Plone News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

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.

Martin Aspeli of the Plone (news, site) project recently sat down and evaluated a "whole slew" of web content management systems. From there, he's digested his observations and shared them in the form of a fairly extensive writeup. While it's obviously Plone-centric, there's a lot that applies to anyone who's trying to choose what Web CMS they want to work with.

This week Packt (news, site) has announced one winner a day for its 2009 Open Source CMS awards. Already they've revealed that:

• Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS
• Drupal (news, site) won 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS and the first inaugural 2009 Hall of Fame award
• ImpressCMS (news, site) won 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS

Today's category is the last: 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS.

Congratulations to WordPress (news, site) for taking home the crown. Tied for runners up are MODx (news, site) and SilverStripe (news, site).

The WordPress project receives US$ 4,000 in prize money, while MODx and SilverStripe each receive US$ 2,500. In addition to the money, WordPress also becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame category next year.

In the winners' announcement, Packt Publishing stated that, "After Pixie and Pligg [tied for runners up] for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot."

This week Packt (news, site) is announcing one new award winner a day. Already they've revealed that:

• Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS
• Drupal (news, site) won Best Open Source PHP CMS
• ImpressCMS (news, site) won 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS

Today's category is the 2009 Open Source CMS Hall of Fame. Starting with 2009, Best Overall Open Source CMS winners are no longer eligible to win this category (though Packt has not definitively stated whether this policy is just for this year or indefinitely).

Instead, all previous Best Overall winners (Joomla! in 2006, and Drupal in 2007 and 2008) now compete in the Hall of Fame category.

Speaking of winners, the winner of the first inaugural Packt Hall of Fame Award is Drupal. The Drupal project receives a prize of US$ 4,000 with this win. Second place is (obviously) Joomla!, which receives US$ 2,000.

In addition to this main award, there are two new separate specialty sub-awards:

• The Drupal Award, given to Zen for the Best Drupal Theme, and Views for the Best Drupal Module
• The Joomla! Award, given to Affinity for the best Joomla! theme, and noixACL for Best Joomla! extension

Tomorrow Packt announces the final prize, that of 2009 Best Overall Open Source CMS.

This week Packt (news, site) is announcing one new award winner a day. Already they've revealed that Plone (news, site) won 2009 Best Other Open Source CMS, and Drupal (news, site) won Best Open Source PHP CMS.

Today's category is for the 2009 Most Promising Open Source CMS. Congratulations to the winner, ImpressCMS (news, site), and runners up Pixie (news, site) and Pligg (news, site). Still to come are the Hall of Fame winner on November 12, and the Best Overall Open Source CMS on November 13. The winner of this category receives $2,000 and both runners up receive $1,000 each.

The Packt award is really more of a popularity contest than a statement of fitness for a particular purpose, but it can serve to indicate where there is growing or waning energy around various open source projects. For a analysis of the top 20 most popular open source CMS, see the free 2009 Open Source Market Share report.

Now in its fourth year, the Packt Awards offer US$ 24,000 in prizes to the projects deemed "best" in their particular open source content management class.

Categories this year include a new Hall of Fame award alongside the usual titles of:

• Best Overall Open Source CMS
• Most Promising Open Source CMS
• Best PHP Open Source CMS
• Best Other Open Source CMS
• Open Source MVPs

The Hall of Fame award is for previous winners of the Overall award and is an attempt to open up that category for more nominees and not just the usual suspects.

It's that time again -- Packt (news, site) is announcing the winners of its Open Source CMS Awards. The lucky ones are narrowed down via community voting, and then judges make the final evaluations. Throughout this week we'll find out who won in each of the 4 categories:

1. Best Other Open Source CMS -- Congrats to the Plone (news, site) project for retaining last year's title!
2. Best Open Source PHP CMS -- Congrats to Drupal who's win was announced this morning.
3. Most Promising Open Source CMS -- Coming November 11, 2009.
4. Best Overall Open Source CMS -- Coming November 13, 2009.

Runners up for 2009's Best Other Open Source CMS are dotCMS (news, site) and mojoPortal (news, site). The winning projects receive prize money as well, $2000 to Plone and $500 each for dotCMS and mojoPortal. Previous winners for this category include Plone's 2008 win and mojoPortal in 2007.

