Web Cms News & Articles

WordPress (news, site) made a small announcement today regarding whether or not the GPL applies to themes. 

WordPress refers to the GPL as their Bill of Rights, but we like to think of it as a free software license. The GPL is a popular licence that grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition, and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved--even when the work is changed or added to.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress writes, "We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license." But just to be double sure, he recently consulted the Software Freedom Law Center for their opinion. Mullenweg's results were summed up on the WordPress blog in one simple line:

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."

Of course, cutting out CSS and JavaScript from WordPress would get kind of hairy and horrible, so the final verdict from the WordPress team is that they will continue to only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible.

In order to recognize and celebrate a few of the folks creating 100% GPL themes as well as providing support and other services around them, WordPress has a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes here.

A recent post on Content Management Connection's blog made a lot of sense. In it, the online community for technology practitioners, software companies and end users, discussed the need to be content first, design second.

Their point is that you wouldn't buy a suit for a stranger without first having her trying it on, so why design websites around content that doesn't exist yet. It's an interesting concept, but not as simple as it sounds.

While it's true that when projects are started and designers are tasked with putting together comps of possible designs, the actual content for a site is usually just a gleam in the project manager's eye. Rarely do design projects start with the final copy. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Call it rubber-necking or whatever you want, but when one company buys another company in this business we want to know the details.

Such is the case with the announcement that Pennsylvania based Really Strategies (news, site) has just bought out DocZone (news, site), a Dutch-based SaaS XML content management provider under -- you guessed it -- undisclosed terms.

The Joomla Web CMS project -- as many of you well know -- is based on the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means, among other things, that the Joomla project generally has an ethos of encouraging collaboration, community and free software.

The Joomla team confirmed in 2007 that both Joomla v1.0 and v1.5 were released under the GPL license. Now, the Joomla folks have taken things one step further.

Installing everything needed for a CMS can be quite daunting, so it comes as welcome news that eZ (news, site) has developed an all-in-one installer for those just starting out or switching in the open source CMS world.

WoodWing (news, site) released two updated versions of its language-improving Smart Speller and Smart Hyphen plug-ins for Adobe's Creative Suite 4.

In August of last year, the CNW Group, a provider of news and information distribution services for communication professionals, launched their social media release, the evolution of their multi-media release which includes print, audio, video and Internet and a little more.

Now they go another step in supporting the needs of communication professionals with the release of the CNW MediaRoom, an externally hosted website that integrates into a company's website, providing the ability to quickly and easily provide communications like press and social media releases.

The initial vision for Plone 4 was so complex that it wasn't slated for release until 2010. In order to allow for smaller, more focused releases, Plone (news, site) Founder Alexander Limi announced at the Plone Symposium at Penn State that the Plone Roadmap has been revised. What was originally Plone 4 has been split into Plone 4 and Plone 5.

FatWire (news, site) is back in the news. These folks have been busy lately. In between "rescue" plans and moves towards worldwide "domination," the web content management vendor also had some time to work on two new releases -- Engage 7.5 (content targeting) and Analytics 2.5 (content optimization) -- which bring major architectural changes involving open source-based technology.

Apple may make beautiful products but it resembles North Korea in how it communicates with the world.

The next major version of Joomla (news, site), Joomla 1.6, is available in pre-release. If you're an extension maintainer, a site builder or just someone who really can't wait to check out the next generation of tools, here's a look at what this initial release has to offer.

OK, you can toss WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 1 to the wind. Why? because even though it was released only five days ago, the popular blogging platform has just announced the release of 2.8.1 Beta 2. 

Along with the release comes a side note from the WordPress team which states: "We especially suggest, recommend, and beg that plugin developers test their plugins against beta 2 and let us know of any issues."

The notable bug fixes in Beta 2 include: 

• Translation of role names fixed
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
• Switched back to curl as the default transport
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload

You can review the full list of tickets fixed here. 

WordPress Baker

“Baker” was named after Chet Baker, an American jazz trumpeter. Accordingly, the new version of WordPress is pret-ty jazzy. The feature that grabs the most attention is arguably the Themes Browser, which allows users to browse, filter and install themes all from the WordPress dashboard. Such a feat no doubt raises the usability bar for many a Web CMS, including Drupal, whose themes are reportedly less than easy to install without a certain level of tech-savviness.

Want it? Download version 2.8.1 Beta 2 here, and check out the changes since Beta 1 here.

The Plone (news, site) project has launched a user feedback system for collecting Plone improvement ideas. This tool allows Plone users to suggest, discuss, and vote on ways the open source CMS can be improved.

While the project doesn't promise that every idea will be implemented, they intend to use this system to understand what Plone users want to see added and improved. In particular, the team recommends that anyone interested in contributing to the project should take a look and see what ideas are the most in demand and sound like something they may want to work on.

If you find something and end up working on a significant new feature or change, then you'll pull together a Plone Improvement Proposal, or PLIP. This PLIP will be reviewed by the Framework Team assigned to the major release you're aiming for (as an example, the deadline for Plone 4 PLIPs just passed).

For more information:

• See the FAQ "How to suggest a feature for Plone"
• Submit and browse Plone improvement ideas
• Read the official idea system launch posting

Tony White of the Gilbane Group began his talk on the evolution of the Web CMS market with an observation. White, apparently something of an early-bird, spotted 22 people in his hotel lobby at 6:30 a.m. this morning. Over half of the people there were taking advantage of the free wifi to browse the Web, while only one person was reading a newspaper. He asked the attendees to imagine how different the behavior of his fellow early risers would have been even as little as five years back.

In a fast-paced talk, White went on to share some of his observations as a consultant specialist in Web CMS. He resumed the market briefly as a wide spectrum from low-end point solutions to complex enterprise platforms, with almost no correlation to price, and warned attendees of putting too much trust into analysis that assume a correlation between cost and quality, as it may not be the case.

Most web content management systems come with a spell checker. Some of them, however, hide the feature away as a little button in a mass of menus. In the rush to publish, it is easy to forget about it. As modern language becomes increasingly mangled and full of jargon, it can be hard for a grammar checker to figure out what you are trying to say.

Take a look at a new tool in the "intelligent" grammar and spell check space. After the Deadline (site) is a smart spell, style and grammar checker that supports the TinyMCE editor and has a WordPress plugin.