We're running a series this week that we call 5x5. Every day we're going to highlight 5 Joomla sites in a particular category.

Today we're focusing on 5 government Education Ministries that use Joomla for their official websites. There are many more, so if know of others, please post in the comments.

ocProducts are proud to announce the launch of the first release candidate for ocPortal 5.0, our highly advanced web content management system. This version introduces a number of bug fixes, new features, usability improvements, and a wide-sweeping design overhaul.

There are a number of key changes and additions within this version of the software; The Admin zone has been given an overhaul including new drop down menus and a much more useful front page. Design change highlights include :

• A complete redesign of the Gallery system (we know this is going to make a lot of people very happy)

• The member profile screen has been completely redesigned

• A restructuring of the member points screen, making the points system far more intuitive.

• The quiz screen has been redesigned

• Just about every side block has been revised

• A brand new commenting interface

We have given an overhaul to commenting, RSS and ratings features. These include allowing guests to choose a display name and improving the previewing of reviews. ocPortal version 5 has been thoroughly tested with IE6 and should display properly on this browser. We do however expect to drop support for IE6 once IE9 is released.

We have put a great deal of work into the ocPortal themeing system, with the aim of making it much easier for users to make their site look just how they want it to. Users can now preview all of the templates they are working on without needing switch between several screens. Other themeing features include making it easier to edit the site logo across all zones & themes, alongside new CSS styled buttons. In addition to the aforementioned template screen preview system, you can methodically work through all the screens in the system in order to ensure your theme looks good.

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Nashua, New Hampshire, USA – Kentico Software (http://www.kentico.com), the Web content management system vendor, announced that its first annual customer conference – the Kentico Connection – will be held this year at the Andel’s Hotel in Prague, Czech Republic on October 18-20.

“The purpose of the Kentico Connection 2010 conference is to get the whole Kentico community together and enjoy three days of learning, sharing experience and getting answers to your questions,” notes Petr Palas, Kentico CEO and founder.  “Anybody who is already using Kentico or plans to use it in the future is welcome to attend the conference. This three-day event will provide valuable content and an opportunity to talk to the Kentico development team.“

The conference highlights include detailed technical sessions on the Kentico technology platform, an “Ask the Experts” panel discussion where you can meet the Kentico development team, a sneak peak into Kentico CMS 6.0 and what Kentico is planning for upcoming year, and a sharing of your experience with fellow colleagues and partners. All sessions are organized into two tracks - the Business Track, focused on content editors, marketers and anybody who wants to get high-level information about Kentico CMS, and the Technology Track, focused on web developers, web designers and project managers who want to create great websites.

The Kentico Connection 2010 venue will be in Andel’s Hotel in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic and one of the most beautiful cities in the world. In 1992, the historical core of the city was listed in the UNESCO Register.

The early bird price is $650 and expires on August 31, 2010.  Attendees can register at the Kentico Connection 2010 website (http://connection.kentico.com/) and follow ongoing news about the event on (http://twitter.com/kenticocms).

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The Deutsche Aids-Hilfe (DAH) is the leading German non-governmental organization that deals with the concerns of people living with HIV/AIDS and helps raise awareness of effective HIV prevention techniques.
As the governing body for more than 120 local AIDS service organizations, it supports this work at many different levels.

The DAH website, aidshilfe.de, is one of the organization’s main communication channels. It offers information on HIV and other sexual transmitted infections and covers the field of counseling for private matters. The website also provides contact information for local self-help-centers, a broad selection of free information material, workshops, community features, etc.

Work on the aidshilfe.de project was supported by many partners. Christoph Schüßler designed the website, which was implemented in Drupal by Berlin-based Werk21. The new aidshilfe.de is a step forward toward a future-proof system that features an attractive new design, interactive features, user-friendly community functionality and great usability.

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We're running a series this week that we call 5x5. Every day this week we're going to highlight 5 Joomla sites in a particular category.

Today we're focusing on 5 national leaders that use Joomla for their official websites. There are many more such leaders, so if know of others, please post in the comments.

The Argentine president lives in the Casa Rosada (Pink House) and the domain http://casarosada.gov.ar leads to the same site.

