Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware has been awarded a 2010 Bossie award (Best of Open Source Software) by InfoWorld, in the Applications category. InfoWorld’s Best of Open Source Software Awards (aka the Bossies) is chosen annually by Test Center editors and reviewers, and recognize the best open source software for business users.

The editors called Tiki “a powerful, integrated, Web-based application” that can “build and maintain websites, wikis, groupware, CMSes, forums, blogs, and bug trackers, as well as make them multilingual.”

The review continues, citing Tiki’s “fine-grained role-based privilege system” as a differentiating factor against classic wiki models, such as MediaWiki. Read the full article on InfoWorld.a: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/b… .

And don’t forget to nominate Tiki for the Packt 2010 Open Source Awards  (http://info.tikiwiki.org/article105).

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The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched yesterday by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.

These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website at www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

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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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Roberto Galoppini has an interesting case study on selecting an open source project management tool. In it, he describes his SOS Open Source methodology for filtering open source projects by looking at a number of factors organized into three categories: sustainability, industrial strength, and project strategy. The case study doesn’t go into much [...]

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CMS Critic: Symphony CMS is a beautifully minimal PHP+MySQL-based open source content management system that uses XML and XSLT as its backbone.

On the surface, Symphony is similar in function to ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, WordPress, or Drupal. While Symphony is certainly capable of running a standard website or blog, its conceptual elegance and focus on data structures puts it in a unique position, straddling the line between a CMS and a full web application framework such as Django or Ruby on Rails.

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The Tiki Community is proud to announce the release of its first promotional video: How to get help.

In this video, recorded in March 2010, Gary Cunningham-Lee explains how new Tiki Community members can get help with their Tiki sites. Gary is a long-time Tiki contributor and a member of the Tiki Software Community Association.

Watch the complete video at: http://bit.ly/ddczzU .

A series of video clips, released under a Creative Commons license, will be made available for interested parties. Daniel Gauthier, a member of the Tiki Community and the filmmaker of these clips says, “I’ve created these video clips for a very specific purpose: To help developers, technology decision makers and companies like ISPs who normally know about Open Source Development projects understand the richness of the Tiki Community.”

Three to five video clips will be released in the near future, each lasting three to four minutes. These “info-clips” are interviews with members of the Tiki community. In each clip, the audience learns about more about Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, the Tiki Community and its “Wiki Way” model of software development.

Mr. Gauthier adds, “What a great way to learn about Open Source Development. Tiki Wiki is a dynamic eco-system. It grows so fast and so strong that one day, I believe it will be adopted by many more Fortune 500 companies.”

The videos also showcase the Tiki integration with Kaltura (http://www.kaltura.org/), an open source, community supported online video and rich-media solution. See http://dev.tikiwiki.org/Video for details on the Tiki+Kaltura integration.

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Presentations to cover a wide range of business and technical CMS

NEW YORK, NY — Magnolia, the open source content management vendor that delivers simplicity on an enterprise scale, today named key speakers for Magnolia Conference 2010, to be held in Basel, Switzerland, September 16-17 2010. The talks were chosen from a broad range of proposed business and technical presentations, from CMS for Small Devices to Integrating Magnolia with the Spring Framework using Blossom.

“Following last year’s sold out conference we received such an overwhelming number of presentation proposals for our second annual meeting that it was tough to pick which ones to slot. In the end we went for a range of topics that demonstrate the diverse business and technical possibilities of Magnolia CMS,” said Boris Kraft, Magnolia CTO. “We invite everyone else to organize their own talks during the event’s second “Community Day”.

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A new version of our favorite Ruby on Rails CMS has been released, Radiant CMS 0.9.0. Obviously, I spoke a little too soon last October when I announced that 0.9.0 was coming soon. Each open source community has their own pace and time-line for releasing the release candidates of their software. In retrospect, I should have noted that Radiant CMS developers like to take their time in making sure the Radiant releases are at a level of quality and stability they’re comfortable with before releasing the final versions to the general public.

So what’s new in the 0.9.0 version of Radiant CMS? Radiant now has a new UI, support for internationalization and loading of extensions as gems. Some of the more significant new features in this version of Radiant include::

• There are new features for pagination (requiring will_paginate).
• You can now run Radiant from a sub-directory.
• When selecting a published date in the future, Radiant will treat the content as hidden until that date
• Extensions may be loaded as gems and generated extensions now have features to easily create gems with Jeweler
• Radiant CMS is now running on Rails 2.3.8 (bundled with Radiant)

If you would like more details on the changes in Radiant CMS, you can always check out the CHANGELOG. Radiant 0.9.0 CMS is available for download from the RadiantCMS.org website.

The TYPO3 Community released the newest version of their Open Source project TYPO3. TYPO3 has been downloaded over 4.6 million times – making it one of the world’s leading Enterprise Open Source projects.

The latest TYPO3 version 4.4 makes TYPO3 easier than ever – especially for newbies. A TYPO3 website is now up and running in 5 minutes after it has been downloaded and with the included template it is up and running.

The most important innovations at a glance:

• Introduction Package
• Udated Look & Feel
• Easier Installation
• Faster Rich Text Editor
• New Taskcenter

TYPO3 version 4.4 innovations in detail:

Introduction Package, to start immediately

The new introduction package offers TYPO3 newbies a configurable template immediately after installation. Using simple examples it demonstrates TYPO3 concepts and possibilities. At the same time this template can of course be used for the first own website, since e.g. the colour-scheme of the template can easily be changed without TYPO3 expert knowledge.

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In case you haven’t heard, WordPress 3.0 was released last week. This is probably the first time I’ve been behind in blogging about the official release of a new major version of WordPress. However, since I told you all about WordPress 3.0 coming soon a couple weeks ago, I felt there wasn’t a need to rush and tell you to go get WordPress 3.0 and try out all it’s new features including taxonomy and multiuser integration. Instead, I spent this past week seeing how others reacted to WordPress 3.0.

As a fan of open source content management systems, its been rather pleasing to see some of the larger technology publications spend more time talking about applications like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. For the tech press, WordPress 3.0 was no exception with some of the major players such as Computerworld, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all making sure they spin out an article reviewing this latest version of WordPress.

What may surprise you though, is that open source CMS is just not an interest of computer geeks. Slowly but surely, open source CMS is the talk of business folks too. For example, both Fast Company and BusinessWeek made sure that they included articles this past week on WordPress 3.0. In the Fast Company article, Francine Hardaway writes some classic things to why business should pay attention to WordPress. Some of my favorite lines from her article, “6 Reasons Small Businesses need WordPress“:

• “WordPress can do anything you need it to do, and for a small business, that’s a gift usually reserved for expensive sites.”
• “Plug-ins for WordPress are the business-to-business version of apps for the iPhone.”
• “WordPress no longer looks like a blog. For small businesses who wouldn’t know a blog from a bag of potato chips, WordPress is a website, otherwise known as a content management system.”

These are all some fantastic words from Hardaway and I think they show that applications such as WordPress are making a significant impact in the business world. I wouldn’t call WordPress an ECM, but it most definately walks and talks like a CMS for the small business folks. If you haven’t taken a look at WordPress in quite awhile, I’d encourage you to take a new look at this application.

Below is the summary video from the WordPress folks introducing you to WordPress 3.0. Enjoy.

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