Welcome to July 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

The Alfresco (news, site) 3.2 Community Edition (note the absence of the term "Labs") is slated for release in early July (any day now actually). This version includes bug fixes, but more importantly a number of new features that should see Alfresco become much more popular in the enterprise. Some of these new features include:

  • IMAP support
  • Compliance with version 0.61 of the CMIS specification (Alfresco is the only ECM vendor who is fully compliant with the current version of CMIS)
  • Policy-driven storage
  • Updates to the forms engine

The second preview of this release is already available. If you want to stay on top of the latest updates, follow @alfrescoeng on Twitter.

Also, registration for Alfresco's first South American meetup in Sao Paulo, Brazil, opens during the first week of July. You can find more details on the Alfresco events page.

Drupal

Jeff Eaton at Lullabot pointed out two interesting tidbits related to Drupal (news, site). For one, Development Seed has announced Open Atrium, which is a customizable intranet system built on Drupal.

Eaton feels that this "freely distributable pre-built solution that uses Drupal, rather than a simple "recipe" that leaves the heavy lifting up to the person who wants to implement the site," is just one of many more products that we can expect to come out on top of Drupal.

Also, of course, the Drupal user experience redesign will continue to come together in July for Drupal 7. Features currently under development are system-wide support for AJAX popups and modal windows, and tools to use them consistently for in-place content editing.

eZ Publish

eZ Systems (news, site) reports that their eZ Conference attracted 250 attendees. As they work on eZ Publish 4.2 and 4.3, they've updated their online roadmap, which takes them well into 2010. This roadmap includes a commitment to putting out two releases per year.

Hippo CMS

Since the Hippo CMS (news, site) team released version 7.1 and the Hippo Site Toolkit 2 (HST2) in late June, many of their users will be exploring the new offerings in July. Hippo will also be demoing these two projects at OSCON in late July.

Hippo CMS 7.1 offers a context menu for folder actions, an improved workflow toolbar, better tab handling, a new plug-in communication mechanism and more.

KnowledgeTree

Those who need to integrate KnowledgeTree (news, site) with other ECM applications such as SharePoint might spend July exploring the new core API and RESTful interface included in the Knowledge Tree 3.6 Community Edition along with other improvements.

Magnolia CMS

Magnolia (news, site) will update Magnolia On Air so that the MediaFlow engine plugs into the Templating Kit using their new Pluggable DAM API. The MediaFlow Engine is their media capturing, DAM and deployment engine. Expect to see this release sometime in July.

In addition, they intend to update some of modules, specifically Newsletter, Forum and Public User Registration. Another focus for July will be on documentation.

Boris Kraft says, "I believe that Magnolia has reached quite a mature state, with powerful core mechanisms that are easy to combine and extend. Our main need is not to implement ever more features but to simplify what we have and document what is already there."

Melody

If you haven't heard, Melody (news, site) launched in June as a fork of the Movable Type (news, site) project. The feature planning process begins in July. Already, there are people on board to:

  • Re-architect the backend to use CGI::Application
  • Create a new installer for the platform to rival WordPress
  • Help assemble packages for Debian
  • Write an Adobe AIR application

It will be interesting to see where Melody goes in July and in the further months and years to come. Especially since it's led by two former Six Apart Movable Type Product Managers.

Nuxeo

July means the release of Nuxeo (news, site) EP and DM 5.2.1. This is a maintenance release focused on bug fixes and minor cleanups and enhancements, with a few new services tossed into the mix. Among these new services are:

  • Tag Service - Allows tagging documents and displays tag clouds
  • Import/Export - Allows migrating repositories from 5.1 to 5.2

The following add-ons hopefully will appear in July as well:

  • Disconnected client - A Nuxeo core embedded in an RCP client
  • Jetty deployment - A lightweight Nuxeo EP that can run in the lightweight web container Jetty instead of needing a full-fledged Java EE server
  • CMIS - They'll start binding Apache Chemistry with Nuxeo, and plan to offer a working demo supporting recent CMIS drafts soon

ocPortal

Getting ready for their 4.2 release is ocPortal. They tell us that this is a major upgrade for them and includes improvements such as:

  • Semantic (Web 3.0) enhancements
  • Export/Import to XML files for easy site backups and transfers
  • Search-friendly URLs containing keywords
  • User Interface Enhancements

And if you want to better understand how to use the ocPortal features, their video tutorial library is under expansion with a number of practical use videos to get you started.

Plone

Now that the original Plone 4 (news, site) release has been split into Plone 4 and Plone 5, Plone 4 Release Manager Eric Steele and Plone 5 Release Manager Hanno Schlichting can spend July getting the projects fully separated and moving forward.

July is also when Plone has seven students participating in this year's Google Summer of Code. Student projects include:

  • Atom Publication Protocol support
  • E-commerce features
  • Ontologies
  • PloneFormGen
  • Better support for large folders
  • Better commenting infrastructure

These projects affect both the existing Plone 3 and the upcoming Plone 4.

There's also the Plone Conference 2009 to be held on October 26 through November 1, 2009, in Budapest, Hungary. Expect to see calls for presentations and more conference details from the organizers Greenfinity and Open Society Institute in July.

Finally, there's Redomino Plone 3 Basic Training in Torino, Italy on July 15, 2009.

Silverstripe

In July SilverStripe is running three events in the US to get the North American crowd more familiar with their CMS. One event is in Washington DC and the two others are at OSCON in San Jose.

Now that SilverStripe 2.3.2 is out, they're working toward Silverstripe 2.4.0. As co-founder and CMO Sigurd Magnusson presented at the monthly NY PHP Meetup, upcoming features include:

  • Support for locales for internationalization and localization
  • Toolset for controlling the publication workflow
  • Extending the form builder with features such as conditional response
  • Public testing of their MS SQL Server support
  • Nested URL support for namespace management
  • Data mappers

There's also a German SilverStripe book available now, that is in the process of being translated into English for publication in the US.