ocProducts are proud to announce the launch of the first release candidate for ocPortal 5.0, our highly advanced web content management system. This version introduces a number of bug fixes, new features, usability improvements, and a wide-sweeping design overhaul.

There are a number of key changes and additions within this version of the software; The Admin zone has been given an overhaul including new drop down menus and a much more useful front page. Design change highlights include :

• A complete redesign of the Gallery system (we know this is going to make a lot of people very happy)

• The member profile screen has been completely redesigned

• A restructuring of the member points screen, making the points system far more intuitive.

• The quiz screen has been redesigned

• Just about every side block has been revised

• A brand new commenting interface

We have given an overhaul to commenting, RSS and ratings features. These include allowing guests to choose a display name and improving the previewing of reviews. ocPortal version 5 has been thoroughly tested with IE6 and should display properly on this browser. We do however expect to drop support for IE6 once IE9 is released.

We have put a great deal of work into the ocPortal themeing system, with the aim of making it much easier for users to make their site look just how they want it to. Users can now preview all of the templates they are working on without needing switch between several screens. Other themeing features include making it easier to edit the site logo across all zones & themes, alongside new CSS styled buttons. In addition to the aforementioned template screen preview system, you can methodically work through all the screens in the system in order to ensure your theme looks good.

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The most recent TikiFest recently ended in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) on July 18. At this TikiFest, the second in Barcelona, more than 20 Tiki developers, consultants, and end-users met (including others via video conference) to work to improve and upgrade Tiki features, as well as to discuss the future of Tiki development.

Led by long-time Tiki Community members (including some board members of the Tiki Software Community Association) Marc (marclaporte), Louis-Philippe (lph), Jean-Marc (jyhem), Jonny (jonnyb) and Xavi (xavi), great progress was made for the next major Tiki release. Tiki 6, planned for October 2010), will include many of the items discussed and coded during this TikiFest, such as:

• Payment system using “CCLite” (a free software web application to support Community Currency management within and among barter networks)
• Fixing encoding issues (when upgrading Tiki under certain specific scenarios)
• Cron-like features (such as automatically changing tracker item status and sending email users if their tracker items do change within a specific amount of time. This is especially useful for Barter networks and Bug Trackers.
• Identifying ways (through the Newsletters and Group Watches featurse) to allow Tiki site administrators to easily distribute content to users, while allowing the users an option to unsubscribe
• New profile “Easy Blog” to easily install common blogging features (such as blog archives, image headers, etc.) for Tiki sites (http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Easy+Blog)

For details on what was discussed, see http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBarcelona2. For more information on the Tiki Community release schedule, see http://dev.tikiwiki.org/RoadMap.

In addition to code development, the TikiFesters took the opportunity to socialize amongst themselves and sample all that Barcelona has to offer, such as:

• Mediterranean beaches
• Local and international cuisine
• Local beverages (to help stimulate discussions!)
• Discovering hidden spots in Barcelona city and exploring tbhe local history
• Enjoying the gorgeous city sites

For complete details on Barcelona TikiFest, see http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBarcelona2.

Upcoming TikiFests

A tradition in the Tiki community, a TikiFest is a meeting between Tiki community members (that usually only meet online). This is an opportunity to socialize, code and discuss about wiki technology and culture, etc.

Upcoming TikiFests include:

• August 15, 2010 in Ottawa, Canada (and online)
• August 27, 2010 in Montreal, Canada
• October 3, 2010 in New York City, USA
• November 14, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
• August 2, 2011 in Haifa, Israel
• For more information, see the Tiki Community calendar at http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-calendar.php.

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The most recent TikiFest recently ended in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) on July 18. At this TikiFest, the second in Barcelona, more than 20 Tiki developers, consultants, and end-users met (including others via video conference) to work to improve and upgrade Tiki features, as well as to discuss the future of Tiki development.

Led by long-time Tiki Community members (including some board members of the Tiki Software Community Association) Marc (marclaporte), Louis-Philippe (lph), Jean-Marc (jyhem), Jonny (jonnyb) and Xavi (xavi), great progress was made for the next major Tiki release. Tiki 6, planned for October 2010), will include many of the items discussed and coded during this TikiFest, such as:

• Payment system using “CCLite” (a free software web application to support Community Currency management within and among barter networks)
• Fixing encoding issues (when upgrading Tiki under certain specific scenarios)
• Cron-like features (such as automatically changing tracker item status and sending email users if their tracker items do change within a specific amount of time. This is especially useful for Barter networks and Bug Trackers.
• Identifying ways (through the Newsletters and Group Watches featurse) to allow Tiki site administrators to easily distribute content to users, while allowing the users an option to unsubscribe
• New profile “Easy Blog” to easily install common blogging features (such as blog archives, image headers, etc.) for Tiki sites (http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Easy+Blog)

For details on what was discussed, see http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBarcelona2. For more information on the Tiki Community release schedule, see http://dev.tikiwiki.org/RoadMap.

