Newspaper, coffee and iPhone on a table.
PHOTO: Adam Tinworth

Acquia, an open source digital experience software vendor, announced a new version of Acquia Lightning, a Drupal 8 distribution with pre-selected modules and configurations to help developers launch Drupal 8 sites faster.

This newest version of Acquia’s Drupal 8 distribution offers new capabilities for developers, site builders, site managers and marketers to build sites faster and deliver the rich digital experiences today’s users want.

These new capabilities include:

  • Layout Builder: Acquia Lightning takes advantage of the industry’s only fully accessible Layout Builder in Drupal 8.7, and also provides templates not available in Drupal core that editors can choose when creating or editing content. Layout Builder replaces the Panels and Panelizer modules previously available in Acquia Lightning.
  • Additional Layout Builder Components: Additional out-of-the-box Layout Builder components, on top of what Drupal core delivers, supporting the use of Google Maps, slideshows, banners and other rich media in layouts.
  • Enhanced Media Management: including a carousel widget that can be embedded on pages and a built-in tool to crop images.
  • JSON:API Support: Acquia Lightning has adopted Drupal’s support for JSON:API, delivering out-of-the-box support for building decoupled or headless applications using a common standard.

In a press release, Dries Buytaert, Drupal creator, project lead, Acquia co-founder and CTO, claimed that “by bringing together modules and capabilities enterprise applications demand most, Acquia Lightning speeds up Drupal development time by 30% or more and helps organizations get to market faster and maintain Drupal sites more easily, while delivering more engaging experiences.”

Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM) v13.2 Released

Bloomreach rolled out Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM) v13.2 on May 20. This minor release provides expanded deployment options for customers and prospects.

The most important product updates include:

  • OpenUI Update: OpenUI applications can now open a modal dialog 'in context' of an end-user. When building a web-page by adding components, the functionality allows dialogs to appear within the Channel Manager with a UI from a third-party system. Bloomreach will also provide a plugin for Bynder, a digital asset management system, and a BloomReach Technology partner, which will be announced at Bloomreach Connect in San Francisco.
  • Dynamic Content Beans: Allows Java developers to customize formatting and provide data-driven logic for content stored in the CMS. The CMS will also now dynamically generate content beans with default behaviors on the fly without developer intervention.

The release documentation can be found here.

Enonic XP 7.0 Launched

Version 7.0 of Enonic XP has been released with a big focus on the developer experience, according to Thomas Sigdestad, CTO of Enonic.

Here are the highlights:

  • Brand new developer portal aggregating all documentation and guides in one place, all fully searchable.
  • New XP documentation, available from the developer portal.
  • Enonic CLI, a native developer and management tool that installs everything you need and builds your first app in a few minutes.

Enonic XP core also offers a range of improvements, including:

  • Now available through native distributions for the major platforms (MacOS, Windows and Linux) — Docker images are naturally also available.
  • Available in server version and SDK version.
  • Enonic 7.0 builds on JVM 11 (vs. JVM 8 in earlier versions). The JVM is also now embedded, eliminating the need to install it separately.
  • The Enonic XP JavaScript runtime and framework now offers partial support for ES6 without use of transpilers
  • Support for “commits” and more effective storage in the NoSQL storage

Plus, here’s what's new with Enonic’s Content Studio (the CMS interface):

  • Content Studio is no longer a part of the XP core, but rather a separate app available from Enonic Market.
  • The pluggable context panel is now also available in edit mode, providing editors with more flexibility and better usability.
  • Fully customizable image styles for use in the rich text editor.

Liferay Portal Community Edition (CE) 7.2 Set for June Release

Liferay is continuing to work on the release of Liferay Portal Community Edition (CE) 7.2, which Liferay anticipates will be released in early June.

The latest version out now is Liferay Portal CE 7.2 RC3, and the source code repository is available here. Currently, the Liferay team is still in the midst of migrating documentation to a new site, but temporary documentation can be found here. Bugs can be reported in Jira here, while a list of known bugs is available here.

More Open Source CMS Headlines

WordPress 5.2.1 is now available for download, fixing 33 bugs including improvements to the block editor, accessibility, internationalization and the Site Health feature introduced in WordPress 5.2.

Joomla 3.9.6 is also available. This security fix release for the 3.x series of Joomla addresses two security vulnerabilities and contains over 25 bug fixes and improvements.