It all appears to be happening in the open source CMS world right now with eagerly awaited updates coming very soon to some of the major players in the world of Content Management.Joomla! 1.6 Beta was released today with some huge upgrades that could cement their place in the enterprise content management market.Improved access permissions are one of the main improvements to the system that will build heavily on the competent but limited user model of Joomla! 1.5.
I haven’t used Joomla! for very long but I can already see a lot of advantages of this system over it’s main rival Drupal. Joomla! seem to be addressing at least one of those issues in 1.6 because the template system has been completely overhauled to offer an improved semantic structure. It has always been easier to create a custom template in Drupal but perhaps this will attract more developers to experiment with Joomla!We also await the next iteration of Drupal but after a lot of industry gossip, we are failing to see it materialize. Maybe the imminent release of Joomla! 1.6 will push Drupal 7 into existence.WordPress, although primarily a blogging platform has also been hovering around the 2.9 mark for quite a while.
They’ve been concentrating on their MU (multi-user) system but the planned integration of that plus many other features indicate that WordPress want to join the enterprise content management system party. Many people use WordPress as a stand alone website already but the introduction of new content types expand the functionality to more than posts and pages.
Another enterprise Content Management System that I use frequently is MySource Matrix.
They were also busy today by announcing the end to their SSV licence. This announcement really opens them up to compete against the major CMS systems and it’s good to see that MySource Matrix is starting to live up to it’s open source ideology.MySource Matrix has enormous power and I just hope they can build a simple installer because the complicated installation must turn off a lot of users. They could at least provide MySQL compatibility.In the same day as announcing the end of SSV, they launched a searchable HTML version of their documentation and also simultaneously launched version 3.28. Those guys at Squiz have been really busy behind the scenes so it would be good to see MySource Matrix rise against their competitors.
