WordPress refers to the GPL as their Bill of Rights, but we like to think of it as a free software license. The GPL is a popular licence that grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition, and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved--even when the work is changed or added to.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress writes, "We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are completely compatible and legal with WordPress’s license." But just to be double sure, he recently consulted the Software Freedom Law Center for their opinion. Mullenweg's results were summed up on the WordPress blog in one simple line:

"PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required."

Of course, cutting out CSS and JavaScript from WordPress would get kind of hairy and horrible, so the final verdict from the WordPress team is that they will continue to only promote and host things on WordPress.org that are 100% GPL or compatible.

In order to recognize and celebrate a few of the folks creating 100% GPL themes as well as providing support and other services around them, WordPress has a new page listing GPL commercially supported themes here.

Such is the case with the announcement that Pennsylvania based Really Strategies (news, site) has just bought out DocZone (news, site), a Dutch-based SaaS XML content management provider under -- you guessed it -- undisclosed terms.

The Joomla team confirmed in 2007 that both Joomla v1.0 and v1.5 were released under the GPL license. Now, the Joomla folks have taken things one step further.

Installing everything needed for a CMS can be quite daunting, so it comes as welcome news that eZ (news, site) has developed an all-in-one installer for those just starting out or switching in the open source CMS world.

WoodWing (news, site) released two updated versions of its language-improving Smart Speller and Smart Hyphen plug-ins for Adobe's Creative Suite 4.

Now they go another step in supporting the needs of communication professionals with the release of the CNW MediaRoom, an externally hosted website that integrates into a company's website, providing the ability to quickly and easily provide communications like press and social media releases.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

FatWire (news, site) is back in the news. These folks have been busy lately. In between "rescue" plans and moves towards worldwide "domination," the web content management vendor also had some time to work on two new releases -- Engage 7.5 (content targeting) and Analytics 2.5 (content optimization) -- which bring major architectural changes involving open source-based technology.

But all was not lost. Instead of settling for something less than perfect, Resolve Digital decided to take matters into their own hands and build an all-new CMS from the ground up. After 5 years under the hood, RefineryCMS is not only up and running, it’s also up for grabs. 

The world is not enough. Following the recent opening of its U.S. office, the open source ECM vendor Nuxeo (news, site) keeps expanding its global reach with a new partnership announced today.

Kisiwa, the content management solutions firm, signed an exclusive strategic and distribution agreement with Nuxeo to provide sales, professional services and support in Southern and Eastern Europe, Russia, Middle East and Africa.

The conference, held in Basel, Switzerland, will consist of keynotes and sessions with business and technical topics in regard to Magnolia CMS (news, site). Speakers include Pascal Mongold and Boris Kraft, Magnolia's CEO and CTO, respectively. Additionally, some folks from Day Software, Aperto, and several other companies and institutions are scheduled to make an appearance as well. The whole shebang will then close with an "Unconference-style" event run by the attendees.

Here's a closer look at the schedule:

Presentation Day, September 10th

During Presentation Day, participants of Magnolia Conference will gain the knowledge they need to build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies.

Community Day, September 11th

Community Day will be an Unconference. This means that attendees themselves will be responsible to propose talks, vote for talks, present, share, question, inquire and otherwise make the event.

For more information on the event, including a detailed schedule of speakers, head on over here. If you aren't going to be anywhere near Switzerland but would still like to get out and shake some hands, check out our complete list of events for something a little closer to home. 

Along with the release comes a side note from the WordPress team which states: "We especially suggest, recommend, and beg that plugin developers test their plugins against beta 2 and let us know of any issues."

The notable bug fixes in Beta 2 include: 

• Translation of role names fixed
• wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
• Upload error messages are now correctly reported
• Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
• Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
• SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
• Switched back to curl as the default transport
• Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload

You can review the full list of tickets fixed here. 

WordPress Baker

“Baker” was named after Chet Baker, an American jazz trumpeter. Accordingly, the new version of WordPress is pret-ty jazzy. The feature that grabs the most attention is arguably the Themes Browser, which allows users to browse, filter and install themes all from the WordPress dashboard. Such a feat no doubt raises the usability bar for many a Web CMS, including Drupal, whose themes are reportedly less than easy to install without a certain level of tech-savviness.

Want it? Download version 2.8.1 Beta 2 here, and check out the changes since Beta 1 here.

This post’s news hails from the Meaning Based Marketing side of things. Introduced earlier this week, the new module is called Autonomy Interwoven Multichanel Optimization, and reportedly combines the capabilities of Web content management, contact center, and advanced analytics.

