Content Management Matters ™

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.

Lo... and the new year was on us, just like that! And as we greeted once more Apollo's Orb, and tramped again its well-trod locus, the muse descended anew upon our marketing team. Bearing a fresh concept to leverage second-degree user-generated content in a streamlined, process-driven revenue model.

The result is the CMSWire Flash Quiz, in which we pose personalities from the Content Management Systems world some simple questions about themselves, the industry, and of course fast cars and the Google share price.

Sandro Groganz is our first capture.

Sandro is based in Germany, and has just set up an Open-Source marketing consultancy. Before that, he was the marketing lead at eZ Systems and Mindquarry. So he knows all about what's going on at the OSS coalface. Sandro combines traditional and social media marketing to build and sustain a market environment typical and beneficial for Open Source software vendors and contributors.

And if that last part sounds suspiciously like official marketing blurb, that's because it is. You know how it is: you can't get a straight answer out of these marketing guys.

Or can you? Let's find out...

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.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert recently gave an interview with PC World, in which he let slip some of the delights in store in the next installment of Drupal -- as well as some interesting information on where the software came from, and where it is heading.

Has it been a year already? Apparently it has, as Packt Publishing releases a first look at the list of nominees for the 2007 Best Open Source CMS Awards.

After months of grueling work and legal battles, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has officially approved the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) originally submitted by Socialtext nine months ago. With CPAL on the OSI’s approved list of open source licenses, Socialtext can now carry the OSI-certified label and proudly call itself open source.

Developers and hackers alike were celebrating as Google Labs recently announced the release of an updated version of their Code Search tool. Conventionally, Google Code Search makes it easier for programmers to search for source code directly and find open source tools they may not have known about. Some key new improvements take the tool's usefulness to the next level.

We do love an acronym-loaded title. In English this time: Socialtext, the leading enterprise wiki provider, just submitted a Common Public Attribution License to the Open Source Initiative.

Socialtext, which ships under a Mozilla Public License + Attribution License, is the first of its kind to seek Open Source Initiative (OSI) Certification on top of all that.

Plone recently received a "Grand prix du jury des Lutèce d'Or 2007" in Paris for its e-government initiatives. The award is bestowed upon open source projects that demonstrate a degree of sustainability and quality in the industry.

All too often, people have wrong impressions of open source software (OSS). Just what is open source software, when should organizations use it and what misunderstandings should organizations avoid?

In a mad dash to keep its bases covered in the volatile OSS and virtualization frontiers, Microsoft has developed a cross-license patent agreement with LG Electronics. The announcement comes just days after it released news of a similar agreement with Xandros.

After 18 months of steady baking, the Umbraco version 3 release candidate has finally seen the light of public day.

Umbraco is a nifty open source CMS and (gasp) ASP.NET Web CMS product driven by an energetic Danish team of developers. The version 3 release focuses on updating the WYSIWYG editor to TinyMCE and supporting the .NET 2.0 platform.

Joining thirteen other open source stalwarts including MySQL, JBoss, Zimbra and Sugar CRM, Alfresco is now one of the founding members of a new online marketplace for business applications called the Red Hat Exchange (RHX).

The next time you see the phrase "open source" used in association with some software, be advised that you'll need to take that claim with a grain of salt. This was a statement made last November by ZDNet blogger David Berlind.

As the concept of Professional Open Source gains momentum and more vendors jump on this boat, its becoming increasingly important to have some reliable indicators of what a real open source effort looks like.

Jumping channel from FR to UK open source Enterprise CMS vendor Nuxeo has opened its latest foreign office in London.

The company aims to capitalize on the oh so rosy UK ECM market and the large number of energy and financial services companies in the UK, as well as gain some international footing as it pushes further.