The latest CMS news from around the world
We try to stay hip to the funk with what's going on in the world with new CMS releases and other related news. But if we happened to miss something that you think should be here, then feel free to suggest it!
Nov
9
Silverstripe 3.0 Alpha
Silverstripe announced their alpha version of their 3.0 release. While its not finished yet, it starts to show off where they want to be in the future and what they are aiming for. One of the biggest changes is the separation between their CMS and Framework. Along with this is a new layout and some simplification of the backend. You can try it out by download it here.
Oct
21
Squarespace 6 Beta
The Squarespace 6 beta is opening up and from the preview video it looks to be a pretty impressive offering for photographers and other creatives. Lots of drag and drop goodness and click-to-edit functionality. Beware, pretty soon your clients will expect this level of functionality in their websites!
Jan
20
Open Source CMS Market Share
A digital agency named Water and Stone has put together a research report about the popularity and usage of varying open source content management systems. Its an interesting quick read, but if you just want the cliffs notes, then here’s their summary:
- The Big Three — WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal — remain firmly in command of the market.
- WordPress has taken the lead in brand strength after a strong growth year.
- The gap continues to narrow between .NET market leader DotNetNuke and contender Umbraco. This continues the trend observed in the 2009 Report.
- Liferay leads the Java WCM market, though Alfresco is not far behind and in fact leads in several metrics.
- Up and coming systems to watch include: Concrete5 and Umbraco.
- Systems possibly at risk include: Textpattern and Xoops.
Jan
12
Joomla 1.6 Arrives
The new version of Joomla has finally arrived. Version 1.6. While it has been in beta for a long time, this is the final release that is ready for the public. This release brings better access controls, a user-defined category structure, easier installation, extended language support, and hundreds of other features. Check out the newest improvements today.
Jan
5
Drupal 7 Out
Big news in the CMS world today: Finally, Drupal 7 has been released. After many alphas and betas, it has been publicly released. As the video states, thousands of contributors have worked for over 3 years to bring this to us. This release brings us many new things including a whole new user interface that streamlines many repetitive tasks, improved database support for all different kinds of databases, better control over theming, custom fields API, and a fancy new image/file handler that can be used anywhere throughout the interface. If you haven’t already, check out the download, installation guide, and then party.
Nov
24
EE Forecast
If you’re really into ExpressionEngine and want to know that EllisLab is up to next, then you’ll want to put this one in your bookmarks: The EE Forecast. The page tells what priorities the team members are working on next so you can get a snapshot of what features and functionality will be fixed or added in the next release.
Nov
23
Big Squarespace Fall Update
Squarespace has been growing a lot lately and is working on adding some nice features to their CMS. These include an iPad App, Geolocation widgets, Autosaving, and media management improvements. These should be available soon.
Nov
22
Open Source Awards 2010
Packt has announced their yearly Open Source Awards, awarding CMS Made Simple the winner of Open Source CMS, with Silverstripe and MODx trailing close behind. That said, they separated Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla into another category called “Hall of Fame CMS” which means they won all of the other years. As a result of a tie between Drupal and WordPress, an extra independent judge was brought in for a decisive vote. Here are the results.
Open Source CMS
Winner: CMS Made Simple
1st Runner up: SilverStripe
2nd Runner up: MODx
Hall of Fame CMS
Winner: WordPress
1st Runner up: Drupal
2nd Runner up: Joomla!
Most Promising Open Source Project
Winner: Pimcore
1st Runner up: TomatoCMS
2nd Runner up: BuddyPress
Nov
18
Textpattern 4.3.0 Released
This release changes some of the old functionality in order to prepare the way for Textpattern 5, as well as adds a bit of new functionality like image tag support, better feeds, and built in language packs for plugins.
Nov
16
Drupal 7 Beta 3
Yep, maybe someday we might reach a release candidate status with Drupal 7, but don’t get your hopes up too soon because right now they’re only releasing another beta. That said, it shouldn’t be too long before as release candidate and then a major release for this major CMS.
If you haven’t been back in awhile, you may also want to check out the redesigned Drupal.org, which features a slick, simpler design and a giant support community.
Nov
9
CMS Made Simple 1.9 “Bora Bora”
CMS Made Simple just had a large 1.9 update where they added “features, features, and more features”. You can now customize the URL any way you’d like, disabling the WYSIWYG editor, a new admin theme, and the ability to have a “Site Down” page during maintenance.
Aug
23
The 2010 Open Source Awards
It’s that time of the year again for PacktPub’s annual Open Source Awards. These awards go to some of the hard-working people out there who help develop open source CMS’s. This year the CMS-related categories are: Open Source CMS, Hall of Fame CMS, and Most Promising Open Source Project. At this time of year they are in the nomination phase, where you can nominate your favorite projects out there. After September 17th, they will narrow the results and you can vote for the top projects.
Aug
7
Have you seen MojoMotor?
In the midst of the update to ExpressionEngine 2.1, EllisLab announced a new product that hasn’t gotten a ton of attention. Its name is MojoMotor and is made to provide a more simple starting point for a website. Then, if the website grows in complexity it could be easily upgraded to ExpressionEngine. Compared to EE, this CMS is a pretty stripped down page-based CMS. It allows you to reorder pages quickly, and use a WYSIWYG editor to update content.
Mar
19
SXSW Roundup
We attended several CMS-related panels at SXSW including:
- Is Wordpress Killing Web Design? – This wasn’t as much a discussion about Wordpress as much as CMS’s themselves. The discussion revolved around the pros/cons of themes, and how we, as designers, have gotten lazy at creatively laying out content within the “editable area”
- R.I.P. Content Management System – This panel’s speaker was Dries Buytaert who created Drupal. Mostly it was just a presentation on Drupal and how it is being used by developers to create really complex, social websites. Coincidentally, we also were on the same plane as Dries on the way home.
- ExpressionEngine 2.0: Total Domination – This one was our favorite. Hosted by a variety of different EE community members, it started with a simple overview of what EE is and how it works. Then progressed down the line of panelists with helpful tips starting with simple theming tips, and ending with complex plugins and whatnot.
SXSW was a completely new experience for us and certainly CMS’s are a big part of what the “interactive” space is involved with. We visited with some of the vendors who were hawking their new CMS’s, we got to meet people we’d met in CMS forums, and we shared a few laughs with fellow designers/developers about the joys/pains of working with them.
Mar
12
We’re at SXSW!
We’ll be attending the SXSW Interactive conference and attending some sessions related to ExpressionEngine, Drupal and Wordpress. We’ll see if we have anything to report back to you after we get back. Feel free to send us an email if you’re also planning to be there!