Today's Wall Street Journal has a great article regarding an employee swap between Procter & Gamble and Google, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation.  The motivation behind the swap was to spur innovation between the two companies.

Google would like to have a bigger slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual advertisement budget and better understand the needs of traditional consumer-market companies.  Meanwhile P&G still spends most of it's advertisement dollars in traditional media with as little as 2% of its ad budget online does need some help in making the leap online.

What impressed me most in the story was just how much companies such as Google and P&G are in two different worlds.

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Just over a month ago, we announced that we opened up editing rights to much of the handbooks for all users on Drupal.org. Our one month trial period is over and the Documentation team has decided that overall it has been a success. We have seen many more edits and fixes in the handbook and, while we did see some limited mess to clean up, occurrences of vandalism (or playing around) were relatively uncommon. We feel, at this time, that open editing is a significant benefit to our handbooks. We have decided to leave open editing in place, with no further defined trial periods. Keep editing away!

In addition to helping out with fixing pages, we also need many eyes on the edits themselves. Anyone can review recent edits and check out the diffs. If you notice something awry about an edit, you can simply fix it by editing or, if you are a member of the documentation team, you can select the "revert" operation from the Revisions tab to undo the change.

This process did raise other discussions related to various improvements we could make to help track edits and thoughts about how the new page creation management, versus editing, could be improved. Feel free to join in those ongoing tasks and discussions. The next IRC meeting will be tomorrow, November 20 at 18:00 GMT (1 p.m. EST, 10 a.m. PST) and all are welcome. For more info on documentation activites and projects, check out our group.

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The November 17, 2008 print edition of InformationWeek has an excellent article regarding the inroads Open Source Software is making into the enterprise.  Drupal and Alfresco are featured as the CMSs that are making serious inroads in the enterprise arena.  As a matter of fact, the Drupal logo is the centerpiece of the print editon's cover graphic.

The link below is to an extract of the CMS portion of the article. To get comprehensive view of the article as a whole, try and get a look a the print edition if you can.

Complete Story

The community has voted, and the votes have been tallied. The winner of Project Icon, with 35% of the votes, is Entry ID “BD,” otherwise known as Ben Dunkle. Congratulations, Ben! The runner-up was VS, otherwise known as Verena Segert, so we’ll be attaching that set to the alternate color palette that is selectable from the profile screen. As we prepare for RC1, Ben and Verena will be revising a couple of their icons so that both sets will use the same metaphors, creating the colored “on” states, and creating the larger size of each icon for use in the h2 screen headers. We are very grateful to have had the opportunity to select from so many great options, and would like to express again our appreciation for all the designers who participated in the contest. Thanks also to the more than 3700 people who completed the voting survey and took the time to weigh on on the individual icon sets.

Q.18 Which one of the sets do you think we should use as a basis for the 2.7 icons? Icon Set # of votes % of votes BD 1285 35% VS 1080 29% GB2 424 11% OSD 376 10% LS 300 8% GB1 235 6%

The wide lead of BD and VS made it clear that voters had a clear preference for these sets.

Q.20 If you could choose a runner-up, which would you choose? Icon Set # of votes % of votes VS 916 27% BD 647 19% LS 522 16% OSD 488 14% GB2 462 14% GB1 331 10%

Question 20 was not mandatory, so a few hundred people skipped it, but the responses we did get (3366 of them) reinforced the fact that the two most popular sets were also the most popular 2nd choices, which made the decision of the judges to go with the popular vote an easy one (take that, electoral college!).

A few of the individual icon metaphors also had a significant lead over the other choices.
Dashboard: 1333 voters (40%) chose a house as the best metaphor. We agree, so both Ben and Verena will be replacing their Dashboard icons.

Media: 2097 voters (65%) chose the combination camera + musical note icon, which was part of Ben’s set. We also really loved it, and Verena will amend her media icon to incorporate this idea.

Plugins: 1682 voters (53%) selected the outlet plug metaphor, which both Ben and Verena used in their sets.

