumpBox appliances now stands at twenty.

Aspiring web designers, listen up! In case you didn't know, Joomla! is one of the premier open source content management systems for publishing content on the internet. And now there's a book that will teach you, the uninitiated, the glories of Joomla! content management. Beginning Joomla! , by Dan Rahmel guides the green reader through comprehensive, step-by-step methods of setting up and running a Joomla! website.

It's a party in the Joomlasphere today, and you're all invited. Joomla! 1.5 Stable has been pushed out the door. The release marks a new dawn in the evolution of the popular free open-source Web CMS.

There are two related reasons why it's a big deal. The first is mostly symbolic: 1.5 marks the end of the road for a great deal of the old Mambo code. Second, there's a hell of a lot of architectural and cosmetic changes.

So let's have a look under the hood of Joomla! 1.5.

Bitnami.org has officially been launched, offering free installation stacks for a host of open source packages designed to make the deployment of such packages as Drupal and Joomla! infinitely easier for all.

If your husband was a pro plumber and the toilet got backed up, you wouldn't hire "Joe Does Johns" from up the street to fix the problem, would you?

Oracle might. Though it already offers comprehensive Web CMS solutions, and pours considerable resources into improving its offerings in the arena, it's chosen Joomla! and a Joomla-specific web developer to build its latest major web portal.

As Packt Press continues to rattle off the awards this week, its Joomla's turn in the spotlight. Today's prize is for "Best PHP Open Source Content Management System".

Quoting the Packt site, "Joomla! is possibly one of the biggest success stories in open source of late. Its first release came in only September 2005 and since then has grown to be one of the most downloaded Content Management Systems on the web."

The runners up in this category were Drupal and e107 respectively. Previous winners this week were WordPress for Best Open Source Social Networking CMS and mojoPortal for Best Other Open Source Content Management System.

And the fun's not over yet. No sir. Rolling right along you avid CMS'ers have both the Most Promising Open Source CMS award and the Overall Winner award to look forward to.

It's a kind of 'Open Source 1.1'. Developers are springing up who build install stacks for open source products like the Drupal Web CMS or Alfresco's Enterprise CMS; offering packaged versions which automate and greatly simplify the initial deployment, or offer various usability augmentations to these powerful but often occasionally less polished products.

Open source being repackaged in this fashion is something we have covered before -- SpikeSource are in this line of business. Bitnami though, they're taking things up a notch, introducing some welcome competition.

Just because the researchers at Gartner chose to overlook open source offerings in their latest enterprise content management evaluation does not mean that decision makers within your organization should go the same route.

To help fill the not so minor gap left by Gartner, Infoworld recently compared five open source content management products that are worthy of any IT manager's shortlist -- though with Alfresco stacked up against the likes of Drupal, perhaps not the same shortlist.

Mambo's Peter Lamont, owner of the MamboXchange developer forge, has just assigned the domain and its accompanying websites to the Mambo Foundation.

The Mambo Foundation shouldered serious volatility in managing the Mambo project after the separation of Mambo and Joomla into separate entities in 2005. Life on the open source frontier isn't always pretty.

"The Xchange rightly belongs with the Foundation who have demonstrated their ability and commitment to responsibly manage and grow the Mambo project and unite a large and growing community of dedicated Mambo users," Lamont explained.

"I have no doubt that [...] the new board will take Mambo from strength to strength under accountable and transparent leadership and governance.”

Cheers to the Foundation.

After a long nomination process, Packt has announced the list of finalists for its Open Source Awards.

In previous years there has only been one award and one prize. This year saw the inclusion of four new categories.