In addition to code development, the TikiFesters took the opportunity to socialize amongst themselves and sample all that Barcelona has to offer, such as:

• Mediterranean beaches
• Local and international cuisine
• Local beverages (to help stimulate discussions!)
• Discovering hidden spots in Barcelona city and exploring tbhe local history
• Enjoying the gorgeous city sites

For complete details on Barcelona TikiFest, see http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBarcelona2.

Upcoming TikiFests

A tradition in the Tiki community, a TikiFest is a meeting between Tiki community members (that usually only meet online). This is an opportunity to socialize, code and discuss about wiki technology and culture, etc.

Upcoming TikiFests include:

• August 15, 2010 in Ottawa, Canada (and online)
• August 27, 2010 in Montreal, Canada
• October 3, 2010 in New York City, USA
• November 14, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
• August 2, 2011 in Haifa, Israel
• For more information, see the Tiki Community calendar at http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-calendar.php.

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 “The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either from a licensing standpoint or because their software is not extensible.”

We sat down with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President & General Manager of Jahia Inc., in Washington, DC to discuss the open source CMS Cloud offering.

Hi Emmanuel, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. In a recent release Jahiastated it has experienced a growing acceptance for hosted web content management, even among conservative industries like banking and finance, for both corporate websites and Intranet projects. Why is not everyone using the cloud?

Emmanuel Garcin: Some companies still have financial incentives to own their datacenter It really depends on the financial structure of the firm. Some prefer hardware that you can depreciate, in order to maximize tax deductions [CAPEX versus OPEX]. Most of our Cloud clients prefer to expense [OPEX] their web initiative spendings.

When discussing the cloud option with new or existing clients, what kind of concerns do you hear the most?

Emmanuel Garcin: Different types of customers have different reasons for looking at our cloud offerings. SMBs with low IT resources don’t want to spend on infrastructure. Large enterprises with datacenters still want the flexibility of the cloud, for example, to reach a new region. Thanks to Amazon, we have computing power all over the world. Companies also may want to get faster to market and bypass the  internal IT/datacenter processes which can be heavy and time consuming.

However, both types of customers hesitate to trust others to administer and secure their systems because they want to be able to monitor and back up the cloud themselves. Their concern is always the same:  What do we do when it’s down? Salesforce.com had the same hesitation in the early adoption phase. In our experience, Jahias’s automatic monitoring, security and backup option is often the selling argument.

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Dallas, TX – Thursday, July 22, 2010 – MODX, LLC, today released its flagship web content management platform, MODX Revolution 2.0. This release culminates years of effort to completely reinterpreting its award-winning popular Open Source Content Management System (CMS).

MODX Revolution is a customizable content management platform. It is built on a modern, object-oriented core with a fully documented API for developers, sits on top of a robust database Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) layer powered by its sister-project, xPDO (http://xpdo.org/).

“Revolution represents more than three years of work reinventing our classic code base,” said Ryan Thrash, CEO of MODX and the project co-founder. “We looked at what was available in both the Open Source and Commercial worlds and thought we could create something truly special and different. We did, and now we’re sharing an amazing platform for consuming APIs, managing content and creating custom web applications with the world.”

Like previous releases, MODX Revolution 2.0 gives visual designers complete control over the design, content structure and overall usability. Since design is an integral part of user experience and aids in communication, MODX leaves how the site will look, how it’s structured and how it behaves up to the project experts. MODX does not impose any restrictions whatsoever in these areas.

Organizations can harness MODX Revolution’s power, flexibility and extensibility that is synonymous with prior releases, with the performance, stability and security of enterprise-level content management applications. This includes a new caching system to improve page loads, handle more content and even leverage proven external caching mechanisms like Memcached. Further improvements include security hardening with proactive cross-site scripting prevention (XSS) and input sanitization.

MODX Revolution 2.0 boasts an all new Manager interface built using the Revolution API itself and ExtJS from Sencha. It can be customized to offer a tailored experience for site managers and editors. Features like a drag-and-drop content tree, the ability to incorporate files on the filesystem as content and linking to external content in the content structure, means controlling content is encompassing and unrestricted.

MODX Revolution 2.0 further introduces Contexts which offer a way to run multiple websites, different language versions, provide additional organizational structure, or even a custom Manager interface. Contexts bring another layer of flexibility and capability to MODX developers.

“Revolution is our future,” said Thrash. “To borrow from Spinal Tap, it takes everything people love about MODX to eleven. Not only that, but it can be tailored to your exact requirements even changing how it functions while still maintaining an upgrade path for future versions or migration from our classic code base.”

The latest release of MODX Revolution be downloaded for free at http://modxcms.com/download/

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It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have news on our next version of ocPortal. 

We had planned to be releasing 4.4 but we’ve decided to head straight for version 5, and now we are within a few days of releasing it.

