I was just looking through the program for the Content Convergence and Integration conference that is being held in Vancouver March 12th - 14th and I wish that I could be there. Not only is Vancouver a great city to visit, the sessions look very good. There are a number of talks on content re-use in a Web 2.0 world sound particularly interesting. If you are able to break away, I would seriously consider going.
Notes and action items from the Plone Strategic Planning Summit were just posted on the plone.org site. The notes are still a little rough and only hint all the information that was shared and there is still work to do to organize and plan the execution of these ideas. Probably the most informative page is the next steps email sent by Alex. This email contains pointers to a bunch of Trac tickets. Every one of them has an owner (or "champion") to push them forward.
IT'S HERE!
I am very happy to announce the availability of Content Here's first report: Open Source Web Content Management in Java. The report is written for technical decision makers and covers Alfresco, Apache Lenya, Daisy CMS, Hippo CMS, Jahia, Magnolia, and OpenCms with a level of detail that I have not yet seen in a professional analyst report on open source software. Each 15+ page evaluation describes:
the history of the project
the architecture and how it can be extended
how the contribution interfaces behave and how they can be customized
how the system can be administered, configured, and integrated
how the presentation tier works and what can be done with it
what the community and other support structures are like
There is enough technical meat for an architect to understand the product and consider it for prototyping. By focusing on the "content contribution" and "presentation" sections of each evaluation, semi-technical readers will see how they would use the system to meet their needs.
Systems integration firms, software companies, and investors will also find Open Source Web Content Management in Java useful for understanding the open source WCM marketplace.
The products are organized into two groups: products that are typically used to power basic informational sites, and products that are used more as frameworks for more complex web applications. For each category, I describe important features that the product should support and rate each of the products in those functional areas.
For more information:
What is in a name? Well, if it is a really good name like InitMarketing, I would say a very clever company. A while back I announced that Sandro Groganz was starting a new marketing company specializing in open source businesses. He didn't have a name at the time, which I thought was... well... curious (being a marketing company, after all). But I am glad he waited because InitMarketing is awesome on so many levels. No logo yet. They are holding a contest where the public submits their ideas. These two things should tell you that InitMarketing is not just another marketing organization.
The other great thing about InitMarketing is my friend and colleague Stephe Walli has joined the company. Stephe brings a wealth of knowledge about open source business and a great network. He is also a fun guy to work with.
[Added links to Jon and Alex's blogs]
I am heading back home from Mountain View after spending a day at the Plone Strategic Planning Session where 50 Plonistas are meeting for three days at the Google campus to discuss the future of Plone. Kudos to the Plone Community for proactively thinking about growth and improvement when things are going well for Plone. Too often these discussions happen during crisis when options and opportunities are limited.
Yesterday (day one) focused on "marketing" and today is about technology. Tomorrow attendees will organize the action items that came out of the first two days. Jon Stahl from One/Northwest did a wonderful job of organizing the event and directing the sessions (he even got a Kentuckian to "twinkle" - you had to be there). The Plone community is lucky to have leaders like Jon. That Jon comes from a non-technical background shows how the Plone community has been able to attract, engage, and leverage non-technical people. Plone co-founder Alexander Limi's assertion that he is not a technologist (although he is a closet geek) has helped the Plone culture be more inviting to non-technologists and give them pathways to leadership. This aspect of the Plone community is somewhat rare in open source software (and most commercial software too). I would say that the closest thing is in the Joomla! and Drupal communities that have active marketplaces for designers to sell and share themes.
The biggest issue that the group struggled with is the one that confounds the whole content management industry: is a CMS a framework or a product? This came up a number of times in pre-conference blog posts and email threads as well as during exercises like composing elevator pitches. The elevator pitch exercise turned up another industry-wide puzzle: what is content management? I, personally, dislike the term content management. "Content" is too vague and "Management" (in my mind) is a negative word (guess who works for himself). "Content Management" implies that content is a liability and needs to be controlled. It sounds too much like "Waste Management" or "Risk Management." However, it is convenient that the term is widely known and immediately brings about a sense of understanding. Alas, I digress. Back to Plone...
There was a good discussion about competitors and differentiators. Drupal, Microsoft Sharepoint, and Alfresco were identified as the biggest threats. From an emotional perspective, Drupal got the greatest amount of attention because the long-standing rivalry and that Drupal has been so successful in the non-profit sector where may of the Plonistas work. Alfresco and Sharepoint are newer and the Plone community is still learning about where they fit in. Plone has a broad set of uses and both of these products certainly encroach on some of the territory that Plone has marked out. Sharepoint, is very compelling for intranets and collaboration. Aggressive pricing by Microsoft, especially for non-profits, trims Plone's edge on total cost of ownership. However, Sharepoint is not a good answer for building traditional websites where Plone is effective.
Joomla!, Drupal and low-end commercial tools like Expression Engine, City Desk and Adobe Contribute are the obvious competitors for building basic websites. In order to reach the broad, low-end market, a theming community and a shallower learning curve would help Plone. Open source products that were noticeably absent from the discussion were TYPO3 and eZ Publish. Although less so in North America, TYPO3 has a nice network of agency style consultancies that can efficiently build highly branded websites on the platform. TYPO3's default install with all of the back-end modules enabled makes the product easy to dismiss as complex and ugly. But most TYPO3 customers see TYPO3 only after it has been tailored to their needs. eZ Publish has the advantage of commercial style support options and productized bundles that are targeted to different market segments and industry verticals. Both of these qualities would help Plone be more accessible to a broader market of buyers.