Tools: 1581 voters (49%) liked the combination of two tools better than anything else, so Ben and Verena will try this approach.

So those are the results, and soon you’ll see the new icons coming to a 2.7 installation near you.

Need another look at the entries to remember which one you liked best? Here are some reminder images, as well as the identity of each set’s creator.

BD was Ben Dunkle, a designer, professor and artist from upstate/western New York State. In case you’ve already forgotten, Ben’s icon set is the winner of Project Icon and will become the default icon set after a few minor changes. VS was Verena Segert, our runner-up, a designer from Germany who presented sets in both grayscale and blue. Her blue icons received more specific voter comments than the gray ones, so we’re planning the second color palette to be in shades of blue so that we can use the blue icon set. GB was Guillaume Berry, a designer from France who submitted two sets in the same style in order to propose a couple of different metaphors. One of his sets came in third while the other came in last, but whether you only look at the higher scoring set or you combine their votes, Guillaume had the next highest percentage of votes, and many people liked the metaphors he used for various icons. In fact, given the enthusiasm of the community for Guillaume’s icons, we think a great plugin would be one that would allow the user to upload the icon set of their choice. Any volunteers? OSD was the Open Source Design class at Parson’s in New york City, taught by Mushon Zer-Aviv and consisting of students Alexandra Zsigmond, Ed Nacional, Karen Messing, Khurram Bajwa, Leonie Leibenfrost. Teacher and students worked together to determine their metaphors and visual style. LS was Luke Smith, a designer from Iowa who specializes in icons among his other design pursuits.

If you need to hire an icon designer any time soon, we highly recommend our Project Icon contestants, who all delivered great work in a very short timeframe. It was great to work with all of them, even for such a short assignment.

So, to sum up:

1. The winning icon sets by Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert will be incorporated into WordPress 2.7 RC1.
2. Someone should write a plugin that would allow anyone to upload a custom icon set (I bet the other contestants could be convinced to release their icon sets for such a purpose).
3. 2.7 is still trucking away, but we can always use help with patches, especially for IE6! (I know, that wasn’t in the main post, but it’s true, so hmph)

Thanks again to everyone who participated in this experiment, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And congratulations again to Ben and Verena!

Alex S. wrote to us and and recommended that everyone take a look at MyBB, a Web forum application.

I noticed MyBB isn't on your CMS Focus list.  I would recommend you looking into it as it is an amazing system.  It even just went open source recently.

But, don't take my word for it KDE is now using it them selves.  It's new compared to SMF and phpBB but it's already competing with the best (including IPB and vB).

http://mybboard.net/

I'm not a developer or anything.  Just recommend this amazing forum system with a bright future.

While I make no promises on getting MyBB into CMS Focus, I do think it is time to take a new look at SMF, phpBB, vB, and the new comers.  Perhaps in a couple days we'll see if it is time for another forum application to knock SMF off the top 30 CMS list.  May the best forum software win...

WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 has been released for your testing pleasure. Here are some of the changes since Beta 2 (over 160 changes in total):

• Numerous style improvements and refinements.
• All admin notices now go under the page title.
• PHP Notice fixes.
• Dashboard widget options now properly save.
• Menu fixes.
• New design for Quick Edit.
• Canonical feed URL fixes.
• Walker fixes.
• An update for Hello Dolly.
• Plugin installer updates.
• Numerous font updates.
• Updated login logo.
• Switch position of “Save Draft” and “Preview” buttons in publish module.
• File upload support for MS Office 2007+ file formats.
• Media upload buttons won’t show if the user doesn’t have the upload capability.
• Canonical redirects only do yes-www or no-www redirection for domains.
• Shift-click checkbox range selection improvement.
• Add New User page now separate.
• Tag suggest only suggests tags (not other taxonomy terms).
• QuickPress shows “Submit for Review” if user cannot publish.
• Private posts/pages, and password-protected posts/pages are rolled into new “Visibility” section of publish module.

