After over 25,000 downloads of its previous version in just five short months, the XOOPS Project, world’s leading Open Source CMS (Content Management System) and #1 CMS System hosted on SourceForge.net, is aggressively building on this success and has released a new version of its award winning software - XOOPS 2.4.0.

This release is focused on usability and productivity improvements. Some of the major changes are:

* new user friendly Admin GUI
* new mechanism to modularize and extend Core via Preloads
* central support for jQuery
* improved Installer
* WCAG 2.0 - Sight Impaired Assisted Forms
* Themeable Admininstration area
* support for WYSIWYG Editors: CKEditor, wymeditor, Xinha, and Spaw2
* new System License Key
* Support to PHP 5.3
* Security updates

The new Admin GUI and the Preloads extension mechanism are the highlight of this release. The key for this new release was an active collaboration of XOOPS developers from around the world: China, France, UK, USA, Germany, Peru, Libya, Belgium, Netherlands, and several others. The worldwide XOOPS community is one of its strength, resulting in a quick translation of new releases into over 20 languages.

RavenNuke™ CMS was originally based on PHP-Nuke 7.6, but has evolved with its focus on security, performance, standards compliance and significantly enhanced functionality.

This release focused on major usability and productivity improvements. Some of the major changes are:

* new user friendly Admin GUI
* new mechanism to modularize and extend Core via Preloads
* central support for jQuery
* improved Installer
* WCAG 2.0 - Sight Impaired Assisted Forms

The new Admin GUI and the Preloads extension mechanism are the highlight of this release. The key for this new release was an active collaboration of XOOPS developers from around the world: China, France, UK, USA, Germany, Peru, Libya, Belgium, Netherlands, and several others. The worldwide XOOPS community is one of its strength, resulting in a quick translation of new releases into over 20 languages.

XOOPS has not only a very loyal base, as the number of downloads suggests, but is also highly respected in the industry. In 2008 it was a finalist in SourceForge Community Awards and in the CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. It also won the prestigious 2008 China Open Source Software Contest Award.

This latest major upgrade to the Asbru Web Content Management system enables organizations to easily deliver content tailored for different devices such as mobile phones and PCs. This release also includes several new features for online stores and many significant improvements for system integrators and developers.

Deliver Content to Mobile Phones

The new version 7.1 enables organizations to easily deliver content tailored for different devices such as mobile phones and PCs.

The content management system's flexible template system already lets organizations build several versions of their websites. The new functionality now enables organizations to easily configure, which version of a website to display for specific devices.

So an organization can for example build and display a simplified mobile friendly version of their website to mobile phone users and another version of their website with a layout to fit larger screen sizes to other users. The new functionality enables organizations to configure special website versions for as many different devices as required.

Below the press release :

Kentico Software, the Web content management system vendor, today announced it will plant a tree for every bug found in the latest version of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. The company also promises to fix all reported bugs within 7 days.

Nashua, NH (PRWEB) August 30, 2009 -- Kentico Software will plant a tree for every bug in Kentico CMS 4.1 reported by clients and it al"We are very confident about the quality of our Web Content Management platform. Although we can hardly eliminate all bugs, our goal is to minimize their number and fix them within 7 business days, so that we can provide a stable and reliable solution to our clients," explains Petr Palas, Kentico CEO. "We want to encourage our clients to report all bugs they encounter. And we decided to give back something that everyone on the planet will benefit from - new trees," he adds.

Web Designers, Web Developers and everyone else will love this new wave of maintaining your new web sites (or your site re-designs). Using this newly released Open Source Content Management System called Concrete 5, you can easily have a web site up and running with Web 2.0 functionalities in literally minutes. There are no funky complicated rules or ways to do things. The installation is done through your favorite browser but works best using Gecko or Mozilla browsers. Designers like it because they can create custom themes very easily. Developers like it because the php used is straight forward and uses the MVC architecture.

Let's start this review on why I think it is an important addition to the Content Management System arena. Why not just use Drupal or Joomla? A couple of reasons. 1. Drupal and Joomla are really well developed and community supported. Nothing wrong with that, but both of these CMS's have become bloated. (Lots of code and it is heavy) 2. Support from the core team is nominal. Granted the support forums and documents are far more developed than Concrete 5 is at the moment but that is improving. 3. A plethora of add-ons that are not completely checked to ensure it runs well with current versions of software. 4. Some add-ons for Drupal and Joomla are tedious and you have to understand the back-end administrative area just to install it and then, in some cases, configure it. Now with those reasons stated, web savvy developers and designers normally have very little problem doing these things but a site owner (from my observation) has a very hard time with it. They even have a much more difficult time of just modifying a page, adding a new page or updating information that takes a designer a few minutes (and the money to have them do it) where as most site owners would prefer to do it themselves. Document management is not as easy as they say. Changing images are not easy either.

(I must say this. Before judging this system (if you have problems), you must must must, take a look at the tutorials and help section of Concrete 5. The forums also answer many questions new users have. I will be the first to say that searching the documents and forum can sometimes be frustrating but most of the answers are there if you take the time to look. This holds true with any system, including Drupal and Joomla. I would say the number one asked question about installation problems is actually caused by the hosting platform. The system is not integrally made for a MS server, it is designed out of the box to be run on a Linux server. So please, review the available videos and documents on the Concrete 5 site before saying you can't do something.)

