Opens Source Cms News & Articles

dotCMS (news, site) is getting ready to dot the i's and cross the t's on version 1.9 Community Edition release of their open source J2EE/Java Web CMS. You can see the progress by checking out the just released “Developer Preview.”

To give you a little taste of what to expect in the upcoming release:

• New UI built using the Dojo toolkit with UX improvements
• Improved multi-site management for large scale scenarios
• Interoperability via a CMIS interface
• i18n compliant admin tools for better internationalization
• Changes to roles and permissions model with substitution of groups for hierarchical roles and role membership
• New Form Builder Tool for web data collection

Trial download (still buggy, not recommended for production environments) can be found here. Currently in beta, the GA release of 1.9 is expected shortly.

Later this year, dotCMS also plans to release “the code-hardened enterprise version” of their product based on version 1.9 Community Edition.

Are you somehow not aware that Drupal 7 Alpha was recently released? Or are you just so busy that you don't have time to check it out for yourself? A Drupal (news, site) tutorial site has released a video preview.

Nuxeo (news, site) shared the news that their Galaxy program partner metaLogic Consulting Inc. (who is also an IBM partner of more than 12 years) has built software for migration from some of Big Blue's products to the Nuxeo open source Enterprise CMS.

While the software won’t be officially available until spring, it’s being demoed away starting today at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando, FL, until January 21.

Why migrate from IBM to Nuxeo you ask? One reason could be the fact that Lotus Domino Document Manager has been discontinued in 2009 and if you’re looking for a migration path, here’s this option.

Meanwhile, IBM is offering its entitled Lotus Domino Document Manager customers a migration to IBM Lotus Quickr that comes with either IBM Content Manager Collaboration Edition or IBM FileNet Content Manager Collaboration Edition.

As described in metaLogic’s blog post, the toolset they produced is designed for migration of email and documents from Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino Document Manager into Nuxeo’s repository. Customizable and configurable, the software can be used in either user-centric or server-centric way.

Alfresco (news, site) got friendly with IBM Lotus today via a (soon to be available) integration of the Alfresco Enterprise CMS with IBM Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal.

eZ Systems’ (news, site) 2010 New Year's resolutions are all customer-serving: look-and-feel editing, XML export and collaboration in eZ Publish 4.2 open source web content management system.

Open source dotCMS (news, site) announced that the upcoming 1.9 release will feature an implementation of CMIS v1.0, which is currently in public review.

According to the vendor, Will Ezell, CTO, has been working with other content management vendors supporting CMIS -- IBM, Alfresco, others -- who are part of the founding members of the specification.

dotCMS says it plans to invest in CMIS to help decrease the amount of connector and integration work on the customer’s part. “The big win is the huge increase in the amount of content available to all. dotCMS felt that CMIS would be very attractive to larger enterprises -- a key target for the company,” said Bill Beardslee, SVP, strategy and development.

“Fresh, highly relevant content is the most crucial aspect of building traffic and converting visitors into customers. CMIS unlocks the power of a content repository, creating opportunities for those organizations that know how to pair content with commercial opportunities,” added Ezell.

dotCMS, who is also an OASIS TC member, plans to roll out their CMIS implementation iteratively. Version 1.9 is scheduled to go GA in Q1 2010 and will include a draft implementation that will be finalized by release 2.0 some time in Q3 2010.

And for those of you having as much fun as we are at Gilbane Boston, check out dotCMS' product lab on Thursday.

Notice a trend? Open source is "stealing" away closed-sourced content management talent. The most recent one to be charmed away is Bill Beardslee, who, until recently, was a SVP, marketing and business development, at the Web CMS vendor Percussion.

Who knows whether it’s better weather (think Miami), or more chocolate, but open source vendors seem to be finding more and more ways of attracting employees from proprietary CMS players.

We had an opportunity to have a quick chat with Beardslee about where dotCMS stands now, where it is going in 2010 and what he plans to achieve in his new role as SVP, strategy and development, of the Java-based, open source CMS provider dotCMS (news, site).

