CM Professionals Summit

CM Professionals is holding its second Summit (press release) in San Francisco on April 11th, 2005. I went to the first Summit in Boston (November, 2004) and it was a great opportunity to meet others who live and breathe content management, share our experiences and think together about solving content management problems.

Like the Boston Summit, the Spring Summit is being held in conjunction with the The Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies (my notes from the Boston Gilbane Conference) and Summit attendees receive a discount on their conference registration fees.

See you there!

Lenya Releases Version 1.2.2

Today the Apache Lenya team announced the release of version 1.2.2. This release includes upgrades to the WYSIWYG editors (Kupu and BXE) and some minor UI improvements. Also, a migration to Cocoon 2.1.6 leverages new features such as more rubust caching, multi-channel output, and improvements to form handling.

Plone stands up to Tsunami

Enfold Systems recently announced how Oxfam's Plone-based website helped Oxfam respond to the Tsunami tragedy by rapidly publishing information about relief efforts and raising $14 million in donations. The article also discusses how nicely the system scaled to the increased traffic. From the article:

When the Tsunami crisis occurred, the system was put to the test. "In the course of ten days during the Tsunami crisis, Oxfam had almost half of its typical yearly visits, and almost 1/3 of its yearly bandwidth - the system performed beautifully", said Internet Manager Nicholas Rabinowitz. "Our public website offered timely, critical content to our users, while providing a solid gateway to our online donation system."

The Wiki software Media Wiki is also playing a prominent role in Tsunami relief by powering the collaborative information sharing website Tsunami Help.

CMS and Compliance Systems

There was an interesting thread on the CM Professionals mail list about the applicability of OS CMS for Policy and Procedures manuals. Apparently, this is an important enough issue that there is a group within CM Pros that wants to create an interest group on "Compliance Systems."

While much of the discussion was about special requirements that a P&P system has (access control, auditing content history, and who has read what) there was also disagreement over whether open source could be the platform for or could deliver such a system. The initial argument against was that this use of a CMS was so specialized it was doubtful that there would be enough interest within the OS community to support it. I find that hard to believe since the existence of the thread and the proposal for setting up an interest group is evidence of a common need. Also, the same argument could be made to disbelieve the existence of commercial products in this space - just substitute the word "market" for "community". That argument died out pretty quickly.

The second argument, which is even more interesting, is that you want to buy a commercial product so you have someone to sue if something goes wrong (such as a bug, I guess). This was made by the representative of a vendor. I wonder if the insurance companies know that their coverage is considered a primary benefit of their customers' product. There has been a lot of talk about lawsuits as a risk of using open source software: such as getting wrapped up in the SCO lawsuit. Some software companies offer indemnification for licensing violations. Now it seems we are jumping the legal shark by naming lawsuits as feature. I guess this means that the concern about support for open source (the old FUD factor) is dying down.

Graffito CMS

I recently started tracking the Graffito project. Graffito is a very early stage open source Java-based CMS project being incubated by the Apache Software Foundation. What interests me the most about Graffito is that it seems to be the answer to a need that I have been hearing a lot recently: a Java-based CMS that integrates into an existing presentation tier.

Graffito is a set of components that can work with different repositories and integrate with other various Java based presentation layers. Graffito provides functionality that people need out of a CMS:

• A repository abstraction layer which gives a common API to access content (documents, folders, etc.) from a relational database (through OJB), WebDav (such as Slide), or a JCR based repository. Currently, the OJB connector is the only one that has been implemented.
  
• Concurrency management so that multiple users do not interfere with each others work.
  
• Security
  
• Content integration which can integrate content from multiple repositories into one tree
  
• Workflow
  

Graffito is closely tied to and integrates with Jetspeed 2, which is one of the Apache portal projects. I have a feeling that Jetspeed 2 may give Graffito some momentum as Jetspeed 2 users look for a CMS to put content on their portals.

Recently the Graffito project website has been showing lots of change. Broken links are being fixed and a lot of new information is being added. This should be a good project to watch if not participate in.

Intranet Team Study

James Robertson, of Step Two Designs, is doing some research for a study on Intranet Teams. His study is focused on answering questions including

• Where in organizations are intranet teams located
  
• How big are intranet teams
  
• What skills do they have

James has an online survey to collect information (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=48049868860).
I am looking forward to reading the results.

This week in OS CMS

This post is an experiment on the concept of a weekly summary of development activity on an open source project. One of the great things about open source software is the transparency. All discussions happen out in the open on mail lists and forums so an enormous amount of knowledge is captured in an archivable format. On the downside, following these lists takes an inordinate amount of time for someone with other priorities. Therefore, I was thinking a human filtered and summarized digest would be something of value to users of an open source software product.

I am trying to determine the appropriate level of detail. The targeted audience is a manager of either software development or network operations - someone who does not have time to read the full list but wants a little more information than what one would get with announcements. I would appreciate feedback as to whether this type of information is useful. Now, on with the show.....

This Week in Plone

Release 2.1 is scheduled for May 2005. It will run on Zope 2.x rather than the new Zope 3.x

Three developers (Philip Auersperg, Jadok Batlogg, and Jens Klein) have started an initiative to enhance Plone's content editing forms by adding some client side scripting to perform functions like validation and multiple object editing without reloading the page. This is in response to PLIP 53. The team has a mockup available for review.

This Week in Lenya

A new feature which enables XMLHTTP was submitted by Josias Theony and checked into the trunk on February 9th. For those who do not know, XMLHTTP allows a page to call back to the server to get more data without an entire page reload. Probably the most famous example of XMLHTTP in action is Google Labs' Google Suggests. Try typing in the search box and watch common search terms start appearing.

An enhancement to make the menuing system cleaner and more flexible has been added to the trunk.

There have been a few updates to improve the installation guide.

On February 8, a massive patch (1.2 MB) was applied to the trunk. This was the result of code cleanup effort by Gregor Rothfuss. The update adds missing javadocs, fixes some resource leaks, and makes exception handling more explicit. Now the Eclipse Find Bugs plugin is more useful on the Lenya code base.

Version 1.4 of Lenya will introduce a replacement to Lenya Usescases (sequences of pages) called UsecaseFramework which uses Cocoon Flow. There is some updated information on the Wiki

TYPO3 Association

TYPO3 announced today the creation of a Switzerland Typo3 Association which will serve as a holding organization which will help set direction for the product and handle financial and legal matters. TYPO3 originator, Kasper Skårhøj, heads the Association.

According the website, the TYPO3 Association was first founded in Fall of 2004. It seems to be a slight variation on a trend of Open Source projects developing a foundation (such as the Apache Software Foundation and the Plone Foundation) to handle things like money and legal liability. TYPO3'S Association appears to be organized more as a membership organization. There are Active Members, who regularly contribute code, and Supporting Members (either companies or individuals), who pay membership fees. Active Members have the right to vote on matters. Supporting membership seems to be more of a vehicle for sponsorhsip.

The first international TYPO3 conference (TYCON3) will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany in September 2005. Two of the key initiatives that the TYPO3 Association will introduce are a certification program for individuals and developers, and adapting TYPO3 to international standards.

TYPO3 has long been a well organized and very professional project. It seems like the Association helps take TYPO3 a little farther by creating a more official legal entity behind the project.