Welcome to the February 2011 installment of our what's coming from the open source projects in the next month. If you feel your project was left out, we invite you to email us at [email protected] to have a project representative added to the list of people we contact for updates.

Composite C1

In February, the folks at Composite C1 (news, site) reached beta. This is the first major update since the release of the free, open source version five months ago. According to the project, the most notable new features are:

  • Free access to the SQL Server provider due to .NET developer requests
  • Full support for all modern browsers, including Internet Explorer 7 and 8
  • 30-day trial of fully-featured commercial packages
  • Improvements to the visual editor and code editor
  • More public APIs
  • MVC 3 support
  • The ability to edit Razor views from the web client
  • The ability to deploy the CMS on both standard Windows Server and Azure without tweaking or code changes

The company has also released a tool for easy migration from standard Windows to Windows Azure. As for the Composite C1 community, members have contributed back Russian translations for the admin UI and the documentation. The first community patches were also integrated into the source code and developer ratings. Additional free feature patches also started arriving this month, such as a collection of Google (news, site) integration features (Google Maps widget, Google Site Search, and Google Custom Search).

Coming in March, expect the final version of Composite 2.1.

DotNetNuke

In February, the folks at DotNetNuke (news, site) announced that they're migrating from Visual Basic to C#. The first C# version will be available to look at in the second quarter of 2011, with the first beta coming in early March. The company also acquired Active Modules, a provider of social collaboration tools for DotNetNuke. It plans to open-source some of the features, such as the Active Forum modules and parts of Active Social, and add them to all versions of DotNetNukewhile. Other parts, such as Active Purchase and the remaining features, will go into DotNetNuke Professional and Enterprise Editions.

Finally, it's announced that the company had 400% year-over-year growth for 2010, tripling its worldwide customer base for Professional and Enterprise editions to over 1,000, growing its open source community to over 800,000 registered members, reaching 8,000 products listed on its third-party app marketplace and nearly 50,000 completed purchases, and tripling membership in the DotNetNuke Corp. Partner Program to 125.

Drupal

In February, Drupal (news, site) founder Dries Buytaert released his Drupal 7 Development Process Retrospective, saying, "I have been thinking about a number of solutions, or experiments, that I would like to try during the Drupal 8 development cycle." It's a worthy read for insights into what worked and what didn't work for the company.

Drupal company Acquia (news, site) announced two packaging offerings for its Drupal cloud hosting: Aquia Dev Cloud (available on March 14) and Acquia Managed Cloud (available now). Acquia Dev Cloud is a self-service hosting platform for developers running one or more sites on a single instance. Acquia Managed Cloud is a "highly available, managed cloud service offering fully redundant clustered server environments in combination with Acquia’s 24x7 enterprise Support." 

Hippo CMS

In February, Hippo CMS (news, site) launched The Hippo Trail, a three-step process to guide people from the Hippo Baby Steps of getting started and installing, to the Grazing Hippo as you begin basic configuration and then Hippo Awesomeness as you master more advanced features. It also released a video showing the basics of getting started with the product:

Quickstart developing your site with Hippo CMS 7.5 from Arje Cahn on Vimeo.

The project also announced that lead developer Berry van Halderen was elected as an Apache Software Foundation (news, site) Jackrabbit committer.

Jahia

In February. the folks at Jahia (news, site) released a data chart module for Jahia Beta 6.5 Platform-As-A-Service (PAAS) . This module offers a drag-and-drop function that allows the creation of data-driven charts and graphs with zero coding. Under the hood, it uses the external framework of FusionCharts.com.

You can download Jahia 6.5 PaaS beta at this point, or take an online tour.

Joomla!

In February, the folks at Joomla! (news, site) announced a few interesting stats:  The open source CMS has been downloaded 21.4 million times as of February, while Joomla! 1.6 has been downloaded over 572,000 times as of February. The number of Joomla! extensions on extensions.joomla.org has risen to 6,941, with more hosted outside.