Those who made Packt's 2009 Open Source CMS Most Valued People list were also announced. the list includes:

• Robert Campbell for CMS Made Simple (news, site) 
• Dries Buytaert for Drupal (news, site) 
• Louis Landry for Joomla! (news, site) 
• Ryan thrash for MODx (news, site) 
• Joe Audette for mojoPortal (news, site) 
• Kasper Skaarhoj for TYPO3 (news, site) 
• Leo Feyer for TYPOlight (news, site) 
• Taiwen Jiang for XOOPS (news, site) 

List members were nominated by the developers and community of each project.

[Editor's Note: Check out our 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report for details on the 20 most popular open source content management systems.]

On Friday we announced the release of the second annual 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. The project was a collaboration with water & stone, an APAC-based interactive agency. The initial announcement addressed what the report covers, its purpose and some key highlights.

For the sake of disclosure, while I did look over the preliminary survey and advise on some tweaks, I otherwise wasn't involved in this report and am looking at this data with fresh eyes and no particular bias from the side of CMSWire.

Now let's take a look more in depth.

Following on the heels of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, this year we collaborated with water&stone to produce an improved 2009 version. The report is an interesting study of 20 dominant systems in the market. It's really not about which CMS is best, nor about relative comparisons beyond brand strength, sentiment and adoption patterns. We're aware of this.

Traditional and Social Media Analysis

What the study did was sniff around the nooks and crannies of our increasingly electronic and publicly broadcast lives and endeavor to quantify the relative brand strengths, brand sentiments and adoption patterns for the top 20 most popular content management products. In addition, we ran a survey on CMSWire.com a little ways back. With this tool we were able to directly pose questions to our readership -- and more than 1200 of you took to the task (thank you!).

This year's analysis looked at Alfresco, CMS Made Simple, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Jahia, Joomla, Liferay, MODx, OpenCms, phpWebSite, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, TikiWiki, Typo3, Umbraco and WordPress.

Key Conclusions: 3 Dominate, Many Are Vibrant

What jumped quickly out is that The Big Three -- Joomla, WordPress and Drupal -- led the survey set across a wide range of measures. However, the top slots are not static, Joomla has gained market share over Drupal, and WordPress with its hosted version has what looks like a smoother path to adoption.

The report identifies less obvious stars. Alfresco, a vendor focused on both document management and web content management, performed well across a number of categories, and led the Java-based open source CMS race over its nearest rival, Liferay. DotNetNuke led the .NET-based open source CMS category, though Umbraco is up and coming.

The report goes on to identify reasons why DotNetNuke's position may soon be changing. In addition to naming the market leaders, the study identifies projects whose market share and brand metrics indicate they are at risk or facing a closing window of opportunity. A metric we found of particular interest was the product evaluation rates versus the adoption rates.

The 90+ page report is available for free and includes profiles of each of the systems covered.

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.

Welcome to the September 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.

Plone 3.3 has been released. Like its predecessors 3.2 and 3.1, it represents what Plone (news, site) has called another “minor” upgrade in the 3.x series. And like its predecessors, it focuses on some simple improvements that will make life easier for users.

While there are a number of refinements with 3.3, the one that will create most interest is that a single Plone instance will be able to run any number of sub sites, each with their own look-and-feel.

These sub sites will all come with different navigation, different portlets, separate content for listing pages, separate internal search, separate workflows and permissions and separate user dashboards.

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.

Last year we noted that the mid-size open source CMS Plone (news, site) looked like it was gearing up for a bigger and better 2009. Many things since then have solidified that observation, including the launch of a user feedback system, a relicensing policy, and much talk about the upcoming Plone 4 and 5.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves though, let's slow down and take a look at Plone 3. Author Veda Williams has just announced the release of her new book Plone 3 Theming through Packt Publishing.

Williams' book reportedly teaches best practices of Plone theme development, focusing on Plone 3. The book covers topics such as configuring the development environment, creating a basic theme product, add-on tools and skinning tricks, integrating multimedia with Plone, and configuring a site's look and feel through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). Finally, for you future fiends, there is a sneak peek into the future of Plone's theming system.

Williams has worked in software development for a whopping 18 years. Her experience includes a three-year stint as a Plone skinner, and she is currently the editor for the documentation section of plone.org. In other words? This lady knows what she's talking about.

