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Joomla! 1.5.12 Released (Codename: Wojmamni Ama Woi)

Jul 1, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.firefoxninjas.com/
About: Srikanth is 20-years old and pursuing his Bachelors in Technology in India. He’s passionate about the web, in fact he’s addicted to it: Search Engine Technologies, Web Designing and Technology Blogging in specific. You can see his blog Firefox Ninjas or follow him on Linkedin for more information.See Authors Posts (12) MyTestBox News

The Joomla Project, which recently celebrated 10 million downloads has announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.12, code named ‘Wojmamni Ama Woi’. This release contains a number of bug fixes and three moderate-level security fixes.

This release marks an important milestone for the Joomla Project due to the upgrade of the PEAR library to the new BSD licensed version, which brings the code base into full compliance with the GPL.

In addition, this release contains an important upgrade to TinyMCE v 3.2.4.1. The Production Working Group’s goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.

Here are some of the fixes and improvements the community has made to this current release:

Components

• Category List Layout sorts correctly.
• Category List Layout HTML error resolved.
• Minimum User Level for Media Manager works correctly for Editors submitting Articles.
• Article Manager shows non-duplicated Page Titles with Page Breaks.
• Section Filter for Content Component correctly lists only Article Categories.
• Reverted escaping of miscellaneous information field in com_contact.

Plugins

• Update to TinyMCE 3.2.4.1.
• Updated installer SQL to correspond with TinyMCE upgrade.
• Added missing language strings for TinyMCE after initial upgrade.

Administrator

• CSS files save correctly when edited using Template Manager.

System

• Upgraded PEAR with a newer version that has BSD licensing.
• PHPMailer allows secure connections to SMTP Servers.
• File::upload() uses chmod 644 in FTP mode.
• Tooltips correctly encoded.
• Reverted detailed module caching fix.

If you haven’t tried Joomla! yet, you can check out the online demo.

Source: Joomla Announcements

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Tags: cms, content management system, joomla, mysql, open-source, php, release

TangoCMS 2.3.0 “Dolphin” launched – another open source PHP/MYSQL content management system competing with the sharks

Jun 29, 2009 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) MyTestBox News

That’s not an easy task going out there, in the wild, and challenge the big white shark (Drupal), the tiger shark (Joomla), the blue shark (Wordpress) and the plethora of other sharks (try some demos here).

But the team at TangoCMS is trying to beat the odds by launching a new version of their PHP/MySQL content management system dubbed “Dolphin” (version 2.3.0).

They added improvments to the WYSIWYG editor, page loading time, security and some more general features (see the roadmap here).

If you feel like tasting this kind of dolphin meat then head on the download page and get it from there (already prepared for you):  http://tangocms.org/download
Don’t be a savage and please use some ustensils for eating this: PHP 5.2.0 or greater, MySQL 4.1 or greater and Apache/Lighttpd are required.

Bon appetit!

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Tags: cms software, content management system, mysql, open-source, php, tangocms

Melody: Community Powered Publishing Platform

Jun 28, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.firefoxninjas.com/
About: Srikanth is 20-years old and pursuing his Bachelors in Technology in India. He’s passionate about the web, in fact he’s addicted to it: Search Engine Technologies, Web Designing and Technology Blogging in specific. You can see his blog Firefox Ninjas or follow him on Linkedin for more information.See Authors Posts (12) New Releases

Melody is a new open source content management system for bloggers and publishers. It is a project initiated and governed by many of the members of the Movable Type(which we reviewed here) community who have a shared desire to help in building a better blogging product that benefits Movable Type and Melody users alike.

The promise of Melody is to serve its community by working to build a product according to the principles and philosophies that have helped make WordPress, Apache, Linux, Firefox and other open source applications so successful. Those principles include creating and fostering open communication channels with its user base, by building transparency into its roadmap, and by permitting users to more freely contribute back to the core product.

Why Melody?

• Secure, scalable and rock solid platform.
• Community supported.
• 100% Open Source. Forever.
• Proven content management system.
• Highly extensible and customizable.