The most recent TikiFest recently ended in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) on July 18. At this TikiFest, the second in Barcelona, more than 20 Tiki developers, consultants, and end-users met (including others via video conference) to work to improve and upgrade Tiki features, as well as to discuss the future of Tiki development.

Led by long-time Tiki Community members (including some board members of the Tiki Software Community Association) Marc (marclaporte), Louis-Philippe (lph), Jean-Marc (jyhem), Jonny (jonnyb) and Xavi (xavi), great progress was made for the next major Tiki release. Tiki 6, planned for October 2010), will include many of the items discussed and coded during this TikiFest, such as:

• Payment system using "CCLite" (a free software web application to support Community Currency management within and among barter networks)
• Fixing encoding issues (when upgrading Tiki under certain specific scenarios)
• Cron-like features (such as automatically changing tracker item status and sending email users if their tracker items do change within a specific amount of time. This is especially useful for Barter networks and Bug Trackers.
• Identifying ways (through the Newsletters and Group Watches featurse) to allow Tiki site administrators to easily distribute content to users, while allowing the users an option to unsubscribe
• New profile "Easy Blog" to easily install common blogging features (such as blog archives, image headers, etc.) for Tiki sites (http://profiles.tikiwiki.org/Easy+Blog)

For details on what was discussed, see http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBarcelona2. For more information on the Tiki Community release schedule, see http://dev.tikiwiki.org/RoadMap.

In addition to code development, the TikiFesters took the opportunity to socialize amongst themselves and sample all that Barcelona has to offer, such as:

• Mediterranean beaches
• Local and international cuisine
• Local beverages (to help stimulate discussions!)
• Discovering hidden spots in Barcelona city and exploring tbhe local history
• Enjoying the gorgeous city sites

For complete details on Barcelona TikiFest, see http://tikiwiki.org/TikiFestBarcelona2.

Upcoming TikiFests

A tradition in the Tiki community, a TikiFest is a meeting between Tiki community members (that usually only meet online). This is an opportunity to socialize, code and discuss about wiki technology and culture, etc.

Upcoming TikiFests include:

• August 15, 2010 in Ottawa, Canada (and online)
• August 27, 2010 in Montreal, Canada
• October 3, 2010 in New York City, USA
• November 14, 2010 in Berlin, Germany
• August 2, 2011 in Haifa, Israel
• For more information, see the Tiki Community calendar at http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-calendar.php.

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We're running a series this week that we call 5x5. Every day we're going to highlight 5 Joomla sites in a particular category.

Today we're focusing on 5 major cultural and historical organizations that use Joomla for their official websites. There are many more, so if know of others, please post in the comments.

The Guggenheim Museums are spectacular art repositories located in New York, Las Vegas, Italy, Spain, Abu Dhabi, Lithuania and Germany.

TicketCake.com is an event ticketing and promotion start-up that recently launched using Drupal as its framework. The website features an innovative design by White Label Graphics which balances functionality and simplicity.

Because Drupal has many ways to display dynamic content, finding the right way to implement a design can be a problem in itself. To overcome this obstacle, the Ticket Cake team focused a significant amount of time creating wireframes for the project.

Drupal’s unique ability to display content in various ways made the process of developing wireframes a constant back and forth. With each iteration, the team updated price quotes, layouts, and site flow.

“Throughout the construction of the wireframes, we always looked to a keep it simple philosophy that ended up being vital,” said Joe Henriod, head of the Ticket Cake business development team. “Measure twice, cut once.”

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We're running a series this week that we call 5x5. Every day for the next 5 days we're going to highlight 5 Joomla sites in a particular category.

Today we're focusing on 5 countries that use Joomla for their official national websites. There are many more such countries, so if know of others, please post in the comments.

Indonesia has the 4th highest population in the world and is the largest economy in Southeast Asia:

Our team is currently working on a project management tool extension for Joomla! 1.6. In short, the goal of our extensions is to provide user-friendly tool for everybody to manage his projects across all parts of their production cycles

During last few weeks we worked on implementing nested tables and many other cool features. If you want to know more about our progress and what obstacles we had to overcome in order to get nested tables to work, keep reading.