If you have already installed Beta 1 or Beta 2, you can update to Beta 3 via the Tools -> Update menu. If you have problems, or if this is your first time in the 2.7 beta ring, you can download and upgrade the old fashioned way.

Get 2.7 Beta 3.

The Inspiron Mini 12, Dell's biggest netbook, is now available to order!  Almost one month ago, CMS Report was the first to break the news that Dell was readying their site for the release of the Mini 12.  Current prices of selected configurations range from $549 to $649 which is about the expected price of this netbook.

Microsoft's Vista Home Basic is currently the only operating system available for the Mini 12.  However, Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP on the Mini 12 are expected by the end of the year.

For the OS-minded shopper, the Mini 12 currently comes with Windows Vista Home Basic, but expect Ubuntu and Windows XP versions by the end of the year.

With a starting weight of only 2.72 lbs. and only 0.92 in. thick, current standard features on the Inspiron Mini 12 include a built-in webcam, 1GB of RAM, built-in Bluetooth and 802.11b/g wireless, a sharp 12.1‑inch WXGA display and an ample keyboard.

I will personally be waiting for the Ubuntu version of the Mini 12 to be released before I make my order.  I will be curious though how users will review the Vista version of the Mini 12 as I would worry about performance issues.  More curious is when we'll see the first hacked Mini 12 running Mac's OS 10.x similar to what we saw with the Mini 9.

Alexandria, VA - November 6, 2008 -- Bitrix Site Manager latest module will add that zing to your portal's Social Networking capabilities.

Bitix Inc., a pioneer in developing content management applications, today announced the launch of the Social Network Module. This module will raise the performance bar for all social networking portals and empower them with some of the most exciting and innovative features ever offered on online Social networking portals.

Very simple to setup and install, the module will allow any sized social networking portal to quickly add multiple functionalities to their portal. The module allows multi-user functionalities including access levels for restriction and content privacy. Users can also upload and share all types of media like pictures, video, etc.

The portal also allows hosting and sharing of audio files. Talk about setting up a new social network for budding musicians!

Some of the exciting features include:

• A full fledged social network technology architecture
• Ability to create and manage multiple forums
• Ability to launch and moderate multiple blogs on different categories
• Moderated photo gallery that can run competition and quizzes
  

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Team Lullabot is really excited to unveil O'Reilly Media's first Drupal book, Using Drupal, due out next month. (BTW, that's a dormouse on the cover. :)) The book is written against Drupal 6.

Our motivation for writing this book was that most peoples' first experience with Drupal involves getting it installed successfully, but then being left with the question, "What next?" Using Drupal is all about answering this question. It shows in a practical, hands-on way how to combine over thirty of Drupal's contributed modules to build Drupal websites that can do things ranging from product reviews to event management to e-commerce, all through configuration with as little coding as possible. You can also think of it as a field guide to CCK and Views, since almost all chapters build on those base modules.

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Earlier in the beta period, we put out a call here on the development blog for designers in the WordPress community who might be interested in designing custom icons for the 2.7 admin interface. Over a dozen icon designers from around the world responded, so rather than choose just one, we decided to turn the icon design assignment into a contest so that more people could participate and the community could have a vote in what the new icons should look like.

Once we decided to go with a contest format instead of a single-designer gig, about half the original volunteers changed their minds. The remaining designers each submitted two icons (Posts, Links) in their proposed style. At this stage a couple of designers were thanked for their submissions but eliminated from the competition because their icons were considered too far afield from the WordPress visual style. The remaining designers were given feedback on the icons they had submitted and given about a week to complete the icon set for the menu as well as the list/excerpt icons that are shown on the Edit Posts screen. All but one of these designers finished a complete set, giving us five sets in total.

So now we need to choose a direction. For each of the icon sets, we’ll show you the set itself, the designer’s introduction, and some feedback from the lead developers. After you’ve reviewed all five, place your vote for the set you think has the visual style that is the most suitable for WordPress 2.7. This will be followed by additional votes on specific icons, so if you like the specific image used in one set but like the style of another, you can vote to change the metaphor for a given icon. You’ll also be able to leave general feedback throughout the voting process. When voting has concluded, we’ll review the comments and the votes, and will declare a winner.