MODx helps you take control of your online content. An Open Source PHP application framework, it frees you to build sites exactly how you want and make them 100% yours. Zero restrictions and fast to build. Super-simple templates in regular HTML/CSS/JS (any lib you want). Registered user systems and a killer community.

Key features in MODx :

• PHP Application Framework
• Strong Web Standards Support
• Graphical Installer
• Improved Rich Text Editors
• Robust CSS Menu Builder
• Works in your favorite browser
• Web 2.0 Features, Ajax enabled
• Robust SEO support
• Separate Manager and Web User sessions
• Improved Document Parser and Error handling
• Custom Content Types
• and much more...

More information and download at http://modxcms.com. Released under GPL License.

Open Atrium is an intranet in a box that has group spaces to allow different teams to have their own conversations. It comes with six features - a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.

The solution announced by Development Seed, provides a completely customizable collaboration and communication platform that you can build on it your next killer knowledge management tool. Supported languages for Open Atrium include Arabic, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Released under GPL and BSD license.

More information and download available at http://openatrium.com

The company have just secured $8 Million in series B financing from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Acquia plans to use the funds for sales, marketing and additional product development to meet growing enterprise demand for the Drupal open source social publishing system. A great opportunity for the Drupal community to meet the enterprise world.

Acquia, whose co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert created the Drupal platform in 2001, told TechCrunch that the company will use the funding to help create and expand the market for Drupal in the enterprise world. Drupal hopes to expand its existing base of 200 subscription customers.

Below the press release :

Andover, MA - July 20, 2009 - Acquia, Inc., the web's resource for the Drupal social publishing system, today announced it has secured $8 million in a Series B financing round from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Acquia plans to use the funds for sales, marketing and additional product development to meet growing enterprise demand for the Drupal open source social publishing system.

SilverStripe could be easily extended using modules, themes or widgets; or even more customized with Saphire framework. Released under (revised) BSD License. SilverStripe CMS features include :

• Create new pages and drag and drop them where you want them to be in the sitemap
• Edit and style content using a toolbar with familiar buttons and dropdowns (similar to MS Word)
• Easily insert links, images, and Flash into your content
• Copy and paste content from MS Word
• View a draft of your content changes before pushing them live
• Publish changes to your site with one click of a button
• Assign different user roles and permissions for each section or even page of your site
• View older versions of a page and roll back if needed
• Search-engine friendly , Standard compliant, Accessible, ...

More information at http://silverstripe.org

From community feedback it appears that eZ Publish using Windows is about 30% quicker with PHP 5.3.0. I decided to validate these reports and confirm the performance of eZ Publish using PHP 5.3.0 with a linux environment.

The benchmark have been done with eZ Publish 4.1.3 and ApacheBench 2.3 using OpenSuse 11.1, PHP 5.3.0, APC 3.1.2, Apache 1.3.41, MySQL 5.0.67. Server hardware CPU: Core 2 Quad 3.5 GHz, RAM: 8 GB and finally HDD: SATA 7200 RPM.

Midgard does this all by building on top of technologies like GLib, libgda and D-Bus. It provides developers with object-oriented programming interfaces for C, PHP and Python.

Web service developers also benefit from MidCOM, a modern MVC framework for PHP development that utilizes all the advantages of the Midgard storage framework. MidCOM helps web production also by shipping a set of content management tools.

With Midgard, you can have your data everywhere, from mobile devices the web server. It enables peer-to-peer sharing of information, and makes it possible to have all the materials you need also when offline.

A very intersting CMS Framework project supporting PHP5 and jQuery with a great documentation. Binary packages of Midgard are available for Debian, Fedora, Redhat, Suse and Ubuntu. Midgard is released under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL).

If you are looking for a high accuracy spelling solution, that improves writing style, finds grammar errors, you might check their free service plan and give it a try.

The portal is divided into five major areas, which are the points of entry for other information:

* list of services available to citizens,
* services and information for the business environment,
* information about Paraná,
* government information, and
* news,

All divided by tabs and color specific.

According to Mr. Iensen, the focus of the portal is to provide information to Parana's citizen, with the ranking of information in order to organize the content and ensure the integrity and robustness of published data. The goal is to maintain the distribution of content based on the national standard for electronic government (e-gov).

It's typical in the Open Source environment that developers work on a project, but then have different ideas, and leave to create a fork. Most of the time they never come back.

So it's a sign of a visionary leadership of the current XOOPS team that they have reached out and were able to attract back three of its recent and most innovative forks:

• Simple-XOOPS under leadership of Dirk Herrmann from Germany (www.simple-xoops.de),
• EXM System under leadership of Eduardo Cortes from Mexico (www.exmsystem.org), and
• Zarilia under leadership of John Neill from UK.

It is also a clear vote of confidence from the forks' developers for the current leadership team of XOOPS and their direction.

All of these forks are very innovative and will bring wealth of features back to XOOPS that will benefit XOOPS users for years to come, and will enhance the upcoming XOOPS 3.0 release. It also show XOOPS' increased effort to bring together and unite XOOPS developers from around the world.