I would say a lot, but you probably want to hear more details about that. As I said in my previous post, we worked on managing documents and tasks  and a little on design of our views. At this point, we are pretty much satisfied with the current state of our project.

Our approach with WordPress has always been to make it run on common server configurations. We want users to have flexibility when choosing a host for their precious content. Because of this strategy, WordPress runs pretty much anywhere. Web hosting platforms, however, change over time, and we occasionally are able to reevaluate some of the requirements for running WordPress. Now is one of those times. You probably guessed it from the title — we’re finally ready to announce the end of support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4!

First up, the announcement that developers really care about. WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4.

For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2. Why 5.2? Because that’s what the vast majority of WordPress users are using, and it offers substantial improvements over earlier PHP 5 releases. It is also the minimum PHP version that the Drupal and Joomla projects will be supporting in their next versions, both due out this year.

The numbers are now, finally, strongly in favor of this move. Only around 11 percent of WordPress installs are running on a PHP version below 5.2. Many of them are on hosts who support PHP 5.2 — users merely need to change a setting in their hosting control panel to activate it. We believe that percentage will only go down over the rest of the year as hosting providers realize that to support the newest versions of WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), they’re going to have to pull the trigger.

In less exciting news, we are also going to be dropping support for MySQL 4 after WordPress 3.1. Fewer than 6 percent of WordPress users are running MySQL 4. The new required MySQL version for WordPress 3.2 will be 5.0.15.

WordPress users will not be able to upgrade to WordPress 3.2 if their hosting environment does not meet these requirements (the built-in updater will prevent it). In order to determine which versions your host provides, we’ve created the Health Check plugin. You can download it manually, or use this handy plugin installation tool I whipped up. Right now, Health Check will only tell you if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2. In a future release it will provide all sorts of useful information about your server and your WordPress install, so hang on to it!

In summary: WordPress 3.1, due in late 2010, will be the last version of WordPress to support PHP 4 and MySQL 4. WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, will require PHP 5.2 or higher, and MySQL 5.0.15 or higher. Install the Health Check plugin to see if you’re ready!

Grandiflora is a boutique florist based in Sydney, Australia. Although you might not have heard of them before, you've probably seen their work in the pages of Vogue, Harpers Bazaar and many other fashion magazines. They've also created the floral design for many celebrity weddings and events in the Australia's premier harbour city.

Recently Grandiflora were interested in updating their identity and marketing (including their website), so they tasked the team at House of Laudanum to create a custom online shopping experience to sell their products online. The previous website was a custom CMS written in Perl and while it did have some e-commerce facilities, it required updating to be a more integrated shopping solution.

Why was Drupal chosen for the project?

Although WordPress was considered early on in the decision making process, the team chose Drupal mainly because of the Ubercart module and some other contributed modules which laid the foundation for the integrated payment solution required for the project.

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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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Dallas, TX - Thursday, July 22, 2010 - MODX, LLC, today released its flagship web content management platform, MODX Revolution 2.0. This release culminates years of effort to completely reinterpreting its award-winning popular Open Source Content Management System (CMS).

MODX Revolution is a customizable content management platform. It is built on a modern, object-oriented core with a fully documented API for developers, sits on top of a robust database Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) layer powered by its sister-project, xPDO (http://xpdo.org/).

"Revolution represents more than three years of work reinventing our classic code base," said Ryan Thrash, CEO of MODX and the project co-founder. "We looked at what was available in both the Open Source and Commercial worlds and thought we could create something truly special and different. We did, and now we're sharing an amazing platform for consuming APIs, managing content and creating custom web applications with the world."

Like previous releases, MODX Revolution 2.0 gives visual designers complete control over the design, content structure and overall usability. Since design is an integral part of user experience and aids in communication, MODX leaves how the site will look, how it's structured and how it behaves up to the project experts. MODX does not impose any restrictions whatsoever in these areas.

Organizations can harness MODX Revolution's power, flexibility and extensibility that is synonymous with prior releases, with the performance, stability and security of enterprise-level content management applications. This includes a new caching system to improve page loads, handle more content and even leverage proven external caching mechanisms like Memcached. Further improvements include security hardening with proactive cross-site scripting prevention (XSS) and input sanitization.

