When it comes to life online, we all use content management systems in one way or another: blogging, building websites, maintaining websites, marketing them, etc.
If we are not web experts, we usually just use software tools to develop websites. We may not even know what it is that powers the websites—what is actually doing the back-end work. Now it’s time to discover Content Management Systems (or CMS systems), and which ones are used most frequently.

I came across an interesting study about who are the leaders in open source content management systems market in the year of 2008.
The study was just released to the public and it was conducted by Ric Sheves from Water & Stone web development company  (cool name, by the way). The company specializes in open source content management systems, particularly Drupal, Joomla!, Mambo, osCommerce and WordPress. Ric lives in Bali, Indonesia (talking about working from cool places).

At 50 pages, there is a significant amount of data in this study that should be of use to developers or to anyone who is looking to commit to a web publishing system. You don’t want to bet on a dead horse, do you?

But first let’s see WHAT is a content management system.

According to Wikipedia a content management system is:

…a computer software used to create, edit, manage, and publish content in a consistently organized fashion. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators’ manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. The content managed may include computer files, image media, audio files, video files,electronic documents, and Web content.A web content management system is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of Web content to Web sites, in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.

Because the theme of this site is web software (software which runs on a web server and in a browser - not desktop software) we will concentrate on web content management systems. And because we do like free things (who doesn’t?) we will present this study which took in consideration only the open source web content management systems (and only the publication-oriented CMSs, not e-commerce like osCommerce and not enterprise portals like LifeRay). Commercial or hosted products are excluded too.

Below are more details about this study.

—————————————————————————————————————

This whole exercise began by brainstorming through various methods of assessing popularity and adoption rates. While there are a number of indicators, there is no standardized metric to gauge market share in this particular segment — there is simply no way to get an accurate fix on how many systems are actually in use on the web right now.

For this survey the research results were broken down into two broad categories:
• Rate of Adoption
• Brand Strength

In each of the areas, they used a multi-faceted approach, assessing a wide variety of measures to identify broad trends and patterns from which we can draw conclusions with some
degree of confidence. Among the many metrics they sampled are a number of non-traditional indicators, such as Twitter Prominence and Social Bookmarking statistics.

Rate of Adoption
The team began their examination of the open source CMS market by attempting to measure the relative rates of adoption of the systems in the sample set. For reasons discussed below, direct evidence alone is not sufficient to allow them to draw firm conclusions.

As a result, they were forced to look at a variety of metrics in hopes of building a more complete picture of the current state of the market:

Downloads

Installations

Third Party Support

- Developers

- Publishers

All these three metrics are explained in details in the study.

  Read the rest of this entry »

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phpMyAdmin, the MySQL web based administration tool, won two category awards at 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards!
It was close to win the hearts of the developers too, but in the end it was only a finalist (Notepad++ took the cake).

The categories in which this web software won are:
* Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition (wow! Well, why not after all? I’m wondering who would buy it though…)
* Best Tool or Utility for Sys Admins (you deserve the love, that’s for sure! But be aware of the competition too… )

The team didn’t enjoyed too much the celebration and they are back to work with a new release: 2.11.8

This new phpMyAdmin release is a security release: a Cross Site Framing vulnerability was found by Aung Khant (member of YGN Ethical Hacker Group).
In the past it was permitted to display phpMyAdmin’s frames inside another page, opening potential phishing or fooling possibilities.
Now, a parameter “AllowThirdPartyFraming” must be set to TRUE in “config.inc.php” to allow this behavior.
Also, XSS (Cross Site Scripting) was possible for someone who could overwrite “config/config.inc.php” during the time this file is present in this directory.

The latest release, phpMyAdmin version 2.11.8.1, is identical with 2.11.8, except it includes a fix for a notice about “lang”.
Check out their security advisory.

About phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin  is a MySQL database web based administration tool written in PHP (GPL license distributed).
It is one of the most popular MySQL database administration tool in the world (if not THE most popular - no wonder it won the “Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition” category at 2008 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards).
The tool is available in 55 languages, an impressive achievement by the community of the translators which really shows the popularity of this project.

See if phpMyAdmin is translated in your language here!

Grab the latest copy of phpMyAdmin here!

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Elgg, the content management system and social network creator, reached the version 1.0 Beta, finally (after spending some time in the versions 0.x…).

Soon the team will announce the stable release (at least for now because I am sure that, even after the release, bugs will be found by the rest of the users - like always it happens in software development).

It seems Elgg became a rising star among open source content management software systems according to this report: http://www.waterandstone.com/downloads/2008OpenSourceCMSMarketSurvey.pdf

The Elgg project has shown increasing mindshare and brand strength since inception. Recently
publishing activity and awards can only boost name recognition. The evidence shows in the social bookmarking metrics, where Elgg finished near the top of the list. Yet despite those positive signs, engagement in the blogosphere is sadly lacking — a troubling statistics given that
this system is focused on Web 2.0 social interactivity. Elgg also faces challenges in terms of developer support, though this is perhaps not yet a source of concern given the relative youth of the project.

