Open source content management systems are beginning to gather quite a reputation and customer base lately thanks to the recent announcement by the White House of its move from proprietary solutions to open source CMS heavyweight, Drupal.  Full service hosting provider NeoSpire has been a long time advocate of open source software and specializes in solutions incorporating Drupal.

Do It With Drupal Seminar

From December 9^th to 11^th, 2009 in New Orleans, the Do It With Drupal Seminar will take place and NeoSpire is not only one of its top sponsors but will be exhibiting as well.  The seminar promises to have some of Drupal’s top developers on tap to teach more about the program as well as information from community building experts.

Patrons of the event can expect to see successful Drupal sites and meet with like-minded professionals, developers, designers and more all intertwined within the Drupal community.  The event will allow interested participants the chance to see the actual workings behind the architect and building of a Drupal web site.  Topics such as building and growing successful web sites with Drupal will be covered.

The cost of this three-day event is $1195 until December 8^th.  Thereafter, walkup registration is $1295.

NeoSpire

NeoSpire managed hosting provides a number of hosting solutions designed to meet the demands of organizations needing a 100% guaranteed up-time.  NeoSpire has been in the web hosting business since 1999 and continues to provide extremely secure and reliable solutions for their hosting customers.  The hosting provider offers several managed hosting options, co-location services, application hosting and more.

One of the more interesting offers by this company is its Drupal CMS Hosting.  NeoSpire offers fully managed Drupal hosting that covers everything from simple web sites to load balanced and redundant set-ups.  The company even has a specially dedicated Drupal support team that are considered the best server admin and tech support people in their field.  Not many web hosting companies available on the Internet sport the same offering or specialized support team.  It is a testament to the security and reliability of both NeoSpire and Drupal.

Drupal

Drupal is an open source CMS program that was initially created in 2000 by an enterprising man, Dries Buytaert.  What initially began as a small news site allowing friends to leave notes to each other gradually grew into the full-blown content management system available today.

The Drupal CMS is extremely extendable with several hundreds of modules to add onto the main program and hundreds of themes to change the overall look.  As an open source project, many third party programmers are heavily involved with the project creating new and innovative modules almost every day.  Drupal users can expect to be able to find just about anything they require within the Drupal module download area.  Administration, e-commerce, file management, statistics, and spam prevention are just a small percentage of what can be found.

Conclusion

A world-class open source CMS program coupled with a world-class hosting solution provider is a dream combination.  NeoSpire and Drupal are, indeed, doing it.

“e107, It’s a candy store (and you’re 8)” proclaims the web site of the open source CMS program e107.  One of the older and more well-known open source content management systems around, e107 strives to be a community based program with a lot of input from its users.

Beginnings

What began as a web site related to the Windows shell replacement Litestep, quickly started gathering speed and evolved into e107 (the seventh project taken on by the owner of this content management system).  Officially open to the public in July 2002, e107 was already a few months old and into its 2.1 version.  As with most CMS programs, attempting to do it alone is never a good idea so the program owner brought on board a few seasoned developers.  Several updates and revisions late and e107 has its current stable 0.7.16 release available to the public (the owner changed version numbering partway through its early production stages).

Plugins

Once e107 is installed and running, enhancing this content management program is a breeze.  The site is affiliated with e107 Plugins (separate entity but tied in with the main web site) and this area is overflowing with downloadable files to add to the base core of e107.  Administration tools, e-commerce, file and directory, and multimedia are a few of the categories covered in this plugin web site.

Themes

e107 has two design web sites affiliated with its main core program – e107 Themes and e107 Designs.  This is where the one downfall with this CMS program may lay.  While there are a number to of designs to choose from, the total number is limited to under 200.  This makes the likelihood of having a unique e107 run web site fairly slim.  However, the program is based on PHP and if the user of the program has a bit of experience with PHP coding, creating a unique web design for the program should be a fairly easy task.

Community

As e107 depends heavily on community input and feedback, the forum area of this open source program’s web site is extremely active.  Covering topics such as third party coding, support, theme request and more, e107 keeps tabs on what users want, what they don’t like and what they have to offer to enhance the software overall.

Sites

e107 is proud to showcase the many web sites utilizing their open source software.  Among the more diverse sites to be found on their webring are Waves of Faith, KISS 105 FM of Indonesia, and CuartoPoder.com.mx (touted as the first newspaper site powered by the CMS).

Conclusion

While not one of the top heavy hitters when it comes to open source content management systems, e107 is a great product with quite a lot to offer.  If one is in need of a CMS that has more than a couple hundred designs to choose from, this program may not be the best choice.  However, for those with a bit of PHP knowledge and some time on their hands to create their own design, e107 can be a great addition to help create and maintain a business web site.

Though best known for its extensive suite of proprietary commercial products, as of late, Microsoft has been dabbling a lot more in the field of open-source development.  Many suspect that this is due to rising competition from major open-source players such as Red Hat, Adobe and Google.  It has just been revealed that Microsoft is working on a new content management software application along with a set of reusable compatible components.  Going by the codename of Orchard, the software details will be shared at the TechEd Europe event.  Perhaps the most surprising part about all of this is that Orchard is said to be a free open-source web CMS set to rival with popular systems such as Joomla, Mambo and Drupal.

While Microsoft is being tight-lipped and secretive about the project, we were able to gather some details on what is currently known about the Orchard CMS.