MODX Revolution 2.0 boasts an all new Manager interface built using the Revolution API itself and ExtJS from Sencha. It can be customized to offer a tailored experience for site managers and editors. Features like a drag-and-drop content tree, the ability to incorporate files on the filesystem as content and linking to external content in the content structure, means controlling content is encompassing and unrestricted.

MODX Revolution 2.0 further introduces Contexts which offer a way to run multiple websites, different language versions, provide additional organizational structure, or even a custom Manager interface. Contexts bring another layer of flexibility and capability to MODX developers.

"Revolution is our future," said Thrash. "To borrow from Spinal Tap, it takes everything people love about MODX to eleven. Not only that, but it can be tailored to your exact requirements even changing how it functions while still maintaining an upgrade path for future versions or migration from our classic code base."

The latest release of MODX Revolution be downloaded for free at http://modxcms.com/download/

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After reviewing 240 sessions submitted for the conference, the track chairs, the Copenhagen team and the Drupal Association are proud to present the DrupalCon Copenhagen program.

The total of 94 sessions is made up of 83 regular sessions, 6 platinum sponsor sessions, 3 keynotes and 2 rounds of lightning talks.

The session selection accounts for many factors including attendee votes, addressing the breadth of interests of DrupalCon attendees, and providing a balanced and compelling program. For example, some sessions were picked because they were essential for introducing new developers to Drupal, other sessions were selected because they present important local Drupal business cases, etc.

If you proposed a session that didn't make it into the program, please consider presenting it at the Unconference on August 23rd or run it as a Birds of a Feather session. We will be adding more information about these options to the website in the coming weeks.

You can either see the sessions selected for each track below, or take a look at the program overview. Please bear in mind that this is not the final program and that sessions are likely to be moved around as we refine it.

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Over the last few months we've been interviewing developers who have worked on widely popular Joomla sites. However, not every successful Joomla developer has sites with a shelf full of awards or 5 million visitors per month.

We're now going to turn our attention to other types of successful web design firms. We're particularly interested in how people make a living with Joomla. In a new series of interviews we're going to investigate how people like you are able to leverage Joomla, start their own businesses, become independent or work to achieve other goals.

First we interviewed Allie Whitney from Global Nomad. She works with unemployed locals on the Tibetan Plateau in western China, providing free training and hiring them to become Joomla web developers.

This week we're talking about a similar topic, interviewing Jen Kramer from 4Web, Inc about how she succeeds with her Joomla business despite living in a small, rural town.

We are located in Keene, New Hampshire in the United States. It is a small town of 20,000 people located in the southwestern corner of New Hampshire. Keene is the “big city” in this region. You have to drive 50-60 miles to reach New Hampshire’s largest cities (Concord, Manchester, and Nashua) and roughly 100 miles to Boston. Keene State College is one of our major employers.

4Web is run by Jen has been working with Joomla since the Mambo days. Prior to owning 4Web, Jen worked as a freelancer from 2000-2008 under her previous business, Focused Consulting LLC. Initially she built a lot of Dreamweaver sites but made the switch to Mambo in 2005. Heidi was one of Jen’s star students at Marlboro College Graduate School, where she graduated in 2008. Heidi has worked part-time for 4Web for the past year.

The Community Leadership Team has created a relief system for the backlog of Joomla User Group (JUG) submissions and correspondence. We would like your help to make this work though.

As of right now, if you are on the waiting list of people who have not heard back about a JUG submission, We have a new form that we ask you to fill out at your earliest convenience.

Resubmit your application using  JUG Submission Form

We know you are tired of forms!  So are we.  For now though this is only a stop gap solution while we work on something more permanent and efficient for all.  We feel this new form can be processed on our end much faster than the current system.

We would appreciate any feedback you have to offer in the JUGs People.Joomla group.

Thank you for your patience! Joomla User Groups make up a valuable component of our community. We appreciate your continued efforts and we look forward to working with you as we resolve this issue as quickly and effectively as possible.

At the Drupal Association retreat in San Francisco, the general assembly set the completion of the drupal.org redesign as its number one priority for 2010. The assembly agreed to fund five contracts to help eliminate obstacles that had prevented the community from completing the redesign.

