Magnolia News & Articles

Welcome to the October 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

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.

The Magnolia (news, site) Conference is happening in just two days -- September 10 and 11. But if you haven't already bought your ticket, you probably aren't able to attend.

Good news for those of you who are still interested in seeing and hearing what's happening. The conference will be covered live on the conference website.

You can watch video streams Tech Sessions on September 10th, follow the Magnolia community twittering (twitter tag #mconf) and see photos of the event. Slides will also be uploaded after talks.

It will be almost like you were there in person. Well, almost.

So keep an eye on the conference website and see what you can learn about this open source web content management solution.

In case you aren't tuned in to the open source grapevine, know that a major Magnolia (news, site) event is just around the corner.

The Magnolia Conference will be held in Basel, Switzerland on September 10th and 11th of this year. Day 1 is Presentation Day, during which participants of the conference can expect  to gain the knowledge to build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies.

On day two, Community Day, the whole shebang will close with an "Unconference-style" event run by the attendees. This means that the attendees themselves will be responsible for proposing talks, voting for talks, presentations, questions, etc.

For more information on the event, including a detailed schedule of speakers, head on over here. If you aren't going to be anywhere near Switzerland but would still like to get out and shake some hands, check out our complete list of events for something a little closer to home.

Welcome to the August 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

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.

Hangin’ around the Switzerland area this September? Be sure to mosey on over to the Magnolia Conference for an open source good time.  

The conference, held in Basel, Switzerland, will consist of keynotes and sessions with business and technical topics in regard to Magnolia CMS (news, site). Speakers include Pascal Mongold and Boris Kraft, Magnolia's CEO and CTO, respectively. Additionally, some folks from Day Software, Aperto, and several other companies and institutions are scheduled to make an appearance as well. The whole shebang will then close with an "Unconference-style" event run by the attendees.

Here's a closer look at the schedule:

Presentation Day, September 10th

During Presentation Day, participants of Magnolia Conference will gain the knowledge they need to build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies.

Community Day, September 11th

Community Day will be an Unconference. This means that attendees themselves will be responsible to propose talks, vote for talks, present, share, question, inquire and otherwise make the event.

For more information on the event, including a detailed schedule of speakers, head on over here. If you aren't going to be anywhere near Switzerland but would still like to get out and shake some hands, check out our complete list of events for something a little closer to home. 

In March this year when Magnolia (news, site) released v4.0 of its web content management system, the company’s CTO Boris Kraft said that while they were happy with the new product, there would be always room for improvement.

Three months later those improvements have come with the first official and complete release of  v4.1. While there are a number of new features, particularly in the enterprise edition, most of the enhancements can be found in new modules with the Standard Templating Kit (STK).

Let's take a look at what else is new.

Want more signs that SaaS is becoming a must-have solution in these troubled times? You have to look no further than SpringCM (news, site) to get them. Last October, it beefed up its SaaS-based enterprise content management system with Version 4.5 and then again, in March of this year, with Version 5.1, adding a number of new features and enhancements.

Now, to add muscle to that, SpringCM has announced five new industry-specific applications available on its platform -- three of them from entirely new partners and two more from existing partners.

Magnolia’s here with another release. Magnolia 4.0  is the fourth generation of the Java-based web content management system and brings with it a whole mess of template related pizzazz.

In addition to production-ready functionality, Magnolia’s latest release delivers content presentation that follows accessibility guidelines, is search-engine optimized and introduces support for mobile devices.

Live Labs, part of the Microsoft Corporation, has announced a new solution for people who want to keep track of all the information they find useful on the web. Thumbtack is similar to social bookmarking, but takes the service to new levels calling it a online research collection tool.

We probably don’t need to tell you that the demand for community-driven and online solutions is growing exponentially in just about every aspect of, well, everything. No Web site? No social engagement? You can pretty much kiss it goodbye.

Take, for example, YouTube and online streaming. With the explosion of the option to pretty much interact with television, the real television (even with the benefits of OnDemand and TiVo) is struggling to keep its little antennae above water. But Magnolia On Air, the new Broadcast Content Management system from Magnolia, may be just what it needs to stay afloat.

Magnolia Enterprise Edition 3.5 has just been released. This version sports a more targeted focus on I18N, streamlined maintenance and integration for enterprises with an international focus.

To begin with, it is much easier to customize the offering. v3.5 includes a new configuration mechanism that enables you to build custom modules that, if you like, can replace certain Magnolia functionalities.

The offering’s complete modularization — another new feature — makes it possible to do this without affecting Magnolia’s default distribution.

Hyland Software Inc, has announced the release of version 7 of its OnBase ECM software suite.

They went big on this release, offering an extensive array of new capabilities and features, including MS Office SharePoint Search integration, Expanded Business Process Management (BPM) Functionality, and solutions for hospitals, universities, and even law enforcement agencies.

Back in the bad old days, when you sent an email somewhere containing some vital, time sensitive information, you just assumed that it got there, and that it would not ‘conveniently’ get lost or delayed somewhere along the line.

Yes, you laugh, but it’s true.

When you sent a registered or notarized letter through either the mail or a courier service, you only certified the damn envelope, and not what was in it. Back in the day, you could send someone a contract to sign, and they could send it back to you with a crucial page missing, and claim that that page in question was not included in the original document. And then you might find yourself in a good old-fashioned mess.

For you, that day might have been today. But, at the risk of sounding like a corny advert, maybe tomorrow will be different.

Magnolia, an enterprise CMS purveyor, as transitioned Magnolia Community Edition to GPLv3.

This is the most current iteration of the open source license released just last June by the Free Software Foundation.

This move makes Magnolia the first JSR 170-based CMS to go public under GPLv3.

Adopting the open source license — thereby enabling developers to improve it as they wish — makes Magnolia more resilient in the face of change, thereby protecting the investment of clients. For this reason Magnolia’s namesake makes an apt metaphor.

Despite its elegant appearance, the magnolia flower dates back over 20 million years. Having weathered its fair share of Darwinist storms, even its fragrant petals are extra-tough, because it is pollinated by beetles.

Not a bad lot to cast your fortunes with.

Download Magnolia Community Edition at no cost on the Magnolia website. Or to find out what others think, clicky-clicky for comments.

In a controversial keynote speech last week at cmf2007 in Denmark, B.J. Fogg, founder of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, proclaimed that “Web 2.0 was dead”, that Facebook had shifted the game and that “there might not be a more persuasive technology [than Facebook].”

Well, it was not a universally agreed upon message, nor I’m sure was it intended to be. Nevertheless, it provoked some measure of good discussion, and based on recent announcements it seems that our bustling UK-based Alfresco — commercial open source enterprise cms vendor extraordinaire — is in-tune with Mr. Fogg and has similarly swallowed the blue pill.