Two Open Source Matters board members, Ryan Ozimek and James Vasile, had their terms extended by a year, and the Joomla Community Magazine's February edition is now available. Looking ahead, on March 12 and 13, check out Joomla!Day India 2011, and on April 2 and 3 there's Joomla!Day Netherlands 2011.

Nuxeo

In February, the folks at Nuxeo (news, site) proposed to contribute its ECM core services to the Eclipse (news, site) Foundation. The proposal names the project the "Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository," and "a reference implementation for content repositories that can be used to develop content applications such as document management, records management, digital asset management, case management, or any vertical or horizontal composite content applications."

The scope of the contribution includes APIs in Java and REST, CMIS support, and a variety of content repository services. Nuxeo invites Eclipse and Nuxeo community members to view the proposal and participate. It will be attending EclipseCon March 21-24 to discuss the project proposal further.

It also launched:

In other news, the Apache Software Foundation announced that the Apache Chemistry (news, site) project has graduated from incubator to a Top Level Project.

Coming in March is a collection of technical webinars geared toward developers.

Plone

In February, the Plone (news, site) project announced Plone Open Garden 2011, to be held in Sorrento, Italy from April 28 through May 1. The event involves both talks and sprints, continuing the momentum it received last year. The organization also held a sprint in Bodega Bay, Calif., where it focused on improving Plone.org and other core Plone community infrastructure.

SilverStripe

In February, the folks at Silverstripe (news, site) released versions versions 2.4.5 and 2.3.11. Both of these releases are bug fixes. It also launched a roadmap toward SilverStripe 3.0, and have started a Q&A blog series to answer commonly asked questions.

Also, SilverStripe Ltd. was named number 261 on Deloitte's 2010 Asia Pacific Technology Fast 500. It also hosted a meetup in Wellington, NZ, focusing on SilverStripe as a business intelligence system, and an overview of Sapphire 3.0. The meetups continue through March and April, traveling to London, Melbourne, Utrecht, Brisbane, and back to Wellington.

Squiz

In February, Squiz (news, site) released:

  • Its manual installation guide for Squiz Matrix
  • Version 3.28.9 of MySource Matrix (the final version with the MySource branding) with 25 bug fixes and 4 new features and enhancements
  • Squiz Matrix 4.0.3 with 27 bug fixes and 5 new features and enhancements, including updates to the Remap Manager's Never Delete setting and an option to prevent remaps from being added on the Add Web Path trigger action
  • Phase 2 of the Easy Edit Suite for Squiz Matrix 4.0.1+, which now supports calendar events

Tiki Wiki CMS

In February, the folks at Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware (news, site) released version 6.2 of its Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, which includes several new features and over 240 fixes and updates. Once Tiki 7 is released in April, Tiki 6 becomes the new LTS version.

The Tiki Software Community Association announced its Tiki Service Provider program, which matches Tiki consultants with users looking to purchase support or training. This program includes a Tiki Consultants Code of Conduct.

Tiki Community contributor and Citadel Rock Online Communities Director of Business Development Pascal St-Jean was invited to take part in the Inuit Uqausinginnik Taiguusiliuqtiit Language Standardization Symposium in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada. There, he demonstrated how Tiki promotes multi-lingual and international standards. Coming in Tiki 7 is an Inuit language version of Tiki.

In March, the Tiki Spring Tour continues in Montréal March 4-8 and Boston March 14-18. The Tour consists of a series of code sprints, with each stop coinciding with other industry events. Expect the schedule for the Tiki Summer Tour to be announced as well, which promises to stop on four continents.

WordPress

In February, the WordPress (news, site) project released WordPress 3.1. New features for users include a redesigned linking workflow, an admin bar, a streamlined writing interface and a refreshed blue admin scheme. For developers, it's added Post Formats support, archive pages for custom content types, a Network Admin, an overhaul of the import/export system and advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries. The company hope to release 3.2 on a shorter development cycle.