The powerful Open Source CMS Drupal has released its latest version onto the world. Drupal 6 adds a host of new features, including an easier installation process, built-in OpenID support and updates to the theming structure.
As far as content management systems (CMS) go, Drupal is easily one of the most powerful, especially for scaling large sites with multiple authors. But that power has always come at a slight cost to usability - especially for new users. We've been playing with Drupal 6's various release candidates (we haven't installed the final release on our test set-up yet) and have been extremely impressed at the changes made in streamlining and simplifying the installation and overall management system. Is it as easy as WordPress, well no -- that's not really Drupal's aim -- but it is much more intuitive than Drupal 5, which in itself was a step-up from Drupal 4. New users should check out this 12 minute screencast on Drupal's site, it walks you through the entire process.
If you are looking for a scalable, customizable CMS solution to host either a large site or lots of different sites, you owe it to yourself to give Drupal a look.
Joomla!, the open-source content-management system has reached a major milestone today with the release of Joomla! 1.5. Like similar projects WordPress and Drupal can be used to drive a blog or full website. Joomla!, which formed in 2005 as a fork of Mambo has a strong developer community and focuses on being simple, elegant and flexible.
The API has received significant updates in Joomla! 1.5, for both the interface and the structural framework. The administrative interface is now more streamlined and easier to use. It is now easy to add and manage media items directly into posts. There are also improved pagination controls and search-engine friendly URLs.
Designers now have greater control over how their layouts, and can automatically override a custom solution over the table-heavy output from Joomla! of old. This model is being adopted into third-party extensions. Additionally designers can now create custom modules to have greater control over how their sites look.
For developers, significant changes to the API are aimed to make Joomla! easily workable with future enhancements. The Joomla! 1.5 API is object oriented and pattern based, while also offering compatibility with both PHP 4.3 and PHP 5.
All in all, the enhancements look pretty impressive and we cannot wait to try out the new Joomla!. Stay tuned to DownloadSquad as we compare other content-management systems later this week.
When it comes to finding out what tech related news items peers find the most important, Digg is probably king. And while Digg also features political news, arts stories, and other subjects, there are some topics that you just aren't likely to find.
Enter Blingd. This site serves all the freshest hip hop news items, in a Digg social story submission style. It's easy to see that every aspect of this lifestyle gets represented here from dance, fashion, graffiti, books, music, sports and movies. It might not be the prettiest site, but it is starting to bring a community together to a place where top news can be shared in an easy to reach location.
If hip hop is your game, and you want to stay on top of who released the top album of the week, who drives the best pimped out ride, and who the latest one signed to Bad Boy is, this might be your place. One thing we would like to see, a little more Bling in the design. Blingd does use the open source Pligg for its CMS.
The web is often a much more stable, avaliable, adaptive, and usable environment for businesses than hacking together old Excel spreadsheet and sharing them via a network drive. It can also be far cheaper than adopting the Sun, Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle software stack's to manage information and customers. That said, the pressure is still on the web service providers to keep finding ways to prove this to customers..
Even as Web 2.0 has moved millions of common computer tasks (such as IM, email, document creation, and even gaming) onto the Internet, the corporate world has been highly skeptical. That isn't surprising, corporations are often very slow to adopt new technology. Moving away from a heavy IT infrastructure and towards service based platforms has a lot of risks and SalesForce has been trying to woo more corporations to take the plunge for several years now.
One of their really good ideas from the SalesForce camp is called trust.salesforce.com. Here everyone, customer or no, can peek into their network operations center and see how things are going. The information is public and not always very flattering. Various icons and information messages let you know what the current status is and when there is a service disruption. It also lists scheduled maintenance windows and impacted systems.
This is a good idea and more companies should follow suit if they hope to attract people away from the business software stacks and onto online only equivalents. Those who provide services targeted at corporations (Google? Amazon? Microsoft?) especially need to do this as their current black box approch is hurting adoption. The more open service providers are, the fewer excuses IT Managers and CTOs will have to keep business tasks in house.
The heat is on once again in the online calendar sector. It seemed like the news was always pumping out on this front late last year, then things cooled down shortly after Calgoo announced it could sync with Google Calendar. Well, Calgoo has announced that they are hitting the big time with Version 1.0 this week.
DownloadSquad has covered Calgoo since its inception, and followed its progress along the way. It's all grown up now, and ready to get out of beta and help users keep calendar schedules clean and uncluttered. The new version will get released this Wednesday, when users can experience all of these new features:
Outlook and Google Synchronization
Redesign of calendar views
Redesign of content management system
Redesign of setup and calendar wizards
Redesign of application icons, buttons and layouts
Microsoft Outlook contact syncing
Agenda view printing
Sample calendars
Improved performance
Look out for a review of the new Calgoo from DownloadSquad when it gets released.
Check out some screenshots of the new Calgoo V1.0 Interface.
If you are a developer or designer looking for a list of great tools, check out the Protolize database. Tony has archived a listing of the most current and useful web tools. With categories ranging from CSS, Javascript, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, Flash, CMS, and Inspiration, you will surely get cooking with some top grade code. Each link is rated, and most contain a little description of what it works for as well as user reviews. Protolize is also quite pleasing to navigate with its sexy web 2.0 style. If you don't find what you're looking for on the site, or want to submit your site for inclusion in the directory, Protolize does have a submission form. Tip: Check out the Top Rated category for some real fresh stuff!
