Packt is pleased to announce a new book that is aimed at helping Moodlers achieve outstanding results by using the ready-to-use recipes for reading comprehension, writing and composition from the book Moodle: The English teachers Cookbook. Written in a cookbook style by Silvina P. Hillar, this book is a guide that will help users improve their skills in Moodle and enhance their way of teaching in virtual classrooms.

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. It is designed to help educators create online courses with a focus on interaction and collaborative construction of content. Its open source license and modular design allows any developer to create additional modules and features.

The book starts off by teaching users to connect simple activities using Moodle that will improve student’s writing in different ways. Furthermore they will be able to match images, texts and import different pictures to their Moodle course. Embedding social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to create stories and design interactive activities will also be learnt from the book.

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 “The cloud might be a deal breaker for many software companies, either from a licensing standpoint or because their software is not extensible.”

We sat down with Emmanuel Garcin, Vice President & General Manager of Jahia Inc., in Washington, DC to discuss the open source CMS Cloud offering.

Hi Emmanuel, thanks for taking the time to talk to us. In a recent release Jahiastated it has experienced a growing acceptance for hosted web content management, even among conservative industries like banking and finance, for both corporate websites and Intranet projects. Why is not everyone using the cloud?

Emmanuel Garcin: Some companies still have financial incentives to own their datacenter It really depends on the financial structure of the firm. Some prefer hardware that you can depreciate, in order to maximize tax deductions [CAPEX versus OPEX]. Most of our Cloud clients prefer to expense [OPEX] their web initiative spendings.

When discussing the cloud option with new or existing clients, what kind of concerns do you hear the most?

Emmanuel Garcin: Different types of customers have different reasons for looking at our cloud offerings. SMBs with low IT resources don’t want to spend on infrastructure. Large enterprises with datacenters still want the flexibility of the cloud, for example, to reach a new region. Thanks to Amazon, we have computing power all over the world. Companies also may want to get faster to market and bypass the  internal IT/datacenter processes which can be heavy and time consuming.

However, both types of customers hesitate to trust others to administer and secure their systems because they want to be able to monitor and back up the cloud themselves. Their concern is always the same:  What do we do when it’s down? Salesforce.com had the same hesitation in the early adoption phase. In our experience, Jahias’s automatic monitoring, security and backup option is often the selling argument.

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CMS Critic: Symphony CMS is a beautifully minimal PHP+MySQL-based open source content management system that uses XML and XSLT as its backbone.

On the surface, Symphony is similar in function to ExpressionEngine, Textpattern, WordPress, or Drupal. While Symphony is certainly capable of running a standard website or blog, its conceptual elegance and focus on data structures puts it in a unique position, straddling the line between a CMS and a full web application framework such as Django or Ruby on Rails.

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Presentations to cover a wide range of business and technical CMS

NEW YORK, NY — Magnolia, the open source content management vendor that delivers simplicity on an enterprise scale, today named key speakers for Magnolia Conference 2010, to be held in Basel, Switzerland, September 16-17 2010. The talks were chosen from a broad range of proposed business and technical presentations, from CMS for Small Devices to Integrating Magnolia with the Spring Framework using Blossom.

“Following last year’s sold out conference we received such an overwhelming number of presentation proposals for our second annual meeting that it was tough to pick which ones to slot. In the end we went for a range of topics that demonstrate the diverse business and technical possibilities of Magnolia CMS,” said Boris Kraft, Magnolia CTO. “We invite everyone else to organize their own talks during the event’s second “Community Day”.

Business Talks

CMS for Small Devices: Magnolia, iPad and WebKit, by Markus Franz, CEO, Sucomo KG

Magnolia STK for the International EADS.com Project, by Ingo Werren, team leader and  senior project manager, Aperto AG

Magnolia for VPRO’s Pinkpop Music Festival Website, by Gerbrand Meijer, Technical Coordinator, VPRO Digitaal

Managing Content of Flash-powered Websites with Magnolia, by Manuel Molaschi, Technology Architect, Openmind

Extending Magnolia CMS with ModeShape, by Mark Newton, JBoss Community Lead, Red Hat

Technical Talks

Integrating Magnolia with the Spring Framework using Blossom, by Tobias Mattsson, Senior Software Engineer, Magnolia International, Ltd.

