Jan 13, 2012
If you read Content Here through RSS or just follow links to individual articles, you may have missed my new publications page. In addition to listing some articles that I have published on other sites, the publications page now includes reports that I used to sell here at Content Here. I have not kept these reports up to date with the technologies that they cover but the background information and selection strategies are still very relevant. They are posted up on Scribd where they are free to read. You may find the following reports particularly interesting.
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This was Content Here's first report. It reviewed 7 open source Java web content management systems (Alfresco, Apache Lenya, Daisy, Hippo, Jahia, Magnolia, and OpenCms). While the individual product reviews are all out of date, the first 20 pages of the 173 page report contain useful information on the rise of open source content management and how evaluating open source platforms is different from commercial platforms
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This is the Alfresco review from Open Source Web Content Management in Java but updated to version 3.1 which was released in April of 2009.
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This is my most recent report. It was published in 2009 and covers Drupal 6.10. The interesting thing about this format is that it reviewed Drupal from the perspective of a publisher. The report is broken up into 3 sections: "what the publisher needs to know," "what the editor needs to know," and "what the developer needs to know." I think that much of the general commentary is still very relevant.
Sep 30, 2009
Not quite the War of the Roses, there is a little skirmish happening between Magnolia International (as in the CMS company) and Ma.gnolia (the off-again, on-again social bookmarking site). The squabble began shortly after Ma.noglia's recent resurrection (it had shut down in February 2009) when Magnolia International issued what appears to be a Cease and Desist order. It is a little unclear because it was written by Magnolia's CEO, Pascal Mangold (not an attorney) and it seems to be more of a request than a demand.
I am no trademark attorney but, since that hasn't stopped anyone else, I figured I would weigh in from a common sense perspective. I understand how Magnolia International would want ma.gnolia.com to be out of the picture. They probably also want ExxonMobile to stop using magnolia.com. ExxonMobile probably wasn't paying attention when, then Obinary International, Magnolia registered magnolia.info to market their new open source CMS.
Does Ma.gnolia have the right to use their domain? I don't know. There are very specific legal distinctions to determine legal and illegal trademark infringement but I don't think it really matters. In the real world, it happens all the time. This is why you try to grab all the variations of your domain (.net, .org, and .biz as well as -sucks.com, -sucks.net, and -sucks.biz) when you are branding your company. You do your best to claim your little spot on the web and you work with what you've got. Getting lawyers involved is an expensive distraction.
I am sure that Pascal knows all this and that is why he wrote his own letter. Hey, it was worth a try. Maybe this will lead to a negotiation for Magnolia to purchase gnolia.com. Who knows how serious Ma.gnolia is about their business. Personally, I don't think I would use a bookmarking service that had a track record of closing down and opening up again.
This is not a particularly interesting story. What would be more interesting is if Magnolia International went after ExxonMobile. What the heck is ExxonMobile doing with that domain anyway?
Aug 04, 2009
Magnolia is hosting its first big user conference this September 10th and 11th in Basel Switzerland. I was going through the program and it looks great. There are two tracks: one for business users and the other for developers. The developer track has a session where David Nüscheler will talk about the new JCR Specification (283). There will also be two people from Texas State University to talk about their work with Magnolia. If you are using or considering Magnolia CMS and can talk someone into sending you to Basel, definitely try to go (register here). You can even get a 30% discount off of the €200 standard price if you use the code "mconf09gottlieb".
Mar 04, 2009
It looks like the first customer of Magnolia's On Air platform is now live. RTSI is a Swiss radio and television company. They are moving to On Air from a home grown system. Eventually eight stations will be supported on the new platform.
Architecture diagram showing integration between Media Workflow Engine and Magnolia (please excuse the colors).
For those of you who are not familiar with On Air, it is an integration between Magnolia CMS Enterprise Edition (reviewed here) and a third party product called Media Workflow Engine by FutureLabs. MWE provides capture, workflow, and advanced (non-destructive) editing functionality for video, audio and images. Images are represented in the Magnolia repository (the Apache Jackrabbit JCR implementation) as proxy objects. This saves the Magnolia repository from becoming bloated with binary files. Another nice feature of the integration is that workflows can be initiated in either system and can be continued in the other system. For example, a visitor uploading a video to a site can kick off a workflow in MWE.
Nov 16, 2007
This morning there was an announcement on the Magnolia user mailing list that the first release candidate (RC1) of version 3.5 is now available for download. If you were waiting for version 3.1, don't worry, you didn't miss it. It is the same release. Still, this is a pretty big release. Some of the more notable features is better internationalization support. It used to be that localized sites needed to be managed more or less independently with no real relationships between different translations of the same asset. The new version provides better support for 1:1 localization schemes. Future releases and add-on modules will provide more functionality in this area. The new version has also been re-factored to be easier to customize. For example, many of the configurations have been transformed into beans that can be overridden and extended. There is also better support for filters. Security has also been enhanced with URL level access control (in addition to content level access control).
The Enterprise Edition will be released after the Community Edition is final and stabilized. If you are using Magnolia Community Edition, you might want to download it and give it a try - especially if you have built modules. The Magnolia team has tried to support backward compatibility for 3.0 modules but you never know. Now would be a good time to tell them if there is a problem.