According to that report Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal are the most used open source content management systems today (phpNuke and Mambo are the things of the past, it seems - you are a king one day and a peasant the next day if you don’t keep up with the demands. And that happened to phpNuke and Mambo - Mambo seems again has internal troubles among the team members. A new project called miaCMS spawned from Mambo.).

So, congratulations Elgg! And work harder to become a king! I wish you success!

Now, some updates from Elgg…
Elgg had one of the most powerful features from the day it was built: the access control. Whatever you create in Elgg (a blog post, an uploaded file, an element of your profile, etc.) can be restricted to as many or few people you want (very granular control).
Which is maybe one of the reasons Elgg, at the begining, started to be used as a social network creator in schools where the privacy is a big thing.

Now, in the latest version 1.0, they’ve refined that even more: creating collections of friends is easier even before. If you are not satisfied with Elgg’s individual-based access model you can swap it with something else: a roles-based access, for example.

More details about the access control and version 1.0 update on their official blog.

You probably are eager to test the new version, right? Well, hold your horses! The version 1.0 will be released to the public sometime this summer.

In the meantime you can still get older versions of Elgg CMS: 0.2 to 0.9.

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BoonEx  (the australian company behind Dolphin Smart Community Builder and other software) release a security patch for its dating and social network software.
This fixes the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) vulnerability found the last week (Orca version allows inserting malicious code into a new topic title).

It is an easy patch to apply so you should do it immediately!Here are the steps to be followed:
* Backup the Orca and groups/orca folders (a regular backup never hurts anyway!)
* Get the patch named Dolphin 6.1 Patch 4. This is compatible with any Dolphin package: SmartPro, AdFree, Free
* Unzip the archive and upload its content to the folder where you have Dolphin installed (overwriting the files with the same names)

Example: Open the “orca” directory on your server, and at the same time open the “orca” directory in the extracted patch on your PC. Upload all files contained in the “orca” directory of the patch to your server’s “orca” directory overwriting those with the same names.

* Edit the build number in the inc/header.inc.php file, replacing $site[’build’] = ‘3′; with $site[’build’] = ‘4′;
* Go and login to the admin panel and recompile Orca languages as described there.

After all these steps you should have Dolphin 6.1.4 patch successfully installed.

The company can be contacted for support, if you need to at, support@boonex.com (you can also login to their Forums and ask questions  or see the Answers questions)

About Dolphin community builder
Dolphin Smart Community Builder is a free, open source software that allows you to build any kind of online community. Social networks, dating sites, content sharing portals…all these can be created very easily and deployed in an instant. You can have Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, Facebook and Match combined in one package.
With a huge variety of features & options, you can quickly develop your very unique and successful website. Checkout the full features here!

It is written in PHP/MySQL so it runs well on Unix/Linux but also it can run on Windows (but you have to use Apache for Windows, not IIS web server).

See a demo of their product here: http://www.boonex.us/ (a demo of their admin section is here)

Download Dolphin smart community builder here!  (the free version, you can also order a paid version which will be ad free).

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Pandora, the web music streaming application, released an upgraded version of their iPhone software on Friday. Users of Pandora can also enjoy streaming music on their computers, about 30 other smart phones and a host of other devices designed to bring this Internet music streaming service directly into the home.

Version 1.1 of Pandora’s iPhone software also works on the iPod touch.

It fixes several bugs and has new features including:
* Streaming in stereo when Pandora is accessed over WiFi (still mono when using 3G, unfortunately).
* A new feature called Station Resume which brings you back right where you left off if Pandora is interrupted to take a phone call or if you switch to a different app.
* Auto-complete when searching for a song, artist or composer.
* Sort your stations alphabetically or by the date you created them.
* Register for Pandora right on your iPhone if you’re not already a member (apparently, with the prior version you had to sign up on the computer before using Pandora on your iPhone).

One of the best things about this new version is that, if you have an iPod touch, you can dock it in a stereo speaker dock and listen to free streaming music in stereo from Pandora’s music service.

But even if you don’t have an iPhone, you might want to check out Pandora, if you haven’t before, because you can use it in your computer’s browser to play music for free. Also, if you buy additional electronics, it can stream music in your living room without a computer.

Billed as “radio from the Music Genome Project®,” Pandora’s best feature is that it introduces you to songs similar to ones you’ve told it you like. You set up a custom radio station by choosing a few artists, and Pandora plays songs by similar artists as well as playing the artists you chose. But it gets better than that, because you can help it zero in on your musical tastes by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to the songs it plays.

In addition, you can bookmark or share songs, and you can share your custom stations too. Not only that, but when you find a new song you like, you can follow links from Pandora to iTunes or Amazon where you can buy a digital copy.

What might be even more exciting is that Pandora has partnered with several electronics manufacturers to develop devices you can use to listen to Pandora’s streaming music without a computer or an iPhone. Presumably, you have to go to the site and set up at least one station first, but then you can sit on the couch and listen to their free streaming music.

You can start using Pandora right now in your browser or download the new iPhone version, or, if you don’t have an iPhone, check to see if your phone is supported.

Or just visit Pandora’s website: www.pandora.com or read their blog

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