Things to bear in mind when making your selections:
A week is not a long time to create 13 icons. The winning set will undergo a revision to be refined, and some icons may be substituted. We asked for all icons in grayscale for the contest. An “on” state and a larger size for screen headers will be designed by the winner. It seemed like too much work to have everyone do multiple states for so many icons.

Ready? Go and take the icon survey. (The survey has now been closed.) Voting will remain open for 48 hours from the time of this post to allow people from all time zones a chance to participate before we close the survey and make a decision (since we’d like to include the new icons in Beta 3).

A Note Regarding the 2.7 Release Date:
As we approach Beta 3, bug tickets continue to be added to Trac, the pain of making things look good in IE6 continues to be felt, and the need to improve accessibility looms. If you love WordPress, are a decent coder, and want to contribute like these icon designers contributed, please consider contributing a patch to help with one of these efforts. Jump right in on current Trac tickets, or pop into the #wordpress-dev IRC channel to ask what to do.

A recent blog post from Sarah Parez tries to answer some "want-to-know" questions on the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications.  With software as a service becoming more popular, Google has quickly become a competitor of Microsoft's Office Suite with its Google Docs.  Microsoft is aggressively fighting back by making its Office software available via the Web browser.

According to Perez's post, Microsoft's Office Web Applications will not only be available in Internet Explorer, but also Safari and Firefox.  Office Web will also be compatible on the Linux and Mac platforms.  Some of the specific answers Sarah Parez gives in her blog post:

Q: Do the Office Web Applications require Internet Explorer?

A: No! Office Web applications will work across multiple platforms and browsers including Safari and Firefox, too.

Q: Will the Office Web Applications work on the iPhone?

A: Yes, in the Safari web browser.

Q : Is Silverlight required in order to use the Office Web Applications?

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In 2006, the Prisma Presse media group renewed its publishing focus on the Web. Today, its Web strategy continues to be successful with eZ Publish as its platform of choice for Internet portals and intranet sites.

Currently, Prisma Presse has 20 publications, including 5 weekly titles, 2 bi-weekly titles, 11 monthly titles, and 2 bi-monthly titles. Prisma Presse has 872 employees and distributes more than 280 million magazines every year. Among the more well-known titles are : VSD, Capital, Management, Femme Actuelle, National Geographic, Gala, and GEO. 

Read the whole story on www.ez.no

Sense/Net, the open-source ECM and portal building specialist, has implemented a prototype of the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) open standard in its Sense/Net 6.0 product.

The new version of Sense/Net 6.0 sees the Content Repository featuring a CMIS-compliant interface, while the portal will have a CMIS client portlet.

CMIS, developed to allow greater interoperability between CMS systems, databases and repositories, will mean a far easier job for web developers working with disparate systems, according to Tamas Biro, co-founder of Sense/Net.

“Interoperability is critical for all IT projects at the moment, particularly as heightened M&A piles more and more pressure on tech teams to sort out integration issues,” said Biro. “CMIS removes the boundaries between content sources and management systems and gives developers more freedom to pick and choose technologies.”

Sense/Net is offering a CMIS-enabled demo version of Sense/Net 6.0 at http://cmis.sensenet.hu. Source code for Sense/Net 6 and the CMIS prototype is available from http://www.sensenet.hu/download

“We want people to download, test and report back on their findings on this ‘community edition’ of Sense/Net 6.0,” Biro added. “For the first time, content management on .NET is freed from the constraints of SharePoint to compete on its own merits. We’re sure this will be a move that is reflected across the industry.”

The XOOPS Project, world’s leading Open Source CMS (Content Management System), has released recently the newest version of its award winning software – XOOPS 2.3.1.