Orchard Overview

Orchard is Microsoft’s latest effort to distribute free open-source software with reusable components and a fully featured application capable of creating a wide variety of types of websites.  The company’s core team of expert ASP.NET developers is actively seeking contributions and guidance from the community of .NET programmers to help get the project off on the right in the early goings.  According to a representative from Microsoft, Bradley Millington, who has been anointed as Engineering Lead for the Orchid project, will be spearheading interactive discussions to invite the community to get actively involved on the ground floor.  Millington will be accepting input to get better understanding of what developers would like to see in the project, the components they envision for their own applications, and how to encourage the community to contribute to make the project a success.  Microsoft remarked that is open to discussing strategy, logistics, functionality and whatever else developers bring to the table.

Apparently, Orchard is not Microsoft’s first attempt in the open-source content management space.  A while back, it was reported that the company was working on a CMS project called Oxite.  In December of 2008, Microsoft made an alpha version of the Oxite source code available under the MS-P1 (Microsoft Public License).  Mary Joe Foley of ZDNet hinted that Orchard could be right on time and become one of the first projects announced for the CodePlex Foundation.  Created to allow for the exchange of code and collaboration among software vendors and the open-source developer community, the Foundation recently released the first working draft of its Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines.  When Foley asked if Orchard was simply a revamped version Oxite under a different name, Microsoft did not respond.

We all know that Microsoft is very skilled at keeping secrets and rolling out big surprises.  Therefore, we just might have to wait until the TechEd Europe Session takes place on November 11 to get more comprehensive details on the Orchard project.  As soon we get something more concrete, we will surely try to pass along the news.

Open source technology has been around for quite some time and has struggled over the years to place itself in the higher echelons of business and government.  The United States’ current President, Barack Obama, has been a vocal proponent of an open and transparent administration.  To further emphasize this, the President recently approved the use of the open source CMS (content management system) Drupal for the WhiteHouse.gov web site.

About Drupal

Drupal is a free open source CMS that allows easy publishing and managing of web sites.  There are tens of thousands of web sites online now that utilize the program and include site types such as community web portals, corporate web sites, resource directories and even social networking sites.

The program is designed to allow quick additions of modules that enable a web site to expand its functionality.  Some of these modules allow for newsletter publication, picture galleries, e-commerce and much more.

As Drupal is open source software, it is constantly being checked, debugged and new updates are constantly being released.  The advantage of this is ensuring that the safest and most secure edition is available to its users.

The word from Dries Buytaert

According to Dries Buytaert, creator and founder of Drupal, his software is well matched and up to the task of helping further the platform of an open and transparent government.  He goes on further to state “Drupal’s flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems.”  Dries feels this move to use open source technology and software indicates that governments are realizing that open source does not present any added risks when compared to propriety software.

One important point Dries brings up is the ability for the Drupal-run WhiteHouse.gov web site to allow for open communication and participation.  This, by itself, is worth seeing the new site and checking out what one can accomplish with respect to open participation.

Not the only government site

Surprisingly, the WhiteHouse.gov is just the pinnacle of government offices using Drupal to publish their web sites.  The Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the General Service Administration and the Department of Education have all been using the Drupal CMS for some time.

Other large business, company and entity web sites currently running on Drupal include the New York Observer, Yahoo! Research, Christian Assemblies International and Sony Music.  The list of Drupal-run web sites continues to grow at a rapid pace.

Future looking open

Going on into the future, the hope is that with Drupal’s latest coup of the White House web site, other government agencies, big businesses and even government entities world-wide will see the awesome potential of open source software and technology.  Further, this may also show the world that open source technology is a huge step in the right direction – especially in the area of cutting costs.  Perhaps this recent Presidential approval will start a web site trend and we’ll begin to see more and more “big guys” realize the advantages of open source.

Beginning as merely a solution to a need for dynamic scripting for a personal web page and named pLog at that time, LifeType was born.  Its developers, Oscar Renalias and Francesc Pla, have continuously enhanced the blogging software to its current release (LifeType 1.2.9).  Their goal is to create a stable multi-user and multi-blog platform and so far they are succeeding rather well with a program that has something for everyone.

For users

For those on the using end of things, LifeType has several great features.  An easy to use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor allows users to add graphics with a click of a button.  Upon initially logging in, the user is presented with a dashboard giving them all the crucial information needed at a glance.  Allowing you to stand out in the crowd, LifeType can be configured with many different and free web site templates and if you have a need for a feature not installed with the standard set of features, you can choose from over 80 additional and free plugins.  One of the best features available within LifeType is the ability to have multiple users for each blog giving users the ability to create a collaborative site.

For administrators

On the administration side of things, LifeType is configured to allow multiple blogs.  It allows for multiple domains, multiple blogs and multiple users – all of which are separated and administered as separate blogs.  The software has an easy four step process for each new blog and even has a centralized location showcasing the more popular blogs.  In addition to multiple domains, the administrator can also provide users with sub-domains via the software.  If the need to localize arises, LifeType is capable of this as well – it supports any encoding and has been translated to German, French, Spanish and many other languages.  System overloading is not an issue as the program utilizes template and data caching making it a high performance and reliable piece of programming.

For geeks

SEO friendly URLs are easily available, ensuring the sites hosted are search engine index capable.  The coding within LifeType is based on the “model-view-controller” type framework and is completely documented using Doxygen and the LifeType site always has the most current API available.  As all of the templates within the program are XHTML 1.0 strict, users will not have to worry about whether or not their sites are up to standards in as far as mark-up is concerned.  The huge list of plugins ensure that the geekiest of administrators or users are able to incorporate just about any feature desired.  The list includes events, localization and much more.  As LifeType is built upon the Smarty template engine, creating new templates for the software is a breeze.

Conclusion

Put it all together and LifeType is one great bit of programming.  It includes all the features your basic user, administrator or hard-core geek would enjoy.  Toss in the multi-blog and multi-user capabilities and this is one piece of software worth checking out.