Sig Alert

Totally off-topic, but if you have ever listened to the radio in Southern California, you have undoubtedly heard mention of a "Sig-Alert" about some traffic accident. In case you ever wondered what "Sig-Alert" stands for, this is what the DOT has to say:

"Sig-Alerts" are unique to Southern California. They came about in the 1940s when the L.A.P.D. got in the habit of alerting a local radio reporter, Loyd Sigmon, of bad car wrecks on city streets. These notifications became known as "Sig-Alerts." Later Mr. Sigmon developed an electronic device that authorities could use to alert the media of disasters. Caltrans latched on to the term "Sig-Alert" and it has come to be known as any traffic incident that will tie up two or more lanes of a freeway for two or more hours.

Bricolage 1.9 Released

The Bricolage Team just announced the release of Bricolage version 1.9.0. I have not yet test driven this release yet but the notes claim that this releases includes the ability to add related media directly within an element. This feature answers a common complaint of Bricolage (and many other CMS) that a user must first upload all binary files and then associate them to an article. There is also an improved preview functionality where the preview page loads in a frame that allows you to work on a template and reload the results more easily. Other new features include: a pluggable authentication system, improved LDAP support, a PHP template burner, and the option to use the HTML WYSIWYG editor Xinha which is an active fork of the now dormant htmlArea3.

New Version of the CMS Report Released

CMS Watch just announced the release of the 8th edition of the CMS Report. The CMS Report is widely regarded as the best, most unbiased research available on the Web CMS (WCM) software market. In addition to reviews of 31 products, the CMS Report also has useful information on approaching a WCM project from software selection techniques to people/process issues. This edition has expanded coverage of open source including a review of OpenCMS by Janus Boye and a review of Plone by yours truly.

More Users = Simpler CMS

I just read James Robertson's short article "More Users = Simpler CMS.". In it, James puts forth a proposition that if you are deploying a company wide CMS, it should be as simple as possible. This idea runs directly against the CMS buying behavior over the last couple of years where companies rolling out the large CMS implementations were looking for "industrial grade" software that had all the bells and whistles. Cross departmental software selection committees aggregated their feature wish lists to come up with selection criteria that favored products that had (or at least claimed to have) everything. And after all this, companies were surprised to find that the implemented solutions were difficult to use and required more training than was budgeted for.

I think the tide is changing from feature richness to simplicity and usability. A couple of other data points:

• Salesforce.com like ASP CMS solutions are gaining popularity
  
• Oracle's ECM product has been designed for simplicity. In the words of Rich Buchheim, Oracle's senior director of product management: "From the user's perspective it's not different than using a desktop application or file server."
  
• Leading CMS industry analyst Tony Byrne of CMS Watch sees usability as being one of the most important trends in content management: "In conference rooms around the world, authors are standing up and declaring, 'Our CMS tool sucks!' Many CMS vendors have noted this user backlash and now fall over themselves to tout products as "intuitive," "adaptive," or just plain "easy to use."
  

In the world of CMS, sometimes less is more. Maybe its the feature that the software does not have that will make it a success.

Plone Live Review

I have been reading Plone Live by Michel Pelletier and Munwar Shariff of CIGNEX Technologies and I highly recommend it. Plone Live is one of several professionally published books on Plone. Other books include Andy McKay's The Definitive Guide to Plone, Julie Meloni's Plone Content Management Essentials, and Cameron Cooper's Building Websites With Plone. Plone Live fits into this existing ecosystem by providing information for more advanced Plone developers ready to take Plone to the next level to build highly customized, performant applications.

The introductory sections are noticeably thin but I think that is OK because books like Plone Content Management Essentials and The Definitive Guide to Plone deliver pretty well in this area. You might have seen an earlier blog entry where I was critical of the choice of chapters selected for preview on Amazon. After reading the book, I feel even stronger about that point because these sections are not representative of the book's quality and usefulness. In fact, I would consider donating those chapters as Wiki articles on Plone.org so that the community can maintain and enhance them.

Plone Live starts to deliver its value beginning midway through chapter 2 with a road map of what is where in the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). Because Plone is so customizable and the ZMI is not specifically designed to manage a Plone site, it is easy to get disoriented with all the folders and other objects that need to be manipulated in order to customize and extend Plone.

The best parts of Plone Live are the sections where it discusses security and the comparative benefits of File Based vs. Through the Web (TTW) development. While most books focus primarily on TTW development, Plone Live's authors make the point that this customization method is primarily for rapid prototyping and is no way to build a robust application because of performance and deployment considerations.

The PloneLive website was built as a file based Plone Product and is available for download. There are a number of other downloadable example products available on the website as well. I would like to see a little more information on best practices for developing and debugging File Based applications such as when you need to restart Zope and when you don't, how a team of Plone developers should work together on a Plone project (source control, etc.). However, this is a good start with advice about using Selenium as a function testing tool and other best practices.

Plone Live also covers common integrations such as relational databases, LDAP, Apache, and using WebDAV and XML-RPC to integrate with other architectures. For each of these topics, Plone Live provides step by step instructions that are easy to follow.

Plone Live contains many references to other good resources including books, websites, and extensions. The book is written in a very "open source" way in that it recognizes the value of the community and is inclusive of rather than competitive with other resources. Plone Live also leverages is the open source concept of frequent releases. Plone Live is a Live Book published by Source Beat. For $29.95, you can subscribe to Plone Live for a year and get access to a constantly updated version of the book.

The critical area where Plone Live lacks is in the A to Z index. Plone Live does not have one. If you subscribe to the Plone Live book, I am sure this is not a problem since there is probably search. However, I think it is an issue with the paper version. This is the first Source Beat book that I have read so this might be a format constraint imposed by the publisher.

Based on all this, if you have been playing around with Plone or have been using it for a small work group solution, and you want to get serious, pick up Plone Live. You will be glad you did.

eZ publish Extension Supports OASIS OpenDocument Standard

eZ systems just announced an extension for eZ publish that will support the OASIS Open Document Standard. The OpenDocument standard was approved in May 2005 and establishes an XML based format for office type applications (word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) that will increase the accessibility and re-usability of documents used within the enterprise. Read more here and here. OpenDocument is very close to the format developed by Open Office and, I think, is the missing link between the way we work today and our vision of a content managed world of re-usable, highly structured assets. Of course, this all depends on Microsoft's cooperation on adopting this or some structured XML format (promised with the next release of Office).

The eZ publish OpenDocument Extension accepts files in OpenDocument, Microsoft Word, and RTF and uses a WebDAV interface to upload documents via drag and drop. From eZ publish, content can be automatically exported into the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice templates.

I have had a lot of conversations about Open Office recently. The key issue is "what's the point." My view is that OpenOffice could turn into the preferred authoring interface used by open source and proprietary content management systems. This would put them at the level of Microsoft which is integrating Office with several of their server side technologies (like MCMS and SharePoint) to create a collaborative workspace using desktop applications. Of course, Microsoft has a huge advantage in market share and you just can't sell a product without at least a claim of MS Office support these days. But if enough CMS vendors start to support OpenOffice (and they have an interest in doing so because they compete with Microsoft on the CMS side), the office software market could get interesting again.