Welcome to the August 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at [email protected] with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Alfresco

Alfresco (news, site) marked a record month for downloads with its July release of Alfresco Community Edition 3.2. This release lays the groundwork for Records Management features added in preparation for US Department of Defense 5015.2 certification coming in September 2009.

For more information about this release, see Alfresco CTO John Newton's blog or watch the following webinar:

DotNetNuke

DotNetNuke (news, site) released version 5.1.1 of both its community and professional editions at the end of July. This release focuses on stabilization, providing enhanced stability and performance for this Microsoft .NET-based open source web CMS.

eZ Publish

The folks at eZ Publish (news, site) aren't relaxing too much this summer. Instead, they're spending it revamping their partner program and updating their community site, using feedback they gained at their conference from developers and partners.

By the end of August, expect to see the beta for eZ Publish 4.2 with their first official support for the CMIS standard. You can see the expected features by checking out their roadmap.

The engineering teams are also working on eZ Flow 2.0 to update their media portal management offering, and eZ Find 2.1.

KnowledgeTree

In July, the RATP (French national rail) contributed a number of extensions to KnowledgeTree (news, site). Nine of these were feature extensions developed by KnowledgeTree's French partner, iNet Process:

  • Column Sorter: Advanced sorting of property columns in browse and search result views
  • Document Extraction: Downloads a zip archive containing a collection of documents and then deletes the selection
  • Document Shortcut Improvements: Improve document shortcuts, including increased information during deletion and linking
  • Folder Properties: Add metadata properties to folders
  • Multi-select Property Fields: Create multi-select document property fields
  • Property Sheet: Create documents without a document attachment and upload the document later
  • View by Document Type: Browse by document properties rather than through the folder structure
  • Web Browser Type Tree: Display a browsable AJAX folder tree for quick access through the web interface
  • Workflow Mass Update: Update workflow states on an entire collection of documents at once

Right now, KnowledgeTree is considering adding a few of these to the core community distribution. The rest will be released into the KnowledgeTree Community Forge as plugins for download.

Magnolia

July has been a busy month for Magnolia (news, site) with the following releases:

  • Mangnolia On Air is now available using Magnolia 4.1's Pluggable DAM architecture
  • magnolia-tools-1.1.2 offers a fix for a repository upgrade bug
  • Standard Templating Kit 1.1.1 offers bug fixes
  • Imaging Module 2.0.1 offers bug fixes
  • Magnolia 4.0.2 contains bug fixes and adds compatibility with Chrome and Safari 4
  • Magnolia 3.6.6 offers bug fixes and also support for Chrome and Safari 4

Along with the software releases in July, Magnolia made the following documentation progress as well:

  • Their documentation site now runs on Magnolia 4.1, making it significantly faster
  • They published a new templating guide for Magnolia 4.x
  • They added the guide "How to install your perfect linux server for Magnolia" on their wiki

The Magnolia conference location has now been set for Mitte, which is describe as "a cool location in the middle of Basel, Switzerland." They've also held their first online partner event, where they presented their new Templating Kit features and how to use the kit to build custom projects.

In August, we can expect:

  • Maintenance work toward the Magnolia 4.2 release
  • More documentation
  • An On Air introduction video
  • Updates to forum and public user registration
  • Prototyping work toward Magnolia 5
  • Finalizing the Magnolia conference
  • Reviewing job applications for a few open positions

Nuxeo

The Nuxeo (news, site) EP 5.2.1 release scheduled for July has been postponed until September while the dev team takes their various holidays. Through August, work will continue toward this goal, however, specifically on:

  • Integrating semantic technologies using the UIMA standard
  • Improving the Nuxeo Runtime to bring it in line with OSGi specifications (and allow faster code/deploy/test cycles)
  • Performance tuning with extended benchmarks

Open Atrium

The Open Atrium (news, site) "intranet in a box" CMS was released in July to the tune of 3,300 downloads in under a day. This project uses Drupal core at its center and a collection of features and installer profiles to differentiate the rest.

Just like Drupal, Open Atrium is 100% open source and highly customizable with a growing number of modules available to extend it. A basic installation of Open Atrium comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a casetracker, a shoutbox and a dashboard.

Plone

Plone 3.0 CMS Training is being offered in Santa Clara, CA, August 19 - 21 by CIGNEX. This course is for content managers and developers, covering topcs such as Content Versioning, Pluggable Authentication Service (PAS), the Content Rules Engine, the Portlets Engine and Buildout.

SilverStripe

In August expect to see SilverStripe (news, site) 2.3.3 released with some bug fixes and PHP 5.3 compatibility that provides performance improvements. Sometime during the month as well, the SilverStripe team expects to reach the 200,000 downloads mark.

Those waiting on the English version of the SilverStripe book will be glad to know that the full text is in the publisher's hands. You can pre-order the book, which Sigurd Magnusson with the project suggests that you do since the German version sold out quickly.