According to the company release, the new module provides organizations with three primary capabilities: active “listening” across all customer interactions, testing across all formats of customer interactions and delivery of a targeted customer experience based on understanding. Autonomy claims this translates to organizations being able to respond to all forms of customer interactions across multiple channels including social media, the Web, contact center, email and in-store.

The module comes after a report by Forrester Research, which found U.S. online consumers who move from channel to channel are largely dissatisfied with their experiences.

“Regardless of which pairs they start with, customer experience professionals need to design experiences that provide users with the three C's: choice, consistency, and continuity,” Adele Sage, Forrester analyst and author of the report wrote.

Will Autonomy’s new module provide the missing link? Follow our coverage closely here and tell us what you think.

While the project doesn't promise that every idea will be implemented, they intend to use this system to understand what Plone users want to see added and improved. In particular, the team recommends that anyone interested in contributing to the project should take a look and see what ideas are the most in demand and sound like something they may want to work on.

If you find something and end up working on a significant new feature or change, then you'll pull together a Plone Improvement Proposal, or PLIP. This PLIP will be reviewed by the Framework Team assigned to the major release you're aiming for (as an example, the deadline for Plone 4 PLIPs just passed).

For more information:

• See the FAQ "How to suggest a feature for Plone"
• Submit and browse Plone improvement ideas
• Read the official idea system launch posting

Take a look at a new tool in the "intelligent" grammar and spell check space. After the Deadline (site) is a smart spell, style and grammar checker that supports the TinyMCE editor and has a WordPress plugin.

As the editorial staff did not have a preference for the content structure, they also wanted something which solidly organized the content. Prisma decided that an open-source solution would fit their bill. Interestingly (and oddly), Prisma thought scalability would be less of an issue with open source, due to the non-proprietary nature of the CMS.

After an initial period of testing, Prisma went on-line with major sites (gala.fr, voici.fr) working from a centralized eZ Publish based CMS. Initial challenges included increased hosting costs (voici.fr receives 225,000 UV/day), and difficulty finding external expertise and support.

Internally, setting up their CMS required formalizing their editorial workflow, establishing restrictive development guidelines, and an estimated 6-month period to bring an experienced PHP developer up to speed with the eZ Publish CMS.

Some of the ways Potier has seen the installation pay off for Prisma are in reduced maintenance and support costs due to centralization, a shorter roll out time for new sites (femmes.com was brought out by Prisma in 40 workday man-hours), and a reduction in training hours for editorial staff due to the shared backoffice among all their sites.

According to Roland, "Media is important, because it's going to be the big driver for the evolution of Web CMS, but eZ doesn't target media over other sectors."

When asked if he could see how some people might get that impression, the response was that  "maybe our literature gives that impression, but that depends who we are talking to.

"For example, the non-profit sector is big for us, because we are open source. When we address a non-profit client, we obviously don't talk about the same things as when we talk to clients who are in finance. They have different goals. It's like this. Media is important, but eZ doesn't target a specific sector in that way."

The company has found success in the publishing sector, with a significant number of European electronic publications running on the platform.

At one of their previous gatherings -- perhaps it was 2007 in Paris -- CMSWire staff saw a slide with the message something to the effect of " We're 200% Focused on Media". It seems the focus has been successful and now perhaps the company is seeking to branch out further.

Percussion Software (news, site) released CM System 6.7. If the product name doesn’t sound familiar, get a little background here on the rebranding move that took place when version 6.6 came out.

So, what’s new in 6.7 you ask? It is all about the package.

Woman's Day got its start in the 1930's, but the venerable magazine is taking on the digital age with an on-line portal. 90% of the site's content is original, and Sanchez reports that the editorial staff at the magazine are pleased with the flexibilty of eZ Flow.

Using dynamic blocks and by tracking clicks on the main page, the editorial staff can move around their content on the fly taking into account what is, and isn't working on the layout. This, in turn, has freed up Sanchez and his department to work on new projects (such as an upcoming recipe finder iPhone app) rather than tweaking templates for the site.

As for searching, Woman's Day uses eZ Find, and has worked out a way to tag and search content in order to run a promotional campaign against certain types of content.

The site integrates Brightcove for video, DART, Moniture, WordPress, Silver Pop and some Typepad for blog content.

Sanchez and his team are gearing up for a site redesign. With the platform already in place, the redesign is a simple matter of gathering together the development requirements.

One such candidate feature -- which the Drupal team has discussed since 2004 -- is that of enabling CMS administrators to define custom content types, or fields for the system.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK), an add-on module for Drupal, has handily taken care of this need for years. In Drupal 7, it will no longer be needed. But even more, we'll be getting some tasty semantic web features as part of the changes.