The Project Leader, Mr. Jiang Taiwen, stated that this release is significant for two reasons: (1) it is merging the two existent XOOPS branches of 2.0 and 2.2 and (2) it is building a bridge towards the next generation of XOOPS – version 3.0.

The major improvements are addition of Extended Profile and Private Messages modules, and standardizing on one Extended DHTML editor as the default across all XOOPS modules. The administrators will also enjoy the addition of EXM Admin GUI.

There are always two perspectives to a “Content Management System” – the developer’s side, and the user’s side. And XOOPS 2.3 is breaking some more new grounds in both areas for the XOOPS community.

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"I did a little searching and found some relevant posts on this question.

The plural of CMS is CMSs. The possessive plural is CMSs’.

That’s my story and I’m sticking with it."

-John DeRosa, Plone advocate, The plural of CMS, November 10, 2008

Yes, your host has been very bad in answering his email.  So we continue to make good by giving everyone their 15 minutes here at CMS Report.  Some of these CMS we'll cover more in dept at a later date.  Rita, an advocate for FatWire writes:

Do you cover WCM? By way of background, FatWire Software provides industry-leading web experience management (WEM) solutions that enable organizations to deliver a rich online experience to users and to simplify management of their web presence.

FatWire offers a comprehensive portfolio including best-in-class WCM and targeted marketing technologies, plus enterprise 2.0 collaboration and content integration capabilities.

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I spent part of the weekend clearing my emails.  Ron Moravek sent me an email about his company's all-inclusive Sitemasher.

Hello, we are a relatively new product that includes both a professional design tool and a full featured CMS. We would like to get evaluated when you get a moment....:)
www.sitemasher.com

Ron, to be honest, I have quite a few CMS related articles to write about and I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to review your Sitemasher.  However, this is a good chance to give readers the opportunity to hear more about Sitemasher.  From the overview page:

A complete website solution. One online platform.

Website builder + content management + analytics + search engine optimization + managed hosting!

Sitemasher provides a fully managed, hosted website solution that seamlessly integrates a website building and publishing environment, a content management system (CMS), analytics, and search engine optimization (SEO)…all within a single platform. 

More details about the features of the Sitemasher platform.

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The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.8 [Wohnaiki]. This release contains a number of bug fixes and two moderate-level security fixes. It has been around two months since Joomla 1.5.7 was released on September 9, 2008. The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community. 

Download Click here to download Joomla 1.5.8 (Full package) » Click here to find an update package. »
Instructions

• New installation and technical requirements
• Upgrade from an existing Joomla 1.5 version
• Migration from Joomla! 1.0.x

Want to test drive Joomla? Try the online demo. Documentation is available for beginners.

Release Notes Check the Joomla 1.5.8 Post-Release Notes to see if there are important items and helpful hints discovered after the release.

View past release notes for Joomla 1.5.7 or release notes for Joomla 1.5.6.

Security

• Two moderate-level security issues were fixed in this release:
  
  • Default filtering for content
  • Filtering for Web Link descriptions

For additional information, visit the Joomla Security Center. Components

• Articles: Remove brackets around Last Updated date and time, Start Publishing date corrections for other than UTC 00:00, hit counts correct for Articles, adding a space after a cloaked email address
• E-mail addresses: Correctly cloaked when presented in Section and Category descriptions
• Categories: Edit icon correctly shows for Articles without Title links, Print icon correct now on first page for Blog Layout
• Sections: Plural and singular form correction, Category link properly ended, Router changes reverted to version 1.5.6 so Article ID does not append to the Article slug
• Frontpage: Article assignment correction, corrected number of Links
• Contacts: Image display correction when Image Directory is configured
• RSS Feed: Corrected spelling of Category in Category feed
• User: Added isInternal checking on referer values
• Weblinks: Language strings

Modules

• Feed: Target attribute validation, language string correction
• Login: ItemID is preserved on redirect
• Menu: Changing Menu Link Type now functions properly, Section Language string, Article Reset button working
• Related Items: Keyword matching functions correctly and filters characters appropriately
• Stats: Corrected Time
• Sections: No authorization parameter works correctly
• Search: Form validates correctly for Transitional xHTML