And what a version 5 we have for you!

Version 5 brings ocPortal right up alongside the most beautiful CMS packages out there, and drives straight past without stopping. We’ve reviewed everything, gone right back to the drawing board (Photoshop) in many cases, as well as injecting the latest display and interface technology.

We could show you a number of before and after pictures, but pictures alone don’t really do ocPortal 5 justice. We have decided to create a preview video of some of the main changes, because from a few pictures you might think we had just tidied things up a bit. This to be fair, is in some sense true, because when we design ocPortal we have to make sure we don’t project too specific a design concept onto people’s unique sites. We’ve done far more than that though, as the following video demonstrates…http://bit.ly/ocportal5

Version 5 isn’t just about graphics. It’s also about addons, dozens of them, which we have lined up waiting for release. I promise you’ll be blown away: we’ve really gone the extra mile to design a set of addons that encompass the best of what can be achieved on the Internet today.

Version 5 isn’t just about graphics and addons. It’s also about features. We’ve implemented dozens of new features, usability improvements, and also bug fixes. All this without breaking anything except theme compatibility.

Version 5 isn’t just about graphics and addons and features. It’s also about something else which we’ve been working on in secret for months and will change everything for ocPortal users… but we’re not ready to announce that yet.

ocPortal Version 5 release candidate will be released on Thursday 22nd of July. 

The ImpressCMS Project (www.impresscms.org) has just released ImpressCMS 1.2.2, which is a security release. This version patches a recently discovered vulnerability in an external library, CSSTidy. The file containing the vulnerability is not used by ImpressCMS, and should be removed.

The vulnerability was reported on Secunia as a cross-site scripting vulnerability targeting a file in the CSSTidy plugin. Upgrading to ImpressCMS 1.2.2 will take care of removing the exploitable file.

To remove the file without performing an update to your installation, you can manually remove plugins/csstidy/css_optimiser.php.

Where do I get ImpressCMS 1.2.2?

You can download the latest release from our read more

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Following ocPortal’s new feature tracker becoming established we wanted to make this announcement to a wider audience outside of our forum. Since the news item below there have been 11 new features added for discussion and 37, almost 20%, have been resolved.

Since the original release we are now working on Version 5 rather than 4.4 due to the amount of changes made. You can expect an announcement about this in the next few days.

Original news forum article:

Preceding the expected release of ocPortal version 4.4,  we are pleased to announce a new feature tracker which we will be using to plan future features. The tracker shows all 177 feature areas we currently have for consideration for future versions of ocPortal, laid out for anyone to see and comment on. In the past we have planned ocPortal in private so this is a huge change for us and a huge release of what were previously private plans.

The purpose of the feature tracker is to highlight current and future developments within ocPortal and allow the community to have a say and make suggestions. Each issue or feature in the database has a description of the intended functionality, a time estimation, and a clear layout of dependencies and risk management data (which gives an impression to how the developers likely see it in terms of schedule for implementation).

We hope the new feature tracker helps foster a greater feeling of inclusivity amongst our community and a real foundation for transparency and engagement. You shouldn’t expect everything on this list to be “around the corner” but it does give everyone a chance to have their say, and help foster a shared vision.

The ocPortal feature tracker can be found here:
http://ocportal.com/tracker/my_view_page.php

FlashMoto.com presented a New Stable Version 1.2 of its advanced Flash Content Management System  – a powerful platform that allows a Flash developer  to manage and the end-user to edit the Flash website without any additional software installing. Both the developers and end-users will really appreciate the new features of the System that have been implemented into the New Version 1.2.

In addition to the features available in the version 1.1, the new version 1.2 of FlashMoto CMS now includes the following:

• Control Panel Rebrandin.
• Under Construction Mod.
• The ability to set a FavIcon for a website via FlashMoto control panel.
• FlashMoto components were updated for more convenient and automated assets loadin.
• The ability to pre-load images, MP3, FLV and SWF files during the website loading stage.
• Disable website sounds effect.
• The ability to preview a website either in the same window or in a new one.
• XML Sitemap Generator.
• Rich Content module with external source.
• Control Panel Interface updates and optimization.
• Improved Media Player, Media Loader and loaders with new resize options.
• Object effects management tools improvement.
• Modules Data Provides Management.
• Auto-validation and correction of XML files.
• Improved display of HTML content page.
• Speed improvements.
• Pages, pop-ups and website properties improvements.
• ‘Rasterize Object’ function added.
• Such modules, as image gallery, info module and music player now provides the ability to manage data sources

FlashMoto Flash CMS is available as a standalone version or with a Flash CMS template. FlashMoto provides a collection of interactive Flash CMS templates that meets the main FlashMoto control panel requirements and can be a perfect solution for Flash websites powered by Flash CMS.

Visit FlashMoto website | Try FlashMoto Live Demo

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