Content management systems enable organizations to manage work flow in a collaborative environment and allow team members to contribute to and share stored data. Companies have come to rely on their web sites as the most important channel for communication, marketing, customer engagement and commerce, Oracle says.

“Together, Oracle and FatWire plan to deliver the most complete web experience management solution that will enable companies to fully optimize the customer experience with innovative social tools that enable user generated content in a managed environment,” said Hasan Rizvi, Senior Vice President at Oracle. “The addition of FatWire products will give Oracle the ability to provide a complete suite of software that empowers web marketers to engage visitors, converting more prospects to customers, and enhancing customer loyalty.”

FatWire complements Oracle’s leading technology products including Oracle Fusion Middleware, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Content Management, and Portal technology. It also complements Oracle’s leading application products including Oracle Customer Relationship Management and ATG Web Commerce.

“FatWire solutions help organizations drive customer engagement and loyalty by offering a targeted and interactive online experience across web and mobile channels,” said Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO, FatWire Software. “This acquisition is expected to provide FatWire customers with dramatically expanded products and services to help them achieve their online customer experience goals.”
The transaction is expected to close within months. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

"With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click extension updates and multi-language functionality, Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool yet for developing a web presence," said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit created to provide organization, legal, and financial support to the Joomla project. "This has been accomplished through the tireless feedback and work on 1.6 by the thousands of members of the Joomla community over the past year."

PHP based Joomla uses object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques and software design patterns. The official Joomla Extension Directory currently lists over 6,000 plug-ins. Joomla will automatically detect any missing dependencies such as PHP or MySQL then install and configure them before installing the CMS. Meta-keywords and meta-descriptions can be assigned to articles, categories, and menu items and users can easily add a site name to the HTML page title.

The latest version does not offer a legacy mode. This means that developers have to upgrade their components to be compatible. The JForm class has been moved to JParameter, which allows automatic filtering. The new class enables developers to create their own forms within the framework. Joomla 1.6 is available as a free download on the community website.

Visit Gemini's Joomla page.

Better user management and a more granular access control are offered in the latest Joomla 1.6 release. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

The blogging and social community platform written in PHP became an open source project in 2001. Over time, optional modules were added to Drupal core, a modular system of hooks and callbacks, and administrators have the option to extend the functionality of the CMS by enabling them. Advanced searches, blogs, comments, forums, and polls are included in Drupal core. Drupal offers multi-site and OpenID support, and access control restrictions can be configured.

Drupal core includes themes that allow users to customize the "look and feel" of Drupal sites. The open source CMS can automatically notify the administrator when new versions of a module, theme, or the core become available. The design allows third-party developers to extend functionality by adding API’s while core files remain isolated. One example is the field API that allows administrators to add custom data fields not only to content but also to users, comments, and taxonomies. Almost 7,500 free modules and over 900 themes are currently listed on the Drupal website.

While Drupal supports most web servers and databases, Apache and MySQL are recommended. Caching has been improved in version 7, and JavaScript and CSS handling have been optimized. The CMS now offers semantic web support with RDFa, and image handling is supported "out of the box." More than 1,000 developers have contributed to the platform that is available as a free download here.

Drupal will celebrate the release of version 7 on January 7, 2011 with 260 launch parties all over the world.

Visit Gemini's Drupal page.

"Blasphemy might be the first word that comes to mind when you hear Microsoft, PHP, and open source mentioned in the same breath," said Mike Gualtieri and Jeffrey S. Hammond in a paper published in May 2009. "But no more: The new Microsoft Web Platform will offer simplified install of certain popular PHP Web applications such as Acquia Drupal, Gallery, and SilverStripe CMS. PHP runs on other platforms now, but Microsoft’s contribution to the open source software (OSS) community is to support PHP apps and make them easy to install - on Windows servers. The result: Open source software has another direct channel into the enterprise, which means that it’s now easier for enterprises to find and install an OSS alternative to expensive commercial application platforms that run on Windows and Internet Information Services (IIS).”

The content management system (CMS) provides enables users to build websites, intranets, and web applications. SilverStripe is written in PHP and takes full advantage of its object oriented design capabilities. Saphire, a custom PHP framework, is embedded. The CMS allows designers to incorporate security models, workflow, caching, multiple language, and sub-site support into their websites. Themes, widgets and modules can be used to extend the functionality o the platform and allow greater customization.

It took developers three years to port the CMS to Microsoft operating systems, web and SQL servers. The developers did package SilverStripe into a Microsoft installer to make the install as easy as possible for Windows users. Using Microsoft Best Practices, the CMS was fine-tuned to run as fast as possible on Windows.

SilverStripe made international headlines when the package was used in 2008 to design a new website for the Democratic National Convention. "DemConvention.com received more than 3.2 million visits totaling more than 2.6 billion hits during Convention week. More than 350,000 hours of video were watched by DemConvention.com visitors as the DNC site offered live gavel-to-gavel coverage in High-Definition (HD) in both English and Spanish for the first time in Convention history," said the Democratic National Committee in a press release at the time. The CMS also received the award "Best NZ [New Zealand] Open Source Project" in 2010. SilverStripe CMS is available as a free download on the community website here.

Bloggers can now create custom menus and combine pages, posts, tags, categories, and links for use in them menus and widgets. An automatic maintenance mode allows to update multiple themes, custom headers and background API's are supported. Since most users will host their blog elsewhere, WP 3 now checks if the required versions of PHP and MySQL are present and notify the blogger if the server does not meet the requirements.

The installation (or update process) itself is straight forward. While WordPress automatically creates an administrator account and a randomly generated password, version 3 encourages users to set their own admin username and password during the installation process to increase security. To enable multiple site support, users need to edit the wp-config.php file and activate a WordPress network. A detailed description of how to do this is available here. Themes and plug-ins for multiple sites can be managed through the "Super-Admin" menu that becomes available after the network is enabled. Unfortunately, there is no global dashboard to configure themes and plug-ins. User need to log into each blog using the "Super-Admin" feature and set each site individually.

For starters, the new default theme for WordPress 3 is Twenty Ten. It features a new lock, improved typography, and more options to customize the site. The WordPress website states that the new version contains 1,217 bug-fixes and feature enhancements. 218 developers contributed to WordPress 3.0.

"Normally this is where I’d say we’re about to start work on 3.1, but we’re actually not. We’re going to take a release cycle off to focus on all of the things around WordPress. The growth of the community has been breathtaking, including over 10.3 million downloads of version 2.9, but so much of our effort has been focused on the core software it hasn’t left much time for anything else," says WordPress founder and developer Matt Mullenweg on the WordPress Blog. "Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless. The goal of the teams isn’t going to be to make things perfect all at once, just better than they are today. We think this investment of time will give us a much stronger infrastructure to grow WordPress.org for the many tens of millions of users that will join us during the 3.X release cycle."