CMS Weekly

Archive for October, 2009

CMS Weekly Episode 39

CMSW2009-10-19

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• Soapbox CMS
• WordPress as a CMS
• Drupal Open Atrium

CMS Weekly is a Technology Podcast with news from the world of Content Management and Enterprise Social Networking

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Time to Grow the Show

by Kara Karsten
The recent Blogworld and New Media Expo provided some great interaction and chance to look at the evolution of CMS Weekly. During the next few weeks, you will be seeing some changes in the web site and the show format that should provide some new and useful content.

Stay tuned !

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CMS Weekly Episode 38

CMSW2009-10-12

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• EC2 Hammered in DDOS Attack
• Alfresco Takes to the Cloud
• Meaning from DAM Statistics

CMS Weekly is a Technology Podcast with news from the world of Content Management and Enterprise Social Networking

Subscribe to CMS Weekly via iTunes

small>Prefer a Direct Download ? (mp3)

If a news item has disappeared from the Del.icio.us list above, try the full list here.

SEARCH ANY STORY YOU HEAR ON THE PODCAST

Scalability Rules – In Cloud or In Hardware

by Andrew McCaskey
The HP Tech Day had some deep dive content that kept a number of the invited guests busy – for example, Ben Rockwood http://www.cuddletech.com/blog wanted to dispense with the GUI’s, spend the day on the command line and with ample supplies of coffee get to the bottom of all this.

Since I’m not a professional IT admin, that had a little less appeal – although to be honest, I was able to follow the demos at the command line as well or better than the GUI based ones – I think simply because it was in smaller chunks.

What I did get from Richard Warham’s talk on Adaptive Infrastructure was a sense of how HP has implemented the scalability of resources for front end, middleware, and back end database processing and how a cleverly set up SuperDome system with multiple cells, processors and memory can flex with demand, order level, web traffic and database calls dynamically. Old school “more blades” thinking reminds me of Scotty on Star Trek, throwing in more crystals and hoping that it holds together through the attack. The new scalable resources mode seems a lot more elegant.

The other connection made for me was the similarity to Amazon’s EC2 cloud based service – exactly the same notion of allowing developers to have a variety of images or templates for highly tweaked configurations – to be called up at will – allowing production and dev sites to be resident on the same hardware.

The final wrap-up with the business case from John Pickett told about a customer that had 30 different OS variants/patch levels/versions deployed – each reduced into an image template that salvaged original investment in code – but allowed the savings in energy costs and maintainability.

Responsiveness, control and speed – the best of all three.

HP SuperDome Server Cell Module

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Congrats @jeffotts01; wins Packt author of the year for Alfresco book
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

The CMS and ECM World has a number of well recognized authors, from the publishing house Packt (pronounced Packed, as in packed with information.) The Author of the Year Award announced by Packt goes to Jeff Potts for his Alfresco Developer Guide.

The award was determined first by readers nominating their preferred candidates, with the final decision being made by a panel of judges. The final nominees were 6 books on such diverse topics as Drupal, Javascript and SOA.
Aaron Winborn for Drupal Multimedia;
Matt Butcher for Learning Drupal 6 Module Development;
Shea Fredrick, Colin Ramsay and Steve “Cutter” Blades jointly for Learning Ext JS;
Stoyan Stefanov for Object-Oriented JavaScript;
Vincenzo Caselli,
Binildas A. Christudas,
Malhar Barai jointly for Service Oriented Architecture with Java.

Packt is a print on demand publishing company based in Birmingham, UK. Founded in 2004 as an independent company, they focus on supporting and promoting Open Source. In 2008, Packt’s donations to Open Source Projects broke the $100,000 barrier. Next contest at packtpub – 2009 Open Source CMS Award. More details at http://www.packtpub.com/award.

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KnowledgeTree®Partners with Zend to Enhance Its Enterprise Grade PHP Application
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

In a recent episode we introduced KnowledgeTree, an Enterprise CMS best known for its easy installation. Today we share news of a recently announced partnership between KnowledgeTree and Zend Technologies.

KnowledgeTree 3.7, available in Q4 2009, will be deployed on Zend Server, a widely used enterprise grade PHP server. In the CMS Report announcement, Zend Technologies is described as “the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications.”

Early tests show that KnowledgeTree runs 40 percent faster on Zend Server. In addition to speed and performance, Zend Server also delivers reliability.

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“Perfect storm” brewing within the workforce
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

Social media expert Tod Maffin says companies are about to face a mass exodus of employees due to a kind of perfect storm brewing within two key generations of employees. Baby Boomers set to retire en masse, companies are going to have to find ways to replace them with younger employees,- “But that particular crop of employees – the ‘Facebook Generation’ – is as likely to walk out the back door as easily as they came in the front.”

