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.

With new versions coming up regularly, Silverstripe proves to be one of the best and usable Content Management System, including full website page content management fetaures and full relational database content management. Like most opensoruce projects, one big asset missing is a documentation, we hope this is getting better especially with the release of the Silverstripe book english translation, to be published in august. Finding one’s way in the plethora of modules and code hacks available for Silverstripe is a rough job, but it pays. Data management in silverstripe  is actually, in my opinion, one of the most integrated and flexible solutions available out there. Another good source of information for developers can be found at the newly built ssbits website that develops hacks and tricks.

In detail

Two different options exist in Silverstripe for data management

• DataObjectManager  is a plugin developed by Uncle Cheese, also known as Aaron Carlino. His dataObjectManager allows the building of data management interafaces within page types, with many features including HTML field, file upload. A good example of the dataobjectmanager is the image_gallery module that improves the standard lightbox gallery that we used in Silverstripe. 
• ModelAdmin is the new scaffolder for Silverstripe : it allows the building of data mangement systems within the Silverstripe admin. The documentation is a bit sparse but there’s a public presentation that explains it quite extensively.

Jspresso -http://www.jspresso.org- is a free and opensource framework dedicated to building RIAs that offer a desktop-like user experience. Among many improvements, one of the major features of this release is the native support of Adobe Flex as a deployment option.

All Jspresso-based applications will instantly run on the Flash plugin without a single, hand-written, line of MXML or ActionScript in their code base. Nor is there any GUI code generation involved. Jspresso relies on a generic Flex client engine that dialogs with the Jspresso Java backend through Adobe BlazeDS using a generic set of GUI commands. This approach relieves the developer from the DTO pain you usually find in this type of applications while still leveraging the style and power of a Flex client-side and keeping the development server-centric.
Last but not least, Jspresso applications, bootstrapped by a Maven archetype, build entirely in Maven and can be directly imported in Eclipse with full WTP support. The server stack remains unchanged (servlet / Spring / Hibernate) and all the previous frontend technologies remain fully supported.

Remember Wikipedia’s table of content, that creates anchors and links automatically from page titles : we’ve enjoyed the feature on MODX CMS, an old but still efficient opensource content management system for PHP / Mysql. Two plugins are available for this software, free of course :  The Automatic Page TOC Generator plugin and the  Automatic TOC and Navbar work the same way, via a simple process that parses H1 .. H6 tags, takes HTML within, builds the table of content, and  inserts the generated table of contents anywhere in your template. Many options are available that can specify explicitly the area to be indexed or put a navbar before the heading to get bazck up to the top of the page. The result can be as shown above on the ausoleilbreton.com web site (work in progress).

EcontentMag, onlinep publication that reviews content management software, has just issued the result of the eighth annual EContent 100, a list of companies that matter most in a digital content industry that involves many domains : Classification & Taxonomy, Collaboration, Content Commerce, Content Creation-Production- and Digital Publishing, Content Delivery, Content Management, Content Security, Fee-Based Info Services, Intranets & Portals, Mobile Content, Search Engines & Technologies, Social Media. The 12 categories that structure this yearly competition illustrate the complexity of an industry that’s slowly  growing to the age of adulthood : opensource and proprietary solutions compete in a universe where even the low wage workers of India are quickly switching to western standards. The global economic crisis will certainly highlight the difficulty to maintain costly and complex solutions while simple, efficient and often free solutions will prove stronger as ever. By the way, Worpress 2.7 is out !!

We are actively testing Silverstripe 2.3 rc2, the lastest candidate for imminent new release of Silverstripe CMS / CMF. Among very efficient code upgrade and efficiency improvements, we love the following feature enhancements and definitely recommend professionnals to engage in learning this  Content Management framework that fits CMS and  website development, including the administration and layout of dynamic image galleries.

• Security new features : possibility to select multiple groups for viewing and administration privileges
  What would be nice now : integrate the user import function from the newsletter module (see our post on how to do this for version 2.2)
• Wysiwyg editor new features : possibility to insert predefined template was missing for webmasters wishing to go beyond the single layout  for each page type. Editors can now choose between predefined templates where content is structured in various configuration (read on for instructions on how to set that up).
  What would be nice now : display a small preview of the layout, like typo3 does. Or integrate on demand page component addition (example : on demand HTML editors, list types, gallery types in one page)
• Other promising features (not tested) : data CRUD scaffolding, Update to TinyMCE 3.2, HTML flash code is now full XHTML compliant!

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