Content Management Matters ™

Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Finns, it's time to flex your open source muscle. The Open Nordic Conference is happening in Norway on June 19-20. Brought to you by a formidable team consisting of eZ Systems, ICT Norwary, National Center for Open Source, and ICT Grenland, the Open Nordic will actually be three different, but related conferences running in parallel. They're all related to open source and promoting the use of free software -- something we can definitely vouch for.

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.

As with any website, design can be key to your overall performance. Many already know that WordPress offers some great features for blogs and sites alike. But did you know that you can get great magazine style themes to ensure maximum design efficiency online?

Not a day goes by that there isn’t some news about SaaS and content management. Maybe it’s a new vendor in the market, or maybe it’s an existing vendor moving into online service offerings. What we came across today in Matt Asay’s blog, The Open Road, took us a bit by surprise.

It’s getting the point that if you aren’t using some form of Web 2.0 in your online endeavors that you are behind the game by about a year. Web 2.0, and particularly the social aspects of it, is the fastest growing web setup around. Remember when YouTube sold for more than a billion dollars (and it had only been live online for about two years)? It was all because two guys wanted to create a social environment that they and their friends could share videos over.

After spending lots and lots of time submersed in web content management, it's always surprising when we hear the name of a company that we don't recognize. Such was the case with DesignApps. But with a little research, there's big news to announce for this web CMS company that works to help deliver software and services to small businesses.

Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook started an infectious desire from the public for more social-ness on the internet. The people were tired of chat rooms and IM just wasn’t cutting it. So the social network crazy started.

But MySpace and Facebook aren't the only social networks out there...

Finding good hosting can always be a pain if you don’t know where to go. But there is one thing you should know -- when you’re in the search for a hosting company, there is something that you need to look for, particularly if you want to install a CMS.

That thing is Fantastico De Luxe. Does your hosting company offer Fantastico?

It wasn't that long ago that we brought you an exclusive view of 7 really Superfly Plugins for Wordpress. But low and behold our ever resourceful colleague John appears to have missed a couple key ones. Now he said we could call him a dufus..but I don't know...

Instead, we offer up 4 more that should whet your appetite for WordPress, particularly around marketing capabilities. Just for fun, we'll give you the other seven as a reminder to John to get with the program.

InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco has released the results of the North Bridge Venture Partner's annual "Future of Open Source" survey. The results were discussed by a panel of top experts in the commercial open source industry, including executives from Acquia, Ingres, SugarCRM, Sun Microsystems and Ubuntu.

Packt (pronounced Packed), published its first book in April 2004. From then on, they began to publish books on specific technologies and solutions, allowing developers and administrators to adapt and customize today's systems, applications and frameworks.

Their dedication to open source has been apparent through their awards for "The Best Open Source CMS”, and their numerous books covering the ins and outs of a number of open source technologies and content management systems like eZ Publish and osCommerce.

And now their dedication to Open Source goes even further.

Virtual appliance wizard, JumpBox, Inc., has announced the launch of JumpBox Open, a service that will give users subscription access to their collection of easy-to-deploy virtual appliances for Open Source applications.

The announcement was made at the Under the Radar: The Business of Web Apps conference. JumpBox Open represents a departure for the firm who previously sold their applications and services individually.

Day Software, global content management and content infrastructure software extraordinaire, has launched dev.day.com, a corporate blog and portal by content experts, for content experts.

Designed to encourage communication among those who share ideas and interests around content-related topics, dev.day.com is aimed toward software developers and includes news and commentary surrounding JSR 170, the Java Content Repository (JCR) application programming interface (API) for stored content; representational state transfer (REST), open source and other related topics and technologies.

The ImpressCMS Project has announced the release of ImpressCMS 1.0, the first stable release of their PHP/MySQL-based content management system. It aims to deliver an extensible open source platform to create interactive and professional websites.