DotNetNuke Corp., the company behind the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platform for Microsoft® .NET, today announced it has partnered with Engage Software to provide new training options to DotNetNuke users. The partnership will allow DotNetNuke Corp. to leverage Engage Software’s extensive training materials to establish a training group, which will offer live and recorded webinars and onsite training to DotNetNuke users worldwide. Chris Hammond, previously the Master Trainer for Engage Software, has joined DotNetNuke Corp. as Director of Training and is leading the new effort.

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 DotNetNuke Corp., the company behind one of the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platforms for the Microsoft .NET Framework, today announced the release of the DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.4. The release includes new document management capabilities that target the needs of organizations sharing documents within intranets or extranets at a fraction of the cost of existing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. DotNetNuke Corp. has partnered with Xepient (Murcia, Spain) to add the document management technology in Xepient Open-DocumentLibrary to the DotNetNuke Professional and Elite Editions.

The 5.4 release of the DotNetNuke platform is fully compatible with Microsoft ASP.NET 4, which launched in April 2010. The DotNetNuke open source core in the 5.4 release is the heart of the DotNetNuke Community, Professional and Elite Editions.

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New Page Level Content Change Approval Workflows, Ribbon Bar Control Panel, and Page Editing Tools Address Business-Critical Web Site Needs

SAN MATEO, Calif. – DotNetNuke Corp., the company behind the most widely adopted Web Content Management Platform for Microsoft® .NET, today announced the release of the DotNetNuke Professional Edition 5.3. The release includes new tools targeting the needs of business-critical web sites including page level content change approval workflows, new tools for editing pages, and a new ribbon bar control panel. The DotNetNuke platform, which is the core of the DotNetNuke Community, Professional and Elite Editions, includes new features in version 5.3 such as a sophisticated taxonomy system, a new messaging capability and API, and an enhanced social media user profile feature for richer online user experiences.

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This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing’s Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I’ve had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. WordPress
2. DotNetNuke
3. SilverStripe
4. MODx
5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your “best” CMS.

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After four years, WordPress has finally earned respect from the judges in Packt Publishing’s 2009 Open Source CMS Award. WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award and is finally being recognized for its evolution from a blogging application to a full fledged Web content management system. Packt also declared MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position in this award.

We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.

While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result 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.

It is important to note that neither Drupal nor Joomla! competed in the Overall Best category as previous winners in this category compete in the Hall of Fame category. This year, Drupal out competed Joomla! in both the Hall of Fame category as well as the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. Joomla! may be out of luck this year but you surely can’t count them out as the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 version should keep them competitive for next year. With three CMS now included in the Hall of Fame it should be an interesting rivalry between the three in 2010.

Some personal notes about the 2009 winners: As one of the judges for the Overall Best Open Source CMS, I too thought WordPress earned the spot for first place. However, I thought DotNetDuke should have been a runner up as I was impressed with it from a usability perspective. Similar to last year, I plan to eventually write a post of my review and the order in which I judged the CMS to be the best among the five finalists for this category. For now though, I don’t want to take the spotlight away from either MODx or SilverStripe as the well deserved runner up winners.

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Packt Publishing announced today the winner of their 2009 Best Open Source Other CMS Award. Using the word “Other” is Packt’s way of saying non-PHP content management system. For the second straight year the winner for Best Open Source Other CMS is Plone.

Since the introduction of this category in 2007, Plone has consistently featured among the top three, having won it in 2008. In another close contest, dotCMS had to settle for the first runner up position, finishing ahead of mojoPortal in the second runner spot.

So far, Packt has not given many details as to why the judges selected Plone over the remaining non-PHP finalists. I do know that last year, the judges praised “the ecosystem that is developing around Python and Zope is encouraging” for which supports Python. We’ll add to this article if additional details are made public by Packt or the judges themselves. 

Perhaps there is very little surprise to also see dotCMS and mojoPortal listed within the the top three CMS in this category. However, I’m surprised that we don’t see a mention of DotNetNuke as a winner in this category. In a recent review of DotNetNuke, I found the CMS to be much improved from previous years and doing a lot of the right things in the area of usability.

Update: Judge Stoyan Stefanov has posted his notes from his review of the five finalists in this categegory: http://www.phpied.com/open-source-cms-aw…