Maffin says these twenty-something employees present an entirely new set of challenges for employers – and that companies need to take an entirely new approach to managing their needs and retaining their services. Two of the recommendations in the article:

Give Them Your Trust: Young people born between 1980 and 1990 were raised by Generation X parents who gave them unprecedented levels of trust. Misguided attempts at increasing productivity, like blocking Facebook and instant-messenger programs, scream “We don’t trust you!” to this group of workers (it’s like blocking telephone calls).

Focus on Team-Based Solutions: That’s the way they were taught all through school – it was all about group projects, not individual reports. Engage them in group projects and let them play an active role in that process.

Consider giving them a box of their own personalized business cards on day one.

Invest in Technology: Your technology must at least keep pace with what this generation uses at home.

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Prepare Your Site for Traffic Spikes with BrowserMob
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

CMS Wire says it best: If It Crashes, They Can’t Come.

If your website is your company, then having it go down for any period of time can cripple you. Huge interest in your site can see the server(s) unable to cope with demand. A new company, Browsermob, does exactly that.

Others simulate HTTP traffic; we emulate user behavior, making AJAX load testing trivial# Simulate 2,000 VUs for only $150. See exactly how your users experience your site when stressed. Create a set of tests in BrowserMob’s Selenium IDE and get a MySQL report full of statistics such as response time, throughput and error rates. It even returns screenshots of errors. Control 2K+ real browsers; 25K+ virtual users.

Then there is the ongoing monitoring. It checks your site with real browsers in the cloud. It alerts you when your site experiences problems. It’s built for complex websites (ie: AJAX, Flash, etc) and is affordable: get started for as little as $1 per day. Try the free test at browsermob.com. Or jump right in and purchase a package starting at $150.

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Alfresco Launches Cloud Content Application Developer Program
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

Alfresco will provide an open source Amazon EC2-ready stack and developer kit for customers and partners to develop, deploy and monetize cloud service architecture content applications on the EC2 platform.

The Alfresco Cloud Developer Program, offering “early adopter” advantages to its partners to deliver cloud-ready content applications for collaboration, document and records management. Alfresco will also offer a subscription for those requiring expert Enterprise 24/7 support.

According to the study “Above the Clouds: a Berkeley View of Cloud Computing,” the cost of cloud computing is one-fifth to one-seventh of that offered to a medium sized data center. By promoting the CMIS standard and making it easy to get on board the cloud, Alfresco is providing a great service to promote the success of their ECM solution. Sounds like a winning combination.

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New #Joomla Book by Daniel Chapman: “Joomla Customization” for intermediate users
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

First book from Ninja Forge and Daniel Chapman has been released – “Joomla 1.5 Customization: Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs”. Daniel admits that the book came about from his frustration with fixing the same simple mistakes on web page after web page. Filling in a gap, this book is aimed at the intermediate Joomla developer.

> Pick the right extensions for your site
> Plan and implement advanced configurations for extensions
> Identify and use the right tools to speed up site development
> Modify module, plugin and component functionality to suit your needs
> Modify extension and template appearances to suit your needs
> Diagnose and fix common problems on Joomla! sites.

The book is selling for $30, $15 for the on-line version. And you get 15 percent off with the Joomla15-DC coupon code. That’s a lot cheaper than hiring Daniel to fix your site. He says he’d rather add fantastic new features to his extensions.

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Drupal Code Freeze Update – 82 Weeks + a Slushy
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

After 82 weeks of development, Drupal 7 hit the goal: September 7 code freeze. The current phase is called code slush and will span 5 weeks.

During Code Slush, only patches with no new functionality will be accepted into the code stream, with a few exceptions. “Important and necessary” API changes are still allowed, as are improvements to usability, accessibility, performance, and documentation.

Drupal module developers, into overdrive testing custom code with the new base. The D7CX Movement (Drupal 7 Contributed Modules) is an initiative to have 40 modules upgraded and solid at release time. drupal.org has a list of the 40 popular modules in the D7CX Movement. See drupal.org/node/578446 for more code freeze details.

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LinearCube Debuts SaaS Document Management Based on Alfresco
Transcript From Episode CMSW2009-09-21

If you are not quite as adventurous, you might consider a SaaS solution – and with a 30 day trial and pricing starting at $99 a month, it could be a very cost effective solution.

LinearCube, a new offering built for the SMB market, has a pretty high quality core — it’s built on the Alfresco open source document management solution.

Associate multiple files with a single document type (i.e. an RFP Package). No file size limit.

Tag documents with one or more keywords to group related documents and improve document searching.

Enable full document version control with “check-in” and “check-out” functionality.

Microsoft Office Integration — check-in, check-out documents directly within Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Rollback to older revision or purge certain revisions

Associate documents with other records managed in LinearCube along with e document-specific comments and discussions via linked discussion threads containing text, images, links, tables, etc.

As a service – there is no long term contract – so that might be attractive as well. LinearCube’s capabilities fall in line with many other hosted document management systems such as Xythos, KnowledgeTree, SharePoint Online, SpringCM and others.

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