Alfresco was also on the radar and there are good reasons why the Plone community should be paying attention to it. While Plone's out of the box user interface is much more refined than Alfresco's, Alfresco has a number of architectural features that make it a better general content management framework. Alfresco's repository services are more open and advanced than Plone's and most large companies developing custom web applications will be better equipped to build and support them in Java than in Python and Zope. I think that Plone's Zope architecture will frequently qualify Plone out of large corporations that think of the world in terms of "Microsoft" and "Java." There was an acknowledgement that large, established IT departments tend to be hostile to Plone and chances are better when business owners run the selection process. That is not to say that very large companies have not successfully deployed Plone in important content management scenarios. Just look at Novell and the CIA. There are also some other big companies that are in the process of major Plone deployments.
Many within the Plone community feel that there are better Python frameworks for building general web applications so maybe this is an area that Plone should not try to compete in. The general consensus is that Plone developers should try to integrate with other applications as much as possible rather than build everything on Plone. I am sure that they are talking about technical tactics for enabling integration strategies today during the technical session. I would expect that there will be a discussion about better mechanisms for creating and consuming RESTful APIs and strategies for replicating content out of the ZODB.
I am really happy that I attended the Plone Strategic Planning Session. It was good to see the Plone community in action working together to solve difficult questions. It will be interesting to see how these ideas get distilled into a strategy that is easy to organize behind. More important, however, will be how the Plone community is able to execute this strategy.
Wow! I never saw this coming! Sandro Groganz just pointed me to this blog post announcing that Sun Microsystems is acquiring MySQL. Kaj Arno (MySQL AB's VP of Community) does a pretty good job summarizing the implications of the the move. Much of the post centers on comforting MySQL users with assurances that Sun is a good company and will do right by the community.
What comes to my mind is that MySQL is seen as a leader in understanding and leveraging open source as a business model whereas Sun has seemed to be very muddled with their open source strategy. Maybe the MySQL team will give Sun some direction. I also wonder if Sun will draw MySQL away from its focus on the LAMP stack. S(olaris)AMJ(ava) doesn't sound as good to me.
If I were a MySQL employee and was hoping for a big IPO, I would probably be a little disappointed as Sun's stock seems to be flat or working its way down.
Information Week recently published an article about an ongoing study of software bugginess. In 2006, a Homeland Security sponsored Coverity study of the major open source projects (Linux Kernel, Apache HTTP, etc.) found these projects to have a similar defect rate to analoguous commercial products (although commercial software defect rates are not made public). I am not surprised by this finding since these large institutional projects have professional developers (employed by major software companies like IBM and Oracle) working on them.
What is interesting about this article is that a new code analysis tool by Stanford University, called Prevent SQS, runs on a periodic basis and has discovered that bugs are being fixed at an extremely rapid rate. To quote the article:
A total of 7,826 defects have been identified and fixed through the Homeland Security review, or one every two hours since it was launched in 2006. Bugs and vulnerabilities have been found in most open source projects, which isn't surprising. What is surprising is the speed with which some projects resolve the issues as Coverity airs them on its Web site, versus other projects that lag behind.
By putting vulnerabilities out in the open, a project with a large community is able to mobilize and respond to risks that users of the software are not willing to tolerate. However, commercial software products tend to be less open about their bugs and prioritize the addition of new features where they hope to achieve competitive advantage in acquiring new customers. That is not to say that these bugs do not get fixed. Anyone who has run a Microsoft IIS environment knows about all the security updates and packages you need to keep up with. However, the commercial patch probably comes after the bug has been exploited on a customer installation and has become a customer relationship liability.
After over 3 years since its last major release, the Apache Lenya team just announced the official release of version 2.0. There is one known live site running 2.0 that was built off of the unreleased 2.0 trunk by one of the committers.
2.0 was originally slated to be called 1.4 but the release got so big that they renamed it to 2.0 (I talked about it here). Even though this is a major release that took a lot of work, most of the big changes are under the covers and are not visible to the content contributor. Hopefully these architectural improvements, plus fresh blood on the development team ( a few new committers have recently been voted in), will be a launching point for further progress on the project.
Sandro Groganz just announced on his blog the formation of his new open source marketing company. His target market includes commercial open source vendors, third party contributors, and investors in open source technology. All three of these groups could definitely use Sandro's help. He is still working on a name for the company and if you have any ideas, please send them to Sandro (what an open source way to start a company!).
If you don't already know Sandro, he was an VP of Communications at eZ systems and recently worked as the VP of Marketing at MindQuarry. Sandro knows the nuances of open source based business as well as anyone that I know.
Best of luck Sandro!
If you have a custom web application that does not necessarily need a full CMS but could use a WYSIWYG editor, there are a number of open source Javascript rich text editors out there that are not too difficult to plug in. The big ones are TinyMCE, FCK, and Kupu. If you just need something simple, you might consider NiceEdit. It just has the basics (bold, underline, italics, left/right/center justification, bullets, indent, font size/family, links and images) but it looks easy to install and may be just what you need.