Welcome to the June installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month.

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

Starting in May and going into June, Alfresco Software (news, site) began planning their first Developer Conference for the fall, one in the US and one in Europe. The audience is novice through advanced developers, and sessions will be delivered by Alfresco engineers and consultants. There will be in-depth sessions on content modeling, CMIS, Activiti BPM, performance and migration. This event will likely span multiple days and may have an optional group programming effort.

Alfresco has also launched itself into the Business Process Management (BPM) space by hiring away Red Hat's Tom Baeyens, founder and architect of the jBOSS jBPM project, and hiring him to be the Project Lead for Activiti along with his second-in-command, fellow BPM architect Joram Barrez as a Core Activiti Developer. They've also hired Barry Duplantis as the Alfesco VP of Customer Services.

Finally, they're expecting the pitter patter of little pages in the form of Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for ECM from Wrox Press. Alfresco CTO John Newton, Chief Architect Dave Caruana and members of the engineering crew put their blood, sweat and tears into the pages. You can find a review here.

DotNetNuke

In May, DotNetNuke (news, site) announced a partnership with Engage Software to provide new training options to DotNetNuke users. This partnership will allow the prjoect to offer live and recorded webinars along with onsite training to DotNetNuke users worldwide. To lead the charge, former Master Trainer with Engage Software, Chris Hammond, is now DotNetNuke's Director of Training.

They also released version 5.4.2, which focuses on enhancements such as increasing the number of users an installation can handle to 2.14 billion and on updating the Installation Wizard's Polish and German language packs.

May also had DotNetNuke Co-Founder and CTO Shaun Walker participating in the Gilbane Conference on a panel regarding open source tools, and he's about to be the keynote speaker at the "European Day of DotNetNuke," of which DotNetNuke Corp. is a Platinum Sponsor.

Hippo

In May, the folks with Hippo CMS (news, site) completed an integration layer with Cap Gemini to pull information from SAP applications directly into the Hippo Portal frontend. They were also nominated by computable as ICT-government project of the year in the Netherlands.

Coming in June is the second Hippo Users Group meeting on June 9, 2010. This meeting will focus on clients and end-users in the government space. They're also expanding the Hippo Forge Fridays to add talks and showcase presentations and are currently looking for talk proposals for 15 to 30 minute presentations.

Joomla!

In May, the Joomla! (news, site) project released Joomla! 1.6 beta and launched a new demo site. The new site offers individual user accounts for setting up private demo servers rather than offering one confusing, shared demo account for all visitors.

Demo installations exist for 30 days. When ready, a user can choose to migrate their demo site to another host, or sign up with partner CloudAccess.net to turn their demo into an ongoing account and return a percentage of the hosting cost back to the Joomla! project. For more, see http://demo.joomla.org

mojoPortal

In May, mojoPortal (news, site) completed 9 new developer training videos for a total of 32 videos so far, with more planned. You can find the full list here. They also moved their source code repository from Subversion on Novell Forge to a Mercurial repository at Codeplex.

The project shipped a minor upgrade of their add-on product Event Calendar Pro. Another important task they've completed is that of creating their transition plan to take them into developing with .NET 4 while still supporting .NET 3.5 for at least the next year.

The project hopes to ship a new release with minor enhancements and bug fixes in the beginning of June, with separate packages compiled for .NET 3.5 and 4.

Nuxeo

In May, Nuxeo (news, site) cast its vote in approval of the CMIS standard, which makes it easier to share the same content across multiple Enterprise Content Management repositories. There were also some releases in conjunction with their Galaxy partners, such as:

Nuxeo also co-sponsored the report ECM State of the Industry 2010 from AIIM. Among other things, the report highlighted open source ECM as a growth area, with 6% of the respondents using open source enterprise content management today and a further 9% planning on adopting open source over the next two years.