Integrating Kona Kart with Magnolia, by Ruben Reusser, Lead Developer, Headwire.com

Content-Driven Web Applications with Magnolia and Ruby on Rails, by Patrik Metzmacher, Managing Director, Dievision GmbH

Empowering Magnolia for Enterprise Use Cases – Experience Report, by Sebastian Frick, Technical Project Manager, & Joerg von Frantzius, System Architect, Aperto AG

High Performance Magnolia with Anycast Routing, by Michael Robertson, Managing Partner and Founder & Mathias Seiler, MiroNet GmbH

The Magnolia Conference draws current and potential Magnolia users, partners, and community contributors from all over the globe, to meet and learn about open source, standards-based Java CMS. Through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials, case studies, and presentations, attendees will gain the knowledge they need to rapidly build open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS.

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I continue to hear great things about EPiServer from Blend Interactive’s Dean Barker and other folks in the CMS industry. Their accolades for this CMS is one of the reasons I decided to begin focusing on EPiServer here at the site.

Honestly, I don’t know enough about EPiServer which is why some of the EPiServer fanboys have promised getting together with me sometime to talk about this platform.  Until my education is complete, I’m going to resort to cheap writing by using press releases and blogs to get some of my information out to you about EPiServer. For instance, lets see if this product announcement by EPiServer’s marketing gets you interested to hear more about their products:

EPiServer announces the release of EPiServer Relate+2 , a product package for EPiServer CMS 6, which containsEPiServer Community 4 and EPiServer Mail 5. It also includes a sample website which shows how to combine these three products to build a powerful online community. In today’s conversation economy the ability to get involved in websites where users are free to create, organize and share know-how and experiences in the form of words, pictures and videos is becoming more prevalent and Relate+ makes it a seamless experience for community members, community owners and moderators.

Included is support for Open ID where users can use an existing login ID to sign into multiple websites. The same rich text editor found in EPiServer CMS, TinyMCE, is now used for writing blog posts and the MetaWeblog API is also supported, so users can use their favorite blog applications, such as iBlogger for the iPhone or Live Writer for Windows, when creating or editing blog posts. In combination with blog syndication and ping/ pingbacks, Relate+ is a full-fledged blog engine.

Additional information about EPiServer Relate can be found at EPiServer.com.

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A new version of our favorite Ruby on Rails CMS has been released, Radiant CMS 0.9.0. Obviously, I spoke a little too soon last October when I announced that 0.9.0 was coming soon. Each open source community has their own pace and time-line for releasing the release candidates of their software. In retrospect, I should have noted that Radiant CMS developers like to take their time in making sure the Radiant releases are at a level of quality and stability they’re comfortable with before releasing the final versions to the general public.

So what’s new in the 0.9.0 version of Radiant CMS? Radiant now has a new UI, support for internationalization and loading of extensions as gems. Some of the more significant new features in this version of Radiant include::

• There are new features for pagination (requiring will_paginate).
• You can now run Radiant from a sub-directory.
• When selecting a published date in the future, Radiant will treat the content as hidden until that date
• Extensions may be loaded as gems and generated extensions now have features to easily create gems with Jeweler
• Radiant CMS is now running on Rails 2.3.8 (bundled with Radiant)

If you would like more details on the changes in Radiant CMS, you can always check out the CHANGELOG. Radiant 0.9.0 CMS is available for download from the RadiantCMS.org website.

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In June, CMS Report sold out all of the banner space that was made available through BuySellAds. Sponsorship helps CMSReport.com pay for the bills we receive from our host provider, internet service provider, and any software or hardware needed to support this site. Without sponsorship, niche sites like this one simply wouldn’t be able to run debt free.

CMS Report provides great content on a wide variety of CMS related topics. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can purchase banner space at this site either through Google’s ad services or through BuySellAds. For those times that we have sold out on our banner space, BuySellAds does offer sponsors the ability to put themselves on a waiting list to advertise on our site. We’ve been holding the price of sponsoring CMS Report below market value so at times you might find the waiting a little long.

CMS Report wants to thank our current sponsors for their support.

Acquia’s Drupal Gardens – Building Drupal websites just got easier with Acquia and Drupal Gardens. Launch a product, promote an event, engage a community – You can create socially smart websites and microsites that accelerate your business with Drupal Gardens.

