Welcome to the November 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 for your project updates.

Alfresco

In October, Alfresco (news, site) achieved U.S. Department of Defense 5015.2 certification, making it the first open source Enterprise CMS to do so. The certification is specifically for their Records Management Module, and means that Alfresco's solution has passed mandatory operational, legislative and regulatory requirements for records management in government. The Alfresco Records Management module is available with both the community (free) and enterprise (not free) versions of Alfresco.

DotNetNuke

In October, DotNetNuke (news, site) announced the winners of the First Annual OpenForce Community Choice Awards in the OpenForce Europe Division. The winners for the best DotNetNuke web sites in this division are:

For November, DotNetNuke is gearing up for OpenForce '09 Connections from November 9 - 12 in Las Vegas, Nevada, which is being held in conjunction with the Microsoft DevConnections conference at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. This conference brings together DotNetNuke and Microsoft .NET developers to meet and learn about the latest developments in the DotNetNuke world. Speakers this year include DotNetNuke Co-Founder and Chief Architect, Shaun Walker, and topics include insights into DotNetNuke module and skin development, and administration.

The First Annual OpenForce Community Choice Award winner in the Connections Division will be announced at the show. Voting is open for the Connections Division until November 4.

Drupal

In October, the Drupal (news, site) project reached its API code freeze point for Drupal 7, making exceptions only for 10 high-priority items such as RDFa. Drupal 7 is now in its "strictly polish" phase, where the only allowed changes involve usability, accessibility, testing, documentation and performance.

Around November 15th (we all know things are subject to change), the team is scheduled to enter string and UI freeze, which involves releasing the first alpha and entering the bugs and release blockers only phase. This phase will continue until all release blocker bugs are fixed, during which betas and RCs will be let into the wild.

eZ Publish

In October eZ Systems (news, site) announced a new full-time community manager, Nicolas Pastorino, formerly an expert consultant at eZ Systems Western Europe, eZ Labs Engineer and member of the Product Management Team. This move comes in preparation for launching a new community platform in November.

According to Bertrand Maugain, VP Marketing at eZ, they're investing more in supporting their community because, "We want to give more value to developers, freelancers and community partners. More activities will be launched, more events and even a community committee will be created."

Note: The eZ Publish team is presenting a webinar on Nov 18th at 11am Eastern titled Optimizing Enterprise Search with eZ Find.

Joomla!

In October, Joomla! (news, site) released its final alpha for Joomla! 1.6. This alpha brings:

  • Access Control List (ACL) http://www.cmswire.com/news/topic/access%20control enhancements such as access management for global permissions as well as content item-specific permissions, variable usergroups, user members of more than one usergroup and fast permission inheritance
  • Extendable user profile, profile view in the frontend and extendable user parameters
  • Tableless com_content layouts
  • Improved com_content modules
  • An article linker plugin for editors
  • A new frontend template
  • A new backend template
  • A new uploader for the media manager

KnowledgeTree

October marked the release of a community-developed integration that adds a KnowledgeTree (news, site) upload widget to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite's user interface. This widget (or Zimlet in Zimbra-speak) allows users to upload emails and attachments to KnowledgeTree by dragging and dropping, and supports the transfer of key fields from emails to KnowledgeTree document properties.

Magnolia

In October, Magnolia (news, site) released its first milestone for Magnolia 4.2, providing access to the Templates Repository introduced in Magnolia 4.0 through WebDAV. Doing so provides an easy entry path to Magnolia template creation, letting anyone create, edit, and manage templates without having to touch Java.

Additional changes for 4.2 include:

  • Standard Templating Kit (STK) 1.2 with many minor improvements and significant improvements in accessibility
  • Public User Registration (PUR) migrated to use the form module, added username and password validators and provided STK integration
  • New simplified node-builder API
  • Data Module extended to allow hierarchal data types
  • Updated to Jackrabbit 1.6

You can download the milestone here:

They've also released all but one of the Magnolia conference videos, opened their sprint backlog so the community can follow development in real time, have job openings for a Senior Consultant with a Java web technology background and a technical writer and trainer, and found themselves in Gartner's latest "Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management." 