Coming in June, Nuxeo intends to release a new case management framework, and they're offering a couple of free webinars as well:

The webinar 8 Things You Should Know About Open Source ECM is now available for viewing for those who weren't able to attend the live session.

MovableType

May marked the release of a new plugin for Movable Type (news, site) users. Store Front is a beta release that offers ecommerce features. So check it out but don't quite yet trust it on a production server.

ocPortal

Coming in late May or early June, ocPortal (news, site) 4.4 should be released. This version offers bug fixes, new features and usability improvements.

Sense/Net

In May and into June, Sense/Net (news, site) has been busy extending their team, doubling their developer capacity and securing funding for future growth. They've completed some local reference projects and landed the Internet and intranet CMS implementation tender for the National Bank of Hungary. Soon, they expect to publish their enterprise licensing.

SilverStripe

In May, the SilverStripe (news, site) team updated their SilverStripe screencast to reflect the interface and capabilities of version 2.4, which offers 391 fixed tickets and has over 1,400 changelog entries. Changes include:

  • Hierarchical URLs so that you can nest page addresses rather than only having URLs one level deep
  • Support for Microsoft SQL Server
  • Support for PostgreSQL
  • Performance and memory use optimizations
  • Optional roles to simplify access control configuration
  • Additional security enhancements
  • Many more improvements such as automated search for broken internal links and file references

Squiz

In May, Squiz (news, site) released MySource Matrix 3.28 and MySource Mini as well. New features for MySource Matrix include:

  • A new user interface, the Easy Edit Suite, which is similar to the editor in MySource Mini
  • A more automated upgrade process
  • Moving the commercial SSV modules to open source, making MySource Matrix 100% GPL

New features for MySource Mini include:

  • Integration with MySource Matrix
  • LDAP and Active Directory integration
  • File system bridge to dynamically source files from your filesystem into the Mini
  • Multi-byte character support for foreign language publishing
  • Safe edit and content versioning
  • Contexts, for example, the ability to nominate the Chinese, mobile version of a piece of content intended for release in a month
  • Free automatic update subscription service for individuals and small business

May also brought a review of Funnelback Search from Ovum and a screencast showing the faceted navigation feature of Funnelback Search. Finally, Squiz announced that its International User Conference for 2010 will be in Melbourne, Australia on October 20 - 22. This year the conference emphasis is on pratical, hands-on advice and real-world experiences.

Umbraco

In May Umbraco (news, site) marked the release of version 4.0.4 with bugfixes and improvements for high-traffic sites, and version 1.2 of "Umbraco Courier" for making content deployment across multiple servers easier. The project also revealed their new Visual Identity as the first stage of making the brand better known.

June brings the Umbraco Developer Conference, CodeGarden, in Denmark from June 23 - 25. The three-day conference features over 250 attendees with many Umbraco notables in attendance. They'll also be joined by three major MVC experts: Jon Galloway from Microsoft and Wrox authors Simone Chiaretta and Steven Sanderson. The team will get attendees up to speed on Microsoft ASP.NET MVC, which is the foundation for the next version of Umbraco coming in 2011.

Summer also brings the release of Umbraco 4.1, which is such a large update that the version number might actually change to a larger jump. Coming for over a year, this update contains improvements for both editors and developers. Editors get an improved preview mode to see future updates in real time, spell-checking and new editing capabilities. Developers get better integration with .NET through LINQ2Umbraco, a more fluent XML schema and a faster and easier way to get started. There are also enhancements to client performance, faster underlying APIs and fewer requests when working with the back office.

XOOPS

In May, XOOPS (news, site) 2.4.4 reached the 30,000 download mark and the project reached over 100,000 registered users on their site. Release Candidate 2 for XOOPS 2.4.5 went live, and the team announced some competitions, including:

Also, the demo site for XOOPS Themes went live with close to 2,000 themes available, XooFoo.org launched the site TV.XooFoo to provide a TV channel for XOOPS users, and the May edition of the XOOPS newsletter (World of XOOPS) went out to the community.