Five key roles were identified: Architect, Solr developer, Project module developer, and an infrastructure developer. The association also elected to upgrade Drupal.org code repository from CVS to Git to help maintain Drupal.org as the hub of Drupal development.

Job descriptions were developed in conjunction with both the redesign volunteers and the Drupal.org project managers, Kieran Lal, Chris Strahl, and Lisa Rex. The job descriptions were then posted to groups.drupal.org for 3 weeks. Approximately 35 applications were received and a dozen interviews were conducted by the project management team. The contracts were negotiated with Drupal Association Interim General Manager Jacob Redding, to whom the project team reports directly. Contractors work day-to-day with the project management team. The association will pay for the contract work using the funds raised through memberships, advertising, partnerships, affiliates, and DrupalCon sponsorships.

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It's been a long time coming, but we finally have news on our next version of ocPortal. 

We had planned to be releasing 4.4 but we've decided to head straight for version 5, and now we are within a few days of releasing it.

And what a version 5 we have for you!

Version 5 brings ocPortal right up alongside the most beautiful CMS packages out there, and drives straight past without stopping. We've reviewed everything, gone right back to the drawing board (Photoshop) in many cases, as well as injecting the latest display and interface technology.

We could show you a number of before and after pictures, but pictures alone don't really do ocPortal 5 justice. We have decided to create a preview video of some of the main changes, because from a few pictures you might think we had just tidied things up a bit. This to be fair, is in some sense true, because when we design ocPortal we have to make sure we don't project too specific a design concept onto people's unique sites. We've done far more than that though, as the following video demonstrates…http://bit.ly/ocportal5

Version 5 isn't just about graphics. It's also about addons, dozens of them, which we have lined up waiting for release. I promise you'll be blown away: we've really gone the extra mile to design a set of addons that encompass the best of what can be achieved on the Internet today.

Version 5 isn't just about graphics and addons. It's also about features. We've implemented dozens of new features, usability improvements, and also bug fixes. All this without breaking anything except theme compatibility.

Version 5 isn't just about graphics and addons and features. It's also about something else which we've been working on in secret for months and will change everything for ocPortal users… but we're not ready to announce that yet.

ocPortal Version 5 release candidate will be released on Thursday 22nd of July. 

Washington, DC – Jahia (http://www.jahia.com), the premier provider of web content integration software, combining web, document, and portal features, today announced three new client wins in the cloud, brought on by Jahia Partner R.Ø.S.A. Creation. Technology. Intelligence. AG: Kuoni Travel Ltd., Sunrise Communications AG, Bellevue Group AG. Jahiahas experienced a growing acceptance for hosted web content management, even in conservative industries like banking and finance for both corporate websites and Intranet projects. Jahia in the Cloud runs on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) platform, addressing the needs of organizations for a proven preconfigured solution without the associated constraints and costs. The hosted service is offered on an annual subscription basis.

"We have implemented 3 web content management sites within the travel, finance, and telecom industries. These industries are obviously looking for lean and efficient solutions, but also those that provide excellent usability.Jahia’s cloud offerings allowed us to create, implement and roll out those enterprise class WCM portals in a very efficient and affordable fashion within just a few months. Those businesses can now easily scale their web applications on the cloud and the operational cost is very low. We strongly believe in the partnership with Jahia and their cloud offering," said Marky Goldstein, CEO of R.Ø.S.A.

“Cloud deployments are the fastest growing segment of our business – hosted web content management is truly coming of age,” said Tristan Renaud, Vice President of Jahia Solutions Group. “More and more of our new customers – and even some of our existing ones – are asking ‘Why should I deploy and manage Jahia when I can get the same services online?’ Jahia Enterprise Edition on Amazon EC2 is reliable, flexible, and secure – plus you never have to worry about keeping your system up to date. The clincher is that it scales on the fly, so you only pay for the resources you need.”

Jahia in the Cloud employs Amazon EC2 to provide enterprise clients with complete control of variable computing resources in a proven cloud-computing environment. The Jahia Cloud Edition combines an efficient WCM with flexible resource allocations while maintaining a consistent level of service, resulting in lower, long-term costs.To learn more about how your organization can benefit from Jahia in the Cloud, please visit http://www.jahia.com/cloud

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