In November, Magnolia will release Magnolia 4.2 and add a new core developer to their team. They'll also have news about a new community contribution called Magnolia Blossom.

mojoPortal

In October, the folks at mojoPortal (news, site) continued momentum from improving the editor experience by adding easy image cropping and easy HTML slide shows to 2.3.1.9. For early November, they're focusing on a feature that their community has consistently requested: Newsletter improvements.

The new Newsletter system won't require a user to register on the site to sign up, instead using a confirmation email to verify subscribers. They're also adding the ability to view newsletter archives and to enable or disable which individual newsletters should be visible. A nicer UI with a jQuery progress bar for monitoring the progress of sending out newsletters to the subscriber list has also been added.

Movable Type and Melody

Movable Type (news, site) fans who were once excited about mod_perlite, the "next generation Perl container for web servers that is: easy to install, fun to use and imminently supportable," will be pleased to hear that progress is again being made on this project.

The mod_perlite team reports that not only have they produced a working initial version of this module, it's also been tested with Movable Type and works.

Byrne Reese, a Movable Type and Melody (news, site) consultant, says that mod_perlite addresses three problems:

  • It makes CGI applications easier to install and set up
  • It's more likely to be adopted by ISPs than mod_perl because it's not persistent, and so there are no memory leaks
  • It makes CGI applications faster

In October a collection of new Movable Type plugins was released:

  • Full Screen Mode - Adds a full screen button to your Edit Entry and Edit Template screens
  • Entry Expiry - Select times and dates that entries should be unpublished from your site
  • Auto Prefs - Automatically apply a set of blog preferences when a user resets their blog templates
  • Cache Manager - A site developer tool allowing developers to the stored cache for template modules, and to clear the cache
  • OpenSSO Auth Driver - Adds support for OpenSSO single sign-on

Work has also begun on an open source custom fields solution for Movable Type -- called Open Fields, the Melody team has officially started working on Melody 1.0 (which will initially be based on Movable Type 4).

Another October release was Six Apart's TypePad Motion and the opening of the TypePad API. Motion is the first client for Six Apart's cloud service. On Friday, October 30th from 3 to 5pm EDT, Six Apart invites people to their New York offices to sit side-by-side by with their developers and learn how Motion and the cloud services work. They'll also have a a video conference set up with team members who developed Motion and the API.

If you can't make this event, they're also giving a presentation on Motion at the next Django-NYC Meetup on November 10.

Nuxeo

The Paris-based Enterprise CMS vendor released Nuxeo 5.3 this month. Highlights of the release included support for the OpenSocial API, a new tagging service, SharePoint integration and a Content Management Interoperability Specification (CMIS) implementation based on Apache Chemistry and version 0.62 of the CMIS specification.

In the coming month the Nuxeo team plans to bring CMIS support up to date with the latest version of the specification and will begin releasing the first of a group of vertical applications built upon their core content services foundation. Note that CMIS version 0.70b was submitted for acceptance as the official 1.0 version of the spec.

Squiz and MySource Matrix

In late October, Squiz (news, site) announced that they're open sourcing MySource Mini under the GPL. They also launched their new MySource Matrix Community site and encourage users to add to the growing number of tutorials there.

Coming up in November, Squiz is a sponsor of the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Cannes.

Umbraco

Mid-October saw the release of Umbraco 4.1 beta 1. This release brought a number of enhancements including improvements to the data layer, a new tree control in the back office interface, a media recycling bin, more internal API events and a spellchecker as part of the core.

In November the team has asserted that a new web form builder will arrive, and that "making forms in Umbraco will never be the same again."

[Editor's Note: If open source is your cup of tea, check out the free 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share report. The report looks at 20 of the most popular content management systems.]