ReadWriteWeb

I started using my first content management system around 1997, when things were crude and clumsy. You would think in the past 15 or so years time would heal all and improvements would be made, but you would be wrong. The modern CMS is still in a state of flux.

In the early days of the CMS we had major players such as OpenText (which didn't really have true CMS functionality until around 2002), Vignette (which was a separate company before being acquired by OpenText in 2009), and Fatwire (which was acquired by Oracle this past summer), among others. Note a trend here? These were gigantic software installations, requiring six figure PO's and a phalanx of consultants to care for and feed these beasts. They were and still are the exclusive domain of the IT department, who treated them like other big-ticket software installations. If you wanted to build a corporate website, you need plenty of time to plan your requirements and implement the code.

BitNami is going beyond the value-add of bundling popular open source "stacks" of software to start including popular plugins and modules for the software. BitNami is starting with WordPress and Drupal by adding popular plugins for each of the popular Content Management Systems (CMS).

We've covered BitNami before. The service started by offering pre-configured "stacks" of popular open source software to simplify deployment. Initially the offerings were binaries that would install self-contained stacks on Linux, Mac OS X and/or Windows. (Not all stacks run on all OSes.)

According to water & stone, the "big three" open source CMSes from 2010 continue to dominate in 2011. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla all topped the company's survey of open source CMSes, with WordPress "clearly outpacing" Drupal and Joomla.

The survey started with 35 systems, which were narrowed down to 20 after getting the survey responses. The report primarily looked at rate of adoption and brand strength. All we really care about is rate of adoption, so let's look at that.

Pantheon is launching a Drupal-based service for creating, managing, and scaling enterprise-class Web sites.

Hosted Drupal sites are not new. You can get a Drupal site on just about any shared hosting service, or just install it yourself in less than 20 minutes. But what Pantheon is offering is more than just a Drupal site on a server; they're promising turnkey scalability, backups, revision control and more.

A Web publisher's choice of content management system could determine its relative visibility to its audience, especially those who frequent social networks. In last December's Water & Stone CMS market share report surveying some 4,200 sites using open source CMS, Drupal - the open source CMS platform for Linux and Windows - claimed a 13.6% share of the CMS market versus Joomla with about one-third and WordPress with one-fourth. But of the Facebook posts that lead readers to these sites, WordPress generated two-thirds of those posts.

There needs to be more developer activity around Drupal if it's to gain sorely needed momentum. So in an effort to grow the Drupal ecosystem, principal commercial contributor Acquia today announced it will launch an Acquia Apps Market around Drupal applications and tools in Q4.

For companies looking to develop and then test, stage and run a Drupal site, Acquia's hosted Dev Cloud service provides an affordable solution to either on-premises hosting of your own Drupal server or going with a general hosting service who may not be as familiar with the oddities of setting up your Drupal server and various add-ons.

Since I'm on an Erlang kick recently, I thought I'd share with you Zotonic, an open source content management system built with Erlang and PostgreSQL. It's not a new project, it's been around for a couple years now. It's up to release 0.6.0. Its admin UI looks a lot like WordPress, but it claims to be 10 times faster than PHP-based CMSes.

Offering your website in multiple languages is becoming increasingly important, but translating your content into another language is no easy task. But for the 2% of the world's websites that run on the open source CMS Drupal, that task just got a little easier today. Acquia, the commercial company that provides support for Drupal has struck a partnership with the collaborative translation company Lingotek which will allow the Drupal community to translate large amounts of their content.

Lingotek can be embedded directly into Drupal through a set of APIs, which will give Drupal community members access to unlimited language translations.

As Egyptians took to the streets and overthrew former President Hosni Mubarak, millions of people throughout the world turned to Al Jazeera for coverage. The global interest in events in the Middle East drove record levels of visitors to the news agency's Web servers. Traffic to Al Jazeera's site increased by 1,000% and that to its Drupal-based live blog increased by 2,000% during the crisis in Egypt, according to a blog post by Dreis Buytaert, Drupal creator and the founder of Acquia, which is now providing its elastic service for the international news organization.

The popular open source content management system Drupal releases its latest version today. Drupal 7 has been three years in the making, with code from thousands of contributors from over 200 countries.

Drupal 7 includes a number of improvements to both performance and usability. The enhancements to the UI mean easier administration, update management, accessibility and content creation. There's also a new image editor that allows users to re-size and crop photos without having to leave the platform.