Melody is at its very beginning, you might want to go through the  goals, upcoming features and other information about the project here.

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Tags: cms, content management system, melody, open-source, publishing platform

Pligg CMS, the PHP/MySQL Digg clone, finally at the version 1.0.0 (the official one)

Jun 17, 2009 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) MyTestBox News

After years in the making, Pligg, the PHP/MySQL open source social networking content management system, reached the official version 1.0.0.
It took small baby steps to reach this version and probably it will the same baby steps to reach the version 2.0.
But we can’t complain: the software is free and open source (still).

Pligg combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication and a democratic editorial system which enables users to collaboratively submit and vote articles.

Sounds like Digg? Well, it is a Digg clone.

Pligg was founded by Yankidank (this is a nickname) and is headed by the lead developer AshDigg (another nickname). It was originally an English translation of Menéame’s source code when it was released in early December 2005 (Menéame being a Spanish CMS created by Ricardo Galli and was inspired by Digg). In December 2005, the name Pligg was added to differentiate from the Spanish version. Since then Pligg has now expanded from just a translation of that Spanish CMS to a very popular CMS system.

This new version is more secure and stable than the previous (obviously) but also packs more features:

- groups feature
- re-vamped admin panel
- new languages: English, German and Thai (more languages to be added by volunteers)
- more database optimization making it more scalable
- pages feature
- upload module
- SEO updates
- many new modules included…

To see the full features list go to their forum and to download it please go to their download page.

Tu run this software you need to have at least PHP 4 (version 5 recommended) and MySQL database (both open source).
Pligg website also offers the possibility to customize more the software by buying templates and modules developed by Pligg developers themselves.

Interesting is that Pligg generated a fork named SocialWebCMS, pretty much like Mambo CMS generated a very succesful fork named Joomla! . Since then Joomla! surpassed Mambo in popularity shortly after launching. Will SocialWebCMS do the same to Pligg? Remains to be seen…

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Tags: blogging, cms, content management system, digg clone, joomla, mambo, mysql, open-source, php, pligg, social bookmarking, social networking, socialwebcms, software

Great Drupal CMS Modules for Building a College Community Website

May 19, 2009 by Srikanth ADcloseAuthor: Srikanth AD Name: Srikanth AD
Email: adsrikanth@gmail.com
Site: http://www.firefoxninjas.com/
About: Srikanth is 20-years old and pursuing his Bachelors in Technology in India. He’s passionate about the web, in fact he’s addicted to it: Search Engine Technologies, Web Designing and Technology Blogging in specific. You can see his blog Firefox Ninjas or follow him on Linkedin for more information.See Authors Posts (12) Tips and Tricks

Drupal, an open source server based content management system (CMS)   and which we have mentioned here (built in PHP/MySQL technology), can support a wide range of web designing including blogs, community, promotional websites and many more.

Drupal provides easy tools with the help of which various sites can be easily developed. Its minimum requirement and easy installation makes it even more user friendly. Various modules available with Drupal.org further enhance the scope and usability.

Here we are presenting a few modules which can come extremely handy while building a college community website based on Drupal.

Organic Groups

Enable users to create and manage their own ‘groups’. Each group can have subscribers, and maintains a group home page where subscribers communicate amongst themselves.

This module will be helpful in creating groups for members like teachers, students etc. You can even group students according to their class. The advantage of this module is that, we can have group posts that are only visible for those group members.

See the Organic Groups module in action here.

Calendar

This module will display any views date field in calendar formats, including CCK date fields, node created or updated dates, etc. Switch between year, month, and day views. Back and next navigation is also provided for all views.

You might find it useful for posting college events and other stuff to be shown on the calendar.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: cms, college, community, content management system, drupal, modules, mysql, php, website

K2 for Joomla! – create custom content types (items) for your Joomla CMS websiteW

May 6, 2009 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) Tips and Tricks

Sometime ago we’ve introduced Seedling, a pre-configured Joomla package plus extensions and modules.

