One step further into the  drag & drop AJAX cms adminstration we’re all looking for : Automne CMS, developped by french based WS Interactive company, implements block management via ext js library features, that come near to a full  drag and drop interface. The content is added in pages through a template based row system that  gives large flexibility over the final layout of the bloks within the page. Learning curve would typically require a few days work before a developer really gets into the multi template system.

http://www.automne.ws/web/fr/244-essayer-la-demo.php

See also

• JSP Based Riot CMS

The expertise around Flash / Flex based CMS is building up a new area for content management. We haven’t had the pleasure to try out the software but the building of wysiwyg interfaces is a promising business, as long as the HTML and Search engine optimization features of pure text are guaranteed : this is where we’d like to know more about FlashMoto’s HTML publishing features, which uses the HTML version technique; meaning the flash based web site is also available as HTML for search engines and non flash browser. This technique is also used by Silex RIA, another Flash based CMS.

What distinguishes FlashMoto from a range of other flash content management systems is that it is the first Flash CMS based on ActionScript 3 and realized as RIA on Flex.   The websites powered by FlashMoto are controlled just like a standard CMS but with the extras that Flash offers.  FlashMoto provides a set of SEO tools what makes the Flash CMS website completely crawlable and seen by search engines.

Flash CMS from FlashMoto is characterized by a range of other features:
- ability to add unlimited number of pages;
- convenient WYSIWYG page and pop-up editor;
- rich media library;
- infomodule component;
- video and image gallery component;
- video and MP3 players component;
- deep linking and Google Analytics integration;
- comprehensive documentation and tutorials.

Fuzzle CMS is a promising Flash CMS delevoped by a group of Russian programmers. The system is claimed to be an extra easy way for creating Flash website thanks to visual content management. Note, Fuzzle’s website is also made with this CMS. Fuzzle brings you advantages of Flash and HTML in one system and affords you create and maintain your website’s content without knowing anything about programming. Flash web sites are differ from regular HTML sites mainly by their presentational abilities: Flash technology allows incorporating complex animations and reach multimedia content. However, Flash sites are considered to have such disadvantages as longer time of development (therefore more cost), harder updating, bad search engines ranking. Fuzzle is breaking these stereotypes!
Main Fuzzle features are: :
- multilinguality;
- simple management (convenient visual editing based on blocks placement and multiple selection of blocks );
- design integration from a draft within 5 minutes;;
- SEO support (HTML version auto generation, DeepLinking support);
- continuously replenished Widget Store availability;
- availability of an open simple API for external developers.

I like gpEasy cms’ quick and easy interface : powered by jquery interactivity, gpeasy is full text cms that works without a database. It is in fact a set of includes that can be administered via privilege based backend that implements FCKEditor. Below is a sample of the drag and drop interface for pages ordering, a must.

Drupal’s new version (7) is in development and it features many improvements, most of them modules developped within the community. One of them is the Garland theme that allows customization of colors, enabling all theme variations including header shades. Another theme that works like that is the CTI flex theme, based on Zen, only available for drupal 6 as of now.

built as a small project, young but innovative, impress pages cms features inline editing with prototype powered drag and drop feature that allows easy building of pages with multiple components : rich text, simple text, html text, simple form builder, image gallery, amazing and promising ! Try it out on impresspages.org

w-script is a nice example of how a good development framework like codeigniter can deliver solid applications. W-Script is a simple wall paper script that comes free opensource with many functions, one them is the color indexing that allows searching colors in pictures.

http://www.wallpaperscript.net/

Create, publish, enjoy : this is the  mission line of ionize CMS, built entirely around Code Igniter, looks very promising as it comes with basic features : drag & drop pages tree, media navigator, permissions…

http://ionizecms.com/

a lot of expereiences are currently being performed on the Zend Framework platform, but a few are really usable in production environement.

• Magento is obviously the best example of how Zend Framework can bring power and ease  of development via a PHP enabled template system. The most popular opensource ecommerce application has been downloaded more that a million times and is still considered  a revolutionnary project after 2 years of production.
• Digitalus CMS is a Zend framework based Content Management System. We covered it a while ago
• Joobsbox is a job board application developped on top of Zend Framewor, not quite stable yet (nice implementation of hirearchical tree does not handle sub pages very well yet, worth the try)
• Dodo is a perfect tutorial for starting with the Zend_Application environment, and it is also a good tasks application
• EasyPhpApp is a CRUD generator that can save you time when working with a lot of database tables (see our previous article on Zend framework scaffolding)

and also you can try, tine 2.0, a powerful groupware application that uses extjs beautifully (covered a while ago too on this blog)

At first sight, nothing really exciting comes from the newly released Cahaya CMS, built entirely around Zend Framework CMS : in fact the toolbar that switches the site to edit mode is an interesting implentation of  insite edition, that allows page building from selected and editable blocks, as illustrated below. The whole web content management interface is built with ext js widgets including drag and drop, and this looks promising, though apparently  quite complex at this early stage. I miss the hierarchical tree for page navigation in the admin, but let’s hope it’s coming.  go to http://cahaya-project.org/ for more.

It’s only alpha but I’ve tested it because I’m still running 1.2 and I’m waiting for serious reason to upgrade : I can tell you I’ve seriously avoided the basic Magento advice whic is ‘never hack the core’, and I have a dozen fixes implemented in the app/code/core section of my production install, which means a few hours upgrade. Reading Release notes was not very interesting so I decided I’d for a test drive. Well not much to say except the new tax system which is suited to european complexity, including or excluding shipping costs, reductions and other attributes are available in the system/ admin menu. The most noticeabl imporvement was not indeed produced by Magento but by google : remember at some time Chrome did not work well with the admin. This is now fixed, and thanks to a better cookie management chrome now handles magento admin pefectly, which means faster work. For enterprise users (9000 $ /year), a new video has been posted about private sales that offer special deals to users for a limited time using special member restricted access with invitations. Magento actually works well with emails, including reports on accepted invitations and generated sales. Enjoy.