Legacy

• Return statement added for Legacy Menu Check

Templates

• Beez: Lengthened E-mail Content Popup, Search button now works when pressed, password reset works correctly, corrections to Beez HTML folders, User details page corrected
• JA_Purity: Added missing language strings

Administrator

• Console: Added "Welcome to Joomla!" information and Joomla Security RSS feeds to Administrator Console
• Installation: Proper deletion of component directories, default entries for Templates and Languages are now correct for uninstall
• Media Manager: Changed default for new sites to disable Flash multi-file uploader due to incompatibility with Flash 10
• Installation: Remove confusing error message about language files for extension installations, Administrator Modules now correctly uninstall INI files
• Sample data: Updated news feeds to point to free software community sites, extensive corrections and updates to sample content

System

• API: JFolder::files and JFolder::folders corrections for Search, missing Method added to JRecordSet, Database Class correctly quotes names not using dot notation, JTableUser matches using the correct number of fields
• Cache: Correct undefined variable in Cache Class
• Language file: Corrected wording, correct installation of PDF fonts independent of language choices, several language string corrections in en-GB.ini
• Menu: Performance improvements for sites with many menu items
• Users: Temporary Users are now able to logout, secure protocol can now be used when editing account details
• Added PHP 4 compatibility for isInternal checking

Statistics

Statistics for the 1.5.8 release period:

• Joomla 1.5.8 contains:
  • 71 issues fixed in SVN
  • 26 commits
• Tracker activity resulted in a net decrease of 4 active issues:
  • 65 new reports
  • 130 closed
  • 66 fixed in SVN
• At the time the 1.5.8 release was packaged, the tracker had 114 active issues:
  • 44 open
  • 44 confirmed
  • 24 pending

Joomla! Bug Squad

Thanks to the Joomla Bug Squad for their dedicated efforts investigating reports, fixing problems, and applying patches to Joomla. If you find a bug with Joomla, find out more information here on how to report the bug.

Active members of the Joomla Bug Squad during this last release cycle include: Ian MacLennan and Mark Dexter co-leads; Airton Torres, Arno Zijlstra, Akarawuth Tamrareang, Alan Langford, Anthony Ferrara, Amy Stephen, Andrew Eddie, Elin Waring, Ercan Ozkaya, Charl van Niekerk, Gergo Erdosi, Hannes Papenberg, Jennifer Marriott, Jens-Christian Skibakk, Jonah Braun, Joseph LeBlanc, Kevin Devine, Marijke Stuivenberg, Mati Kochen, Mickael Maison, Robin Muilwijk, Samuel Moffatt, Shantanu Bala, Toby Patterson, and Wilco Jansen.

A warm welcome to the newest members of the Joomla Bug Squad: Dan Walker, Eduardo Diaz, and Tibor Toth.

It is that time of year again!  I want to change the look and feel here at CMSReport.com.  My current theme, LiteJazz from RoopleTheme, has served me well this past year.  I'm now looking for a theme that provides two columns to the right of the body (content on the left side).  Something along the lines of the contributed Drupal theme Marinelli is what I'm seeking.

If you have a good suggestion for a Drupal 6 theme that you think would be perfect for this site, please leave your suggestion as a comment or contact me. Also, if you are a theme designer, you're welcome to take this opportunity to advertise your product (within moderation of course).  I'd prefer a free theme for my site but I'm always open to a quality theme at the right price.

Together with Leadsure, Joomlatools is pleased to announce the UK's first Joomla Bootcamp. The Bootcamp will be held on the Thursday 11th of December at the Crosby Auditorium in London. This IBM location is well-known for being used in the film set for the James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies", as the headquarters for the media mogul Eliott Carver.

Topics covered include exploration of the new Joomla framework, best practices and tips in developing and deploying sites, building effective SEO into your Joomla site, making sense of the Joomla extension universe, and designing accessible and beautiful sites.

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