Now we have another tip for you: K2 (and that’s not the mountain).

What is K2 and for what can you use it?

K2 is a content construction component which lets you create custom content types (aka items) for your Joomla! website. Having this component installed on top of your Joomla! web software allows you to transform your website  to a news site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing and more…all these packed together in one single component.

If you are familiar with Content Construction Kit (CCK) for Drupal content management system then you will become familiar very fast with K2 for Joomla!.

The component is very flexible, you can add as many content fields as you want and create category-specific content items, e.g. article, blog post, product page, directory listing.
The standard offer are nested-level categories, tags, comments,  item image (useful for articles/catalogs), videos, galleries, user profiles, attachments, ajax-based frontend editing and more.
Here is a demo for you to try: http://k2.joomlaworks.gr/demo/

If you have already a Joomla! CMS website and want to use K2 you need to convert your content to K2. There’s no easy way to do it but Jeremy Wilken found a way and built a piece of software which does that. Checkout his K2 Converter.

K2 is a product of JoomlaWorks, a Greece-based web development company (since 2006) specialized in developoing Joomla and Mambo content management systems components.

Download and try it!

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Tags: content construction kit, content management system, drupal, joomla, joomlaworks, k2, k2 converter, software, web development, website

Seedling – a pre-configured Joomla package plus extensions and modules

Mar 18, 2009 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) Tips and Tricks

If you want to have the content management system Joomla + extensions and tools in one package now you have it.
The name is Seedling and it makes your life easier when it comes to build or manage your website.
The software installation on your host/server is quickly and easily (2-3 minutes), featuring a customizable template and demo content which you can edit or replace to create your website.
One thing the Seedling folks don’t mention explicitly is what exactly is in the package beside Joomla (which is also not the official release of Joomla Project but a customized version). They just mention “article commenting, advanced image handling, embedded video and more“.

This package is not free though. Seedling + basic support is $49 and Seedling + professonal support is $349 (1 year).

Seedling is built by the people from Design Guru, a Toronto, Canada based company with 5 years experience in using Joomla content management system.
They also maintain a pro-Joomla blog found called Why Joomla where they have more details about Seedling.

Watch a tutorial about using Seedling below

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Tags: cms, content management system, extensions, joomla, modules, package, seedling

Magnolia content management system (CMS) version 4.0 released

Mar 16, 2009 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) MyTestBox News

This Java based content management system is at version 4.0 now (don’t confuse this web software with Ma.gnolia.com – the social bookmarking web service).

Magnolia CMS it’s, maybe, not well known to the large audience but it is powering many of the government websites as well as Fortune 500 enterprises.
This new version introduces production-ready content delivery templates that provide a large set of out-of-the-box functionality. Content delivery is search-engine optimized, follows accessibility guidelines and introduces support for mobile devices.
The new Templating Kit allows designers and programmers to quickly and easily build best-practice web site designs and to control the complete layouting life-cycle (part of  “Supersonic Templating” bundle). There are ready made templates for Magnolia 4.0 to create custom designs that dynamically adapt  content delivery to various devices, including the iPhone. The standard templates are search engine optimized (SEO) and follow W3C accessibility guidelines. Multiple Web site designs for front- and back-ends can be managed from within Magnolia’s browser-based administration interface.

These are, in short, the new features of Magnolia content management system, version 4.0:
* New Standard Templating Kit
* Enhanced email module
* New templates management module
* New Multi-Site module (Enterprise Edition)
* Incorporates Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practice
* Access control, workflows, automated backups for design elements
* Follows Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG2 and Germany’s BITV)
* New web forms module
* XHTML-conformant page templates with table-less CSS layout
* Smart view-port detection to provide optimal browsing experience on any device, including mobile devices such as the iPhone
* Supports FreeMarker Templating language in addition to Java Server Pages (JSP)

Magnolia CMS 4.0 can be downloaded immediately because it’s free (open-source). I am talking about its variant called the Community edition because Magnolia has also an enterprise variant which is not free (it offers more enterprise functionalities).
The support for the enterprise edition is provided by Magnolia International LTD. and starts at $12,000 (doesn’t seem cheap but it is for big enterprises and government after all (not for small businesses).

