CMS Blog Watch

On Strategy, Twinterviews and Haiku

Persuasive Content — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:18:56 +0000

I think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I’ve tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – [...]

TfMA Seminar – Content is still King!

Persuasive Content — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:18:50 +0000

Forgive the cheesy title, but yes I gave a presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TfMA) show last week where I talked about the place of content and in web or digital engagement. Or as marketing put it in the show guide synopsis: ”The importance of good content management and governance as a [...]

Is Wordpress a CMS? Hardly? Barely?

Persuasive Content — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:18:39 +0000

The perennial “what is a CMS” debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, “I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system.” that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against… and crikey [...]

DrupalCon – San Francisco 2010

Bryan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:42:02 +0000

Drupal's "premier conference" is quickly approaching. This Drupal conference is known as DrupalCon and will be held in San Francisco from April 19-21, 2010. As with previous years, the unofficial theme of the conference is to "learn about all things Drupal". If the conference sessions aren't enough, the schedule is also packed with plenty of development, documentation, and training events that are being held the days prior to and following the conference.

Presently over 1500 people have signed up to attend the conference. The price of attending a DrupalCon has always been reasonably priced which is one of the reasons this conference always sees a high turnout rate. If you plan on attending the conference, I would urge you to buy your tickets to DrupalCon now. Procrastinators like me have been known to wait too long to register for this conference only to find out that the maximum number of available tickets for the conference has already been reached.

Also, CMS Report is proud to be a media sponsor for DrupalCon - San Francisco 2010. This is our first time we have sponsored a DrupalCon event and we're excited to be helping out by promoting this event. While you can learn quite a bit about Drupal at this conference, the conference also gives you a chance to see and hear directly from the the open source community that is supporting Drupal. As a user of Drupal, it's not just about the software that sparks our interest in DrupalCon but also the people in Drupal's community we have come to know and appreciate.

BBC Elevates Social Media for News Creation and Monitoring

Bill Ives — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:08:00 +0000

According to the Guardian (see BBC tells news staff to embrace social media). BBC news journalists have been advised to use social media as a primary source of information by Peter Horrocks, the new director of BBC Global News. He...

Is my project management useful?

Philippe Parker — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:05:30 +0000

Delivery has been uppermost in my mind recently. My wife is expecting a second child but this one decided he doesn’t want to head in the right direction. Next week he’ll be “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d”. Consequently I’ve been thinking heavily both about caesarean delivery and about a number of projects which now [...]

How to integrate ASP.NET into RedDot CMS projects – Best practice on .NET template embedding

Markus Giesen — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:51:30 +0000

Is it easy to integrate .NET into your RedDot CMS project? Yes it is, if you know how and obey some simple rules. This article gives you a best practice on how to include any .NET functionality for your published website within your RedDot CMS templates.

So simple, so true!

Oscar Berg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:47:00 +0000

Today's management tip "How to Retain Talent in a Recovery" from Harvard Business Online is so simple, yet so very true:

In an economic recovery, top talent — fed up with no bonuses and low morale — may want to jump ship as soon as the job market picks up. Here are three things you can do to keep your top talent where they are:
Launch efforts to rebuild trust. One of the things that suffers most in a recession is the trust between employees and employers. Show your employees that what was done in survival mode is not the norm going forward.
Adjust compensation and benefits. Keep your radar tuned to the job market and any signs that it is heating up. Adjust salaries to make up for lost bonuses and raises and to match the market.
Know your top talent. You not only need to know who they are, but what they want. Communicate with them regularly about their careers and how your company can support them.

Read this together with Seth Godin's post "Losing Andrew Carnegie", and it will be pretty clear that the messages above won't stick to the minds of management in most organizations:

Carnegie apparently said, "Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors......Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory."

Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?

Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual... that's king. In fact, shareholders demand it.

It turns out that success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.

Tiki Announces 3.5 and 4.2 Releases

ricks99 — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:07:08 +0000

Tiki has released updates for both current release branches: 3.5 and 4.2. Both updates include bug fixes, feature polishing, and security updates. All Tiki sites are strongly encouraged to update to the latest version to take advantage of security fixes and updates. See the download page at TikiWiki.org to determine which branch (3.x or 4.x) best suits your needs.

Coming Soon: Tiki 5

The next major release, Tiki 5, is planned for April 2010 and will include many new features including shopping cart and payment support, improved translation/multilingual support, an advanced rating and scoring system, workspaces, performance improvements, and much more. See the Tiki 5 documentation for additional information on this upcoming release. Early adopters can obtain pre-release versions of Tiki 5 directly from the SVN repository.

Enterprise Drupal: Project Configuration Management and Release Management

kimberlymccabe — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:59:41 +0000

All Drupal developers have experienced this nightmare. You have been creating a great project, now it’s time to deploy it. No one wants to deal with it. No one wants to be the responsible of doing it.

If you are building a simple site, and there’s only a one time deployment, it’s not a big deal. You just have to follow the largely discussed and know simple rules.

The Rules:

Use SVN (or CVS) to keep your code updated among the developers
Deploy to production by backing up/restoring the database
Create scripts to make the deployment process automatic

That’s all, the unique problem you could have is maybe that you will have to delete the test content/users and change some settings before going live, but in summary, it’s pretty easy.

When it’s about deploying code, it’s still easy to do if you followed the simple rules. You will have only to update your SVN branch and you are done.

When the nightmare begins?

The problem is deploying changes made in the CMS, but without wiping all the existing data. In other words, merging the database changes, the settings and content stored in the database.

Scenario 1: Big (or huge) Drupal projects

You have to deploy a project in multiple phases. So while the first phase is deployed and working in production, you have a bunch of developers working on the next phase (this means, implementing new code, creating new nodes, creating new views, editing existing ones, changing settings, users, permissions, etc.)

Read more of Cesar Salazar's take on: Enterprise Drupal: Project Configuration Management and Release Management.