The field of Content Management Systems (CMS) mirrors what my grandfather always said, "Cream rises to the top." Scores of open source products jockey for position among the field and only a very few rise to the occasion. Joomla (formerly Mambo), Typo, and Drupal stand out among the field and, of those, Drupal mostly wins the overwhelming support of the FOSS community. Drupal can be seen in action at sites like OurMedia, SaveThe76Ball, and Spread Firefox, all of which receive regular traffic poundings.
Michael Stutz of Linux.com has taken Drupal 5 for a thorough test drive and put together a medium-depth look at installation, changes to the new version, Drupal's new CSS caching engine and other wide ranging upgrades.
It's an impressive overhaul, over 500 developers submitted 1000 patches to the popular framework. The final verdict? Drupal is easier but, still not easy. Stutz writes, "Installing and running Drupal is fairly easy now, but configuration of a first-class site still takes work and ultimately a programmer's hand -- you have to know your PHP and CSS, and you have to spend time learning how it all interacts in Drupal." Fortunately for the brave souls tasked with developing first-class CMS backed websites and web applications, Drupal's community is strong, and very helpful.
There's no shortage of CMS or "portal" building tools out there. Drupal is one I've come to trust and its feature set is hard to beat. But many require a certain amount of heavy lifting or at least tweaking to get running. Enter Geeklog-- a so-called "portal in a box," or to hear them say it, "The Ultimate Weblog System." I don't know about ultimate, but I will say the installation and configuration process is pretty darn simple. The most cumbersome aspect will be creating a SQL database (wish I had a nickel for every time I've said that). After you've got your database mojo, it's a straight shot to unpack and install and start working.
Geeklog is no slouch in the added functions, as there are apparently a large number of plugins and add-ons. It's not all sunshine and roses, as there are limited templates and the usual quirks and gotchas. Linux.com has an excellent review, and brief guide to getting started. Geeklog might not be everything you've been looking for, but if you want something quick and dirty (and at some point, don't we all?), it might be a good fit. I should mention they're working to improve the tool by using bounties: a small sum paid to developers (courtesy of sponsor AOE media GmbH) for implementing user-requested features. So with any luck, Geeklog will flourish in the coming months.
Seymore is a Ruby on Rails CMS (that's Content Management System) by Thomas Mango that's still in the earliest stages but nevertheless looks pretty impressive. Seymore relies on the principle of allowing input wherever there's output, i.e. if I'm logged in and looking at a page of the site, I can edit that page right there, without entering an administration back-end or similar. The best way to get an idea of how Seymore works is by visiting the site and watching Mango's screencasts. He shows off Seymore's category system, WYSIWYG editor, wiki-like revision system, and other important features. Like I said, Seymore is brand new (first release: yesterday), so its to-do list is as long as its feature list, but it looks like it's off to a great start. I'm not sure what license it's released under, but since Mango makes the source code available, I'm gonna go out on a limb and call it open source.
Just when you think there are plenty of CMS choices available, we track another one down via eHub: Skeletonz, a simple CMS based on Python and AJAX with a few tricks up its sleeve. Since it's in a 1.0 beta for now, the only way to get it is through SVN, and you'll need Python 2.4, MySQL and MySQLdb. Once you're up and running you'll be greeted with standard features like a template system, plugins and an intuitive editing system, along with built-in spell checking for those times when your content matters more than your English degree.
A wiki is also available, including information on where the project is headed. Check out Skeletonz if you've been looking for something a little different from the CMS industry.
If you ever have need for an online learning center of any kind, Moodle is most likely one of the best options you have. It is a full-blown pedagogical learning managment system that has everything you could want and more. It is "easy" to configure if you know what you're doing. It is written in PHP and uses MySQL as a backend, but can be used with other database systems if needed. Many universities and K-12 schools have setup online learning centers using Moodle. I have personally used it for corporate projects, including hacking it to give me exactly the data I want for integration with an existing training tracking application. It plays nice with many types of content including SCORM, flash, and many more. Moodle also supports many types of modules that are easy to install through it's clean interface. It is a bit easier to install and use than many other learning systems I have tried, and is more stable. Moodle is free for download. Open-source LMS baby!
There are a lot of CMS's out
there, and we've mentioned a
couple. NetOffice is another CMS, and OpenSourceCMS rates it at a 4.32, which is pretty good. It's got some great
features for working in groups, like Gantt charts (we all love those, don't we?), full support for the iCal format (so
Sunbird can import), and the usual panoply of checkpoint and people tracking stuff... The only problem is, there hasn't
been a lot going on with the versions since middle of last year. Some people on the forums have been asking if the
project is dead, and there's not really a definitive answer. Still, it looks like a promising project, and possibly
useful if you're needing a groupware-oriented CMS.
The core developers of Mambo, a popular open source CMS, are parting ways with Miro, the company that owns its name. The split is the result of recent Miro's decision to start a "Mambo Foundation," without the input of Mambo's developers. The developers have taken their base of operations, as well as most of the Mambo community, to OpenSourceMatters, where development of the CMS formerly known as Mambo continues apace. News Forge has the scoop.
The field of Content Management Systems (CMS) mirrors what my grandfather always said, "Cream rises to the top." 
There's no shortage of CMS or "portal" building tools out there. Drupal is one I've come to trust and its feature set is hard to beat. But many require a certain amount of heavy lifting or at least tweaking to get running. Enter 
There are a lot of CMS's out
there, and we've 
The core developers of Mambo, a popular open source CMS, are parting ways with Miro, the company that owns its name. The split is the result of recent Miro's decision to start a "Mambo Foundation," without the input of Mambo's developers. The developers have taken their base of operations, as well as most of the Mambo community, to 
