Feature
Welcome to the August 2012 installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month. If you feel that your project was left out, we invite you to email us at [email protected] to have a project representative added to the list of people we contact for updates.
Composite C1
In August, the folks at Composite C1 (news, site) celebrated their debut in Microsoft Azure's (news, site) App Gallery. The App Gallery is still just a preview, with only eleven apps listed, but it allows you to install Composite C1 for free in the Azure cloud within minutes. They also created a tutorial helping Composite C1 users install and implement templates from Twitter (news, site) Bootstrap.
August brought a renewed effort toward the Composite C1 core team blog as well, along with work toward the release of Composite C1 4.0. The latest feature additions include:
- Pluggable page templates using ASP.NET Master Pages and Razor files.
- Additional Razor functions within the "Functions" perspective, inherited from the contrib project.
- The ability to convert ASCX controls into C1 functions.
Finally, one of the community members created an autocomplete add-on that enables autocomplete in the console, similar to the Visual Studio autocomplete feature.
Drupal
In August, the Drupal (news, site) project celebrated the open-sourcing of We the People, the White House's Online Petitions System. This code was released in the form of a Drupal install profile, which can be cloned or forked by anyone interested in launching a similar site. The project also released the Drupal 7-based Spark 2.x-1.0-alpha4, which is an early look at prototype authoring experience improvements they hope to propose for inclusion in Drupal 8's core. This alpha release includes:
- Inline editing through the Edit module.
- A true WYSIWYG editor through the Aloha Editor.
- A responsive layout builder through the Layout and Gridbuilder modules.
- A new admin theme through Ember.
Drupal company Acquia (news, site) announced a partnership with BlazeMeter, integrating BlazeMeter's JMeter load testing cloud with the Acquia Network through the installation of (what else?) a Drupal module. They've also released an interactive prototype of Drupal Commons 3.x, in hopes of collecting feedback. Improvements coming for this version of Drupal Commons include:
- "Following" other community members, topics, groups, individual threads and other content.
- Becoming a "contributor" to an open group the moment you create content in it, along with other streamlined group audience controls.
- Browsing easily within a group through a new browsing widget on group home pages.
- Highlighting "interesting" content through an automated "active content" system, using a variety of factors such as the number of comments, likes and views.
- Supporting different platforms with a responsive theme.
- Reporting spam with a built-in "report as inappropriate" link, and additional spam-fighting tools for community managers.
August also saw Acquia's purchase of Mollom for social content moderation, a first-place ranking of Acquia in Inc. magazine among software companies and eighth place overall in Inc.'s 500|5000 ranking of the U.S.'s fastest-growing private companies, and the launch of Instant Insight, which can scan your Drupal site and compare it against a battery of tests on performance, security, SEO and best practices.
Joomla
In August, the Joomla! (news, site) project released Joomla 3.0 Alpha 2. The main goal for this release is to allow advance testing of the new admin and site templates based on the Bootstrap framework. This release also includes most of the platform changes coming with Joomla 3.0.
August brought the Joomla Summer of Code projects to a close. Coming in September, the students will receive their reviews and put the final touches on their projects. This month also carried Joomla past the milestone of 10,000 extensions.
September will also bring the launch of Joomla 3.0, and Joomla Days in Columbia (September 6), Brazil (September 7 - 8), Poland (September 22 - 24), New York (September 22 - 24) and Italy (September 29).
mojoPortal
In August, the folks at mojoPortal (news, site) shipped the beta of their skin exporter for Artisteer 4. The final version will be released when Artisteer 4 is. They've also started a new project to get designers creating HTML 5 skins for mojoPortal.
There's a new community project for skinning mojoPortal as well. September will bring the next release of mojoPortal, focusing on some long-standing requests for improvements to the blog feature.
Learning Opportunities
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Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
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Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
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Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
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Webinar
Jun
21
Retail Reinvented: A Masterclass in Creating Digital Experiences That Click
Hear how online retailers architect their digital experience infrastructure for peak traffic and demand
Webinar
Jun
21
The Feedback Loop: Accelerating Personalization for Exemplary Customer Experiences
Are you ready to harness the power of feedback in your personalization strategy?
Webinar
Jun
22
How to Succeed in Today's Engagement Economy
Doing true personalization at scale with marketing automation
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Orchard
In August, the folks at Orchard (news, site) continued preparation for their first conference, Orchard Harvest, which will be held in Santa Monica, CA on September 8 and 9. They also continued work toward Orchard 1.6. This release focuses on performance and dependency issues, notably nHibernate 3, which will bring database-level caching to the Orchard CMS.
Nuxeo
In August, the folks at Nuxeo (news, site) released Nuxeo Platform 5.6. This version is scheduled for GA release on September 5. The company also continued their series of webinars focusing on different aspects of 5.6, and continued preparations for Nuxeo World, which will be held in Paris on October 25 - 26.
Plone
In August, the Plone (news, site) project adopted the Plone Code of Conduct for the Plone Conference 2012, and opened voting on the talks for the conference. Coming September 21 - 24, the community will hold the Sea Sprint in North Carolina, where they'll add Deco Lite into the Plone 4.x series.
Sense/Net
In August, the folks at Sense/Net (news, site) released Sense/Net version 6.1 and Sense/Net version 6.1.1. These releases bring new performance tuning, better and more complete localization, a new robust backup tool, and lots of new documentation in the wiki, including a new Getting Started section.
Sense/Net also partially changed their licensing scheme. The Sense/Net Community releases remain under the GPL, but the Sense/Net Enterprise licensing has shifted from server-based to core-based, which offers more flexibility for smaller installations. This licensing includes SQL server cores, and there are now no WCM, Office or High Availability versions. All features are available to all Sense/Net Enterprise-licensed servers.
In September, the Sense/Net team will continue work toward the next releases, which will focus on an improved API, a REST API, and even more mobile and tablet support.
Squiz
In August, the folks at Squiz (news, site) held their Squiz and Funnelback International User Conference from August 30 - 31 in Brisbane. At the conference, they plan to launch Funnelback 12 and a new Squiz product. Watch the Squiz website for more details. This conference follows their European User Summit, which they held in London in July. The presentation videos are now online.
August also brought the launch of Squiz Matrix 4.8.5 and 4.10.1. These releases included a new Record Filter screen for Data Source assets and a new SOAP function to configure multiple metadata fields on an asset. Coming on September 3 is the release of Squiz Matrix 4.10.2, which brings the following new features:
- A new keyword modifier to return a JSON encoded string.
- Improved error handling for required metadata with workflow bundles.
- Spanish characters remapped in Web paths.
- A new keyword modifier to evaluate XPath expressions.
- A No Results bodycopy for the rolling Calendar page.
- Improved HIPO error handling.