Download Magnolia Community Edition here.

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Tags: cms, community, content management system, enterprise, java, java server pages, mag.nolia, open-source, web software

Open source content management system Drupal 6.10 and 5.16 – security fixes

Mar 12, 2009 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) MyTestBox News

The Drupal security team released security fixes and some bug fixes for Drupal, version 6.x and 5.x.
One of the security release is critical and it is recommended you upgrade ASAP.

Download Drupal 6.10 here and watch the installation video guide here.
Download Drupal 5.12 here.

The upgrade instructions can be found here.

Drupal is a very powerful open-source content management system built in PHP/MySQL/PostgreSQL (other database are supported too).
It runs best in an Unix/Linux/Apache environment and it has implemented a caching mecahnism which makes it quite scalable.

It has lots of features including multilanguage support, templating, caching, blogging, administration, community features and it is used by sites like Warner Bros, The New York Observer, Fast Company, Amnesty International, SpreadFirefox.

Many hosting companies offers this software as an easy instalable package so you can start right away. Drupal site is also rich in informations and tutorials. It has an active forum too where you can find support and even developers if you need them, not to mention books written about it (Amazon.com is a good place to start looking for those).

Another open source content management system which is a strong contender to Drupal and is widely used too is Joomla.

We will review Drupal soon and give you our opinions.

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Tags: cms, content management system, drupal, hosting, joomla, mysql, open-source, php, postgresql

AxCMS.net, the free enterprise web content management system, now at version 8.5

Mar 12, 2009 by Mircea GoiacloseAuthor: Mircea Goia Name: Mircea Goia
Email: mtb@mytestbox.com
Site: http://www.mytestbox.com
About: Mircea Goia was born in Romania and imigrated to USA in 2005. He lives in Phoenix, AZ and works as web developer. Aside, he works also on several entrepreneurial Web projects. He shows a keen interest in commercial Web development such as social networks, viral marketing, online video. His artistic hobby is filmmaking with special interest in directing.See Authors Posts (73) MyTestBox News

If Zimplit was one of the simplest content management systems (see the next post below) around and it’s open-source PHP based, AxCMS.net isn’t among the simplest and is not open-source based.
But is has one thing in common with Zimplit: it’s free.

AxCMS.net is Microsoft .NET technology based and you would expect to cost some money. Well, it’s not.

Since 2001 it had 8 major releases and now it’s at the version 8.5,  Axinom being the developer and providing also the funding.

This version has many improvements (like any new software release):
# Multilanguage:  new languages can be easily added by the editor
# Multilanguage:  improved user interface for translations
# Export and import of page contents, categories and user profiles in XML
# New and improved interactive controls with Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash
# Newsletter service: bounce-management, attachments, parallel HTML- and „Plain Text“
# Tracking / reporting: track (user-)individual links specifically to evaluate click rates.

For developers:
# Extended and  improved online documentation: http://en.help.axcms.net
# AxCMS.net service for implementing Asynchronous Business Processes
# Custom logging: trace any actions with contextual meta-information
# Search and indexing is now possible in “custom fields”
# Lists can now be adapted  to meet individual needs (filters, columns, “bulk operations”)

According to Axinom, AxCMS.net web content management system is a high end solution, for websites in a price range of 5.000 to 500.000 USD…which, basically, rules out the part time web developer used to built websites in Wordpress.

Axinom, the company, has offices in UK, Germany (the headquarter), Estonia (the developers playground), Switzerland (the money vault) and, of course, USA.
It has a worldwide network of partners (plannig to have over 200 this year) and it is Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and International Microsoft Vendor.

You can signup for a demo acount on their website.

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Tags: .net, axinom, cms, content management system, enterprise, free, microsoft, web