The OpenCms Days 2008 Website is filling up with information. The speakers list and program have been finalized. My presentation is scheduled for the first business session of the second day. I am looking forward to it!
(I guess that could have been a tweet but what the heck.)
I heard from Adriaan Bloem that you could can configure Blogger to use your own domain rather than blogspot. The process is really easy.
Now Enter Content Here can be found at http://blog.contenthere.net. If you subscribe to my FeedBurner feed, nothing changes for you.
Via Ostatic: Microsoft to Help Sourcesense
Microsoft and open source integrator Sourcesense recently announced a partnership. One of the areas that they will be collaborating is on the Apache POI project. For those who are not familiar with POI, it is used by several CMS (and other applications) to transform Microsoft Office file formats into indexable text and other neutral formats like PDF. POI has not kept up with the latest Office 2007 formats so this is good news for CMS like Jahia.
OpenOffice is also used as a server side library for MS Office file transformation. Interestingly, POI doesn't support OpenOffice and the OpenDocument format very well. Hmmm...
Outerthought recently announced version 2.2 of their Daisy CMS platform. One of the biggest improvements has been in the area of localization. Daisy, with its "variants" model, has always been strong in managing multiple language renditions of a content asset. With 2.2, Daisy has improved the way different translations of a document are kept in sync. For example, if your native language is English, you may create many incremental English versions of an asset and translate the major versions into the secondary languages. Daisy 2.2 allows you to map different versions of language variants and shows you when the mapped versions are not in sync. For a better, more thorough explanation, see Bruno Dumon's blog post on translation management.
I think that the Daisy 2.2 release has been ready to go for a while but the team has been working on a new web application framework called Kauri. I know what you are thinking: just what the world needs, another web application development framework. Take comfort in knowing that they are not trying to re-invent everything. They are re-using what they like but have decided to build their own runtime and their own template language. The runtime is based on a "Restlet" (as opposed to servlet) architecture and seems pretty interesting. While servlet based frameworks may be considered to heavy weight for REST style architectures, I think departing from a well known standard (like the Servlet standard) should not be taken lightly. Noelios, the company behind Restlets, is intending to take their Restlet API 2.0 through the Java Community Process this year (see blog post).
The creation of a new templating language makes me a little uncomfortable. While there is really no good standard other than JSP JSTL (not really a templating language in itself) and XSLT (too hard for most to learn), creating a new templating language (or any new language) is the developer equivalent of jumping the shark - an over the top attempt to break out of the status quo.
No templating language is perfect but there is value in working in an imperfect language that you know or that your IDE knows. Most templating languages go through a natural lifecycle where they start out architecturally pure but limiting (and often a little slow and buggy too), then they achieve stability, then they start to get ruined by the desire add programming capabilities that spoils the separation between layout and business logic. I would love to see a better standard in this area that will help slow the decay of a good templating language and bring some commonality between content management systems.
I will try not to pass judgement on the Kauri template language before I see it and I would love to see something that would make me want to teach it to a creative developer. I guess you could say that I have a healthy skepticism.
Via CMSWire (because I missed the press release in my in-box - sorry Patrick).
Day Software recently launched a new blog and developer portal. The intent of the portal is to be for content management experts, by content management experts and focus on content technology standards. Day definitely has the horsepower to produce good content with on-staff visionaries like David Nuescheler (the driving force behind JSR 170), Roy "the REST man" Fielding, and collaboration and open source expert Lars Trieloff.
Color me subscribed!
BTW, I just noticed from the RSS feed that the title is "(content goes here) blog." What's up with that?
If you have been disappointed with Alfresco's web content management user interface, you should see what is happening in the Community Edition (2.9 - an R&D release). In particular, there is an extension called Alfresco Dynamic Website that seems to provide a much better UI for managing web projects. I have not started playing with it but it looks promising.
With this extension, Alfresco WCM gets a much needed tree control to browse and organize a website and in-context editing. BTW, how did Alfresco know to win me over by having an enviro-demo? I wonder if this work was somehow tied into their recent Synerge win.