Squiz.net (news, site), the Australian firm behind the MySource Matrix CMS, has released a lite offering, MySource Mini under the GPL license. Squiz has made their CMS fully editable from what they have dubbed the Viper inline interface. Context sensitive help and a selection of pre-loaded design templates ensure that users can have a basic site up and running quickly.

A versioning system which tracks changes to content and integrated image galleries and a movie player round out the features included by default in a MySource Mini CMS install. The image galleries offer an inline or lightbox-style option, and thumbnail images are generated automatically.

The video upload wizard, accessed from the inline editor, makes it easy to upload and display video for the built-in player.

As befits a micro CMS, ease of use is the buzzword for MySource Mini. In a nice little twist, the MySource Mini installer is also available as a VMware bundle, which can be auto updated to avoid complicated update procedures.

Jahia (news, site), an open source content management system vendor, is on a quest to further penetrate the U.S. market (among others) in addition to its French operations. The new global Jahia Business Partner Program gives partners more control and flexibility with free pre-sales support and various levels of certification, including those for VARs and SIs scenarios.

According to Jahia, they don’t want to compete with their partner network when it comes to CMS implementations. Hence, the “non-compete guarantee.” That means Jahia plans to refer almost all of the integration work to its partners -- around 70 of them in 15 countries around the globe. Some of Jahia’s partners are in the U.S., the market to which Jahia is paying more and more attention.

"Being open source and not competing with services partners is unique within the open source industry… We are focusing on software and its related support…," said Emmanuel Garcin, Jahia's VP and GM for North America.

While having an implementation partner network is a common approach in the industry, why not do that work in-house? Why not move toward a native Professional Services approach? Sure, it’s more costly and requires you to have, grow and nurture the in-house subject matter expertise. While it’s certainly not a deal-breaker in many CMS selection processes, different organizations may feel differently about partner vs. vendor implementations.

[Editor's Note: See our recently released report on the top 20 open source content management systems (including Jahia).]

concrete5 CMS (news, site) recently announced GA of their first eCommerce add-on -- coreCommerce.

With SMBs in mind, concrete5 is putting this low-priced offer on the market and giving folks yet another option of selling their goodies online.

She is well-versed in matters of Enterprise CMS, Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and social media; specializes in VQA wines, weaves in candy and aspirin into one sentence and posts some of the yummiest foodie tweets out there.

Soon after her resignation, the former Open Text-er was asking on Twitter whether 6 pairs of shoes would be enough for one week in Paris, there was a chance that French bistros, Père Lachaise and walks down Canal Saint-Martin were not the sole purpose of the trip.

Every now and then, there are bright days in open source. XOOPS (news, site), certainly, cannot complain with over 25,000 downloads of its 2.3.3 version of CMS in just 5 months. The XOOPS Project decided to build on the momentum and promoted XOOPS 2.4.0 Beta 1 to the release candidate level.

Mainly, we are looking at usability and productivity improvements in this RC. Keep in mind, RCs are not designed for anything but loving and tender testing.

Open Source Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo (news, site) is trying to make it easier for anyone interested in using its technology stack to bring those dreams to reality -- from top to bottom.

Today's announcement of the partnership with OpenLogic (news, site) is designed to help various organizations and system integrators looking to deploy Nuxeo ECM system to have a one-stop shop for Professional Services and Customer Support.

We know too well that PS and support is where de trop of your budget will be spent, even if you’re still in the pink haze of the illusion that open source is free or cheap.

With the release of mojoPortal 2.3.1.6 (news, site), this simple CMS has focused principally on upgrading its image editing abilities with TinyMCE and FCKeditor WYSIWYG features.

The upgrade from the North Carolina-based company is focused on the optional ability to automatically resize images for the web or, in the case where images are already web-ready, the ability to turn this feature off.

For people working in companies that have a web department, but their principal business is not web development, this will be particularly welcome. Especially for content managers who have to explain to their less web-savvy colleagues that a 10MB image is just not going to cut the cloth.