Open Source Training – Open Source Training provides training across North America on Joomla!, Drupal, and WordPress. They have worked with Fortune 500 companies, state and local government, plus universities and colleges.

CMS themer – CMS themer is a professional theming service catered to designers, developers and web companies who do not have the time or expertise to theme a CMS based on an existing website or design.

Jahia – Jahia delivers Open Source Web Content Integration Software by combining Enterprise Web Content Management with Document Management and Portal features. Jahia offers a complete solution for developing, integrating, delivering, and managing content across Intranets, Extranets, and the Internet.

Mollom – Mollom is a free web service that helps you stops spam and profanity on your site. And best of all? It is free!

Sitecore – Sitecore provides web content management (CMS) and portal software for organizations to create compelling website experiences.

Sourcecoast: Joomla plus Facebook - Monetize your Joomla site.

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At a time when consumers have increasingly high expectations for website content, site owners need to pull out all the stops when creating an engaging experience for their visitors. This may include social networking features, multimedia, interactive features like polls and contests, and of course, fresh content that changes frequently. And these features need to be easy to add to a site (and change often) without constant intervention from the IT department.

The trouble is that all-in-one solutions for online customer engagement are thin on the ground. For the most part, the various functions that a site owner needs to deploy for customer engagement – such as analytics, social networking, and content management – are found in separate solutions, creating software management headaches for site owners.

Why is customer engagement so critical for today’s site owners? In a still-recovering economic climate, websites can’t afford to lose customers who show up on the home page, only to lose interest and leave when they’re not drawn in by compelling content. Engaged customers will download information and submit their contact information, which fills the lead-generation pipeline. They’ll buy products, they’ll stay longer, and they’ll come back again and again.

You need to adapt your digital strategies to meet the high expectations of the consumers, and the requirements of your business, to make as many customer interactions succeed. Ideally, customer engagement systems contain the following functions if they are to achieve the goals of retaining customers and improving sales:

Tools to streamline marketing campaigns:  Marketing and sales departments shouldn’t need to enlist technical people every time they need to launch a new campaign, or shift gears on a current campaign. Nontechnical users should be able to easily create campaigns and monitor their progress.

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As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don’t talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal’s developers. Drupal 6.17 is one of those releases which contain significant changes I think are worthy a mention.

I’m probably most excited about the improvements made in Drupal 6 for better PHP 5.3 compatibility. A couple weeks ago I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5.3 and there were just too many annoying errors showing up in the Drupal 6 system logs.  I’m hoping with Drupal 6.17, I have better luck this time around (currently running this Drupal 6 sites with PHP 5.3).

With over 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6, the following are the highlights of changes included in Drupal 6.17:

• Improvements of session cookie handling
• Better processing of big XML-RPC payload
• Improved PostgreSQL compatibility
• Better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility (my fingers are crossed)
• Improved Japanese support in search module
• Better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
• Improved logging for login failures
• An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16′s new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved

The latest version of Drupal may be downloaded from the project page at Drupal.org. Whether you’re new to Drupal or currently maintaining a Drupal site, this latest release of Drupal is a clear indication that there is plenty of life and plenty of development taking place with the Drupal 6 release. Now what other Drupal 6 sites do I have that still need this upgrade to Drupal 6.17.

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As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don’t talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal’s developers. Drupal 6.17 is one of those releases which contain significant changes I think are worthy a mention.

I’m probably most excited about the improvements made in Drupal 6 for better PHP 5.3 compatibility. A couple weeks ago I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5.3 and there were just too many annoying errors showing up in the Drupal 6 system logs.  I’m hoping with Drupal 6.17, I have better luck this time around (currently running this Drupal 6 sites with PHP 5.3).

With over 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6, the following are the highlights of changes included in Drupal 6.17:

• Improvements of session cookie handling
• Better processing of big XML-RPC payload
• Improved PostgreSQL compatibility
• Better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility (my fingers are crossed)
• Improved Japanese support in search module
• Better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
• Improved logging for login failures
• An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16′s new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved

The latest version of Drupal may be downloaded from the project page at Drupal.org. Whether you’re new to Drupal or currently maintaining a Drupal site, this latest release of Drupal is a clear indication that there is plenty of life and plenty of development taking place with the Drupal 6 release. Now what other Drupal 6 sites do I have that still need this upgrade to Drupal 6.17.

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