According to the forum, at least some of these concepts will start to be available for Community Edition 2.9 by mid April (although, since 2.2 Enterprise is late, I am not holding my breath). The feature will be baked into Community Edition 3.0 scheduled for late July. The 3.0 is aptly named "Project Slingshot" - I think that Alfresco could afford to shoot ahead in WCM usability.
When I wrote the Hippo CMS evaluation for Open Source Web Content Management in Java, I noted that Hippo really had no presence in North America yet but they were poised to enter the market. Well, it's happening. Hippo BV bought David Sean Taylor's (of Apache Jetspeed fame) company Blue Sunrise. David is now the VP of Engineering and gives Hippo a presence on the West Coast (Bay Area).
I don't know of any North American customers running on Hippo CMS yet. But I wouldn't be surprised if Blue Sunrise customers running on Jetspeed start to move toward Hippo Portal, which is based on Jetspeed.
Hippo BV also relaunched their website under a .com address: www.onehippo.com. When browsing the website I noticed some commas in the URLs that made me suspect that they are running on the upcoming Hippo ECM 1.0 platform (a developer release is due out in April). When I asked CTO Arjé Cahn about it, he told me that they are running the site on Vignette. I hope their North American expansion doesn't make them lose their Dutch sense of humor.
Today Sandro Groganz blogged an announcement of a new initiative by the European Union called the "Interactive Knowledge" project. The goal of the project is to promote the latest web standards like CSS3 and RDF (semantic web). They intend to do this by giving out grants to small CMS vendors and adopters to support these standards.
This program could have a huge impact on those open source projects that focus on standards and bringing the web to the next level. In Dries Buytaert's Drupalcon keynote, he made specific reference to how RDF can give Drupal the opportunity "to build a graph that connects everything" (see my notes). There are number of open source projects that are already walking the walk when it comes to standards: Plone (WCAG), Alfresco (JSR 170), Hippo (WebDAV and soon JSR 170), and Jahia (JSR 168) all place a high value on supporting standards. Some commercial vendors like Day Software have also made huge contributions in developing standards but it is less common for them to take the lead and drive (like Day has).
Waiting for customers of commercial CMS products to demand RDF has not broken the chicken and egg impasse that holds back widespread adoption of these technologies. There is no pressure to implement RDF and microformats if no one is using browsers and services that leverage this information. No one develops technologies to leverage this information if it is not widely available. Targeting smaller CMS products with money that is meaningful to them seems like a good way to seed the long tail of the Internet with a movement that will get the interest of the larger players. Remember, the big CMS vendors were the last ones to get RSS.
If you are interested, please send an email to Wolfgang Maass (wolfgang dot maass at hs-furtwangen dot de) no later than this Thursday, March 20th, 2008. A little more lead time would have helped but I am sure that if you contact him with your interest, you can get your foot in the door.
There is a good post on the Redfin blog about why they selected Bricolage to manage their website including why they broke down and implemented a CMS and why they chose Bricolage over Alfresco, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, and Plone. They also looked at Interwoven, RedDot, and CrownPeak.
Redfin was looking for a de-coupled CMS that would allow them to separate content publishing from updating website code. Of the open source products that they looked at, only Alfresco and Bricolage could do static publishing (I don't think they came across the CMFDeployment or Enfold's Entransit project for Plone).
What they didn't like about Alfresco was how index pages were generated. They felt that they would need JSPs to dynamically render listing pages from directories of statically generated detail pages. While listing pages can be statically generated through the same mechanism that renders detail pages, the fact that it happens at save time rather than publish time may have created performance problems if they had lots of composite pages.
Their main concern with Bricolage was similar to what most non-periodical websites experience: that the user interface metaphor is highly specialized to publishing stories and related media. Business users need to mentally map the terminology of the product to their own domain model. They also found the branching model unintuitive.
Overall, the Redfin development team is happy with their choice of Bricolage and it sounds like they will bring energy and expertise to the Bricolage community.
There will be a JCR Community Gathering in Amsterdam on April 8th as part of ApacheCon Europe. There will also be a JCR session and BoF in the ApacheCon conference.
Hat tip to Zukka Zitting for the announcement!