If you're a professional Web designer working with Plone and would fancy some theming help, you can pick up your electronic version here.

The twists, turns and tips you need for staying up-to-date by the water cooler.

Highlights of the Week

• SharePoint 2010, A Business Collaboration Platform. Coming down the pike is the latest version of Microsoft's SharePoint. Here's an early peek.
•  Nuxeo Galaxy: Extending Enterprise CMS to CEVAs. Nuxeo, being quite a busy bee lately, launched their Galaxy Program. No, astronautical adventures are not included.
• Plone Web CMS Update - What's Coming in v4. Following the PLIP process, the Plone 4 Framework Team has polished off their list of what's to be included in this release.
• A Quickie with Microsoft Office 2010. The ol' suite is most certainly a seasoned player, which, so far, has proved its ability to keep up with the changing times.
• Hannon Hill Updates Web CMS to v6.2, Improvements Aplenty. After only a month of testing Cascade Server 6.2 Beta, which was released on June 9th, the official release of v6.2 incorporates all the major changes in the beta version plus a few fixes.
• Mark Logic Launches New Application Services, Updates Core Software. World, meet both MarkLogic Server 4.1 and MarkLogic Application Services 1.0.
• New Software Glues Alfresco Enterprise CMS to Scalable Storage. It was inevitable that tighter integration between the two was on the way, and yesterday they formally announced the launch of the Alfresco2CAStor connector between the two platforms.
• Socialtext Offers Cheap Microblogging  for Your Intranet. Take a look at the new Socialtext Microblogging Appliance. It’s like Twitter for your Intranet, and it’s only a dollar per user, per month.

Most Popular Articles

And these are the articles you couldn't get enough of during the past week -- if page views are anything to go by, anyways. So, what was your fancy? SharePoint 2010, Social Media and Drupal SEO.

• SharePoint 2010, A Business Collaboration Platform. Now Microsoft gives us a bird's eye view into what SharePoint 2010 is really going to look and behave like. Time to take a little tour.
• More Moms Ditch Magazines, Turn to Social Media. Once, all that was needed to identify a mom was her jeans. Now, it's her twitter handle.
• Drupal SEO - 5 Must Do Configurations. Some people say that system X is better than system Y for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. This may be true to some degree. But I've never seen a serious Web CMS project that expected to use the software without any configuration or modifications.
• Open Atrium: A Drupal Based Intranet Ecosystem. Open Atrium, now officially in its public Beta phase, is an open source starter intranet package that includes popular tools like blogs, wikis, a calendar, to-do lists, a ticketing system and microblogging.
• SharePoint 2010: Developer and IT Professional Outtakes. In this sneak peek, let's look at what's new for developers and IT professionals.
• Microsoft Silverlight and Expression Hit the Big 3 Mark. What's new under the hood of Silverlight 3 and Expression 3.
• WordPress 2.9 Takes Aim at Multi Media. Things are moving pretty quickly in the Web CMS world, as usual. Accordingly, hot on the heels of WordPress 2.8 comes an announcement about 2.9.

The Economy is in the Dumps but Content Management is Booming

If you're looking to advance your career, or if your org has got empty seats in need of savvy CMSers, you're in luck. Catch the best fish of the season on our on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs:

• CTO with Drupal experience needed in San Francisco at Drupal Staffing
• Jr. Drupal CMS Engineer at North American Travel Journalist Assoc
• Drupal Developers needed in San Francisco (relocation ok) at Drupal Staffing
• Software Engineer - Knowledge Management at Amazon
• Visual Designer at Lime Wire

Whether Traveling or Virtual, There are Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our new Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• Usability Week Sydney 2009 July 27 - Aug 1, conference
• Drupalcon Paris 2009 September 1, Conference
• IDEA Conference 2009, Toronto, Canada September 15-16, Conference
• Adobe MAX 2009, Los Angeles, CA October 4-7, Conference

It's been a busy summer for the Plone (news, site) project. In particular, they put out a call for Plone Improvement Proposals (PLIPs) for Plone 4. They also split the initial vision for Plone 4 into a more do-able Plone 4 for this year and a more far-reaching update for Plone 5 slated for next year.

Following the PLIP process, the Plone 4 Framework Team has polished off their list of what's to be included in this release.