Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards
Packt Publishing has anounced the winners in the 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS category of their annual competition. Silverstripe and CMS Made Simple took home first and second place. I am very happy report that MiaCMS came in 3rd place overall tied with another terrific Content Management System named ImpressCMS.
And also kudos to the master, Chad Auld, for being named in Packt Publishing’s 2008 list of “Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems“.
It is absolutely delightful to experience this kind of recognition for our project.
Posted in MiaCMS, News, Open Source | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Link exchange between the sites just don’t cut it anymore. “Cross-site information sharing” paradigm is growing into a greedy monster requiring new ways to expose your content. RSS has been holding up really good in that front. Given that you can put together – mash up- a website filled with thousands of articles in a matter minutes; it seems like, RSS over-accomplished its task. So what’s next ?
Today, core Mambo and Joomla! are both lacking good RSS facilities. You can only share your “Front page content” via RSS in Mambo (probably the same for J!). If you are keeping only one content item with some “never-updated-flashy” short content, your RSS feed is technically useless to the rest of the world. You can find a good RSS extension, which would cover that scenario.
Question
What if you want to expose more from your CMS site ?
Answer:
With the addition of the Brilaps REST API, MiaCMS, Mambo, Joomla! will allow for advanced external interaction. Meaning that interaction with the site and its content no longer has to occur directly through normal browsing methods. For the first time you can start to consume Mambo’s internals as external services via the data type of your choosing (i.e.) JSON, XML, or Serialized PHP.
How?
Brilaps REST API, MOStlyREST provides the com_rest as a base library that takes care of the message receipt and packaging back to the caller. Brilaps also released a few other goodies that goes along with the base implementation that the other 3rd party developers can use as samples or extend from those. com_rest_content and com_rest_stats components sit on top of the base component(com_rest) and expose your “top ranked”, “most popular” articles, or articles for certain sections/categories, or your site stats to any application that’s capable of parsing some simple XML.
Why?
Why do want to REST enable your Mambo or Joomla! site? One simple answer to that is, larger audience. Larger audience is both audience as in visitors and utilizing applications.
A few examples:
- You can have one MiaCMS site as a content repository, and expose parts of content to multiple other sites that you own. See the sample application, SMRC, to imagine different possiblities.
- You can have a widget like Bridget,
that you can distribute to your visitors to track or search your site at the comfort of a desktop application.
- this list can go on and on, but I leave it up to the implementers and site owners imagination
Next?
I believe, REST enabled MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla! sites will change the landscape of the content management landscape covered by MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla!. Indeed, that’s a pretty large landscape. I guess, we just sit back and watch what’s gonna happen next…
For questions and comments about the REST API for MiaCMS, you can visit http://forum.brilaps.com
*Same article is also posted on Chad’s site; http://www.opensourcepenguin.net . If you’d like a take a peek at some other cool stuff, browse on.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, News, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Comparing Open Source Licenses
I StumbledUpon this chart during StumblingUponing. More about it can be found here.
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off
Monday, April 28th, 2008
I recently started writing this article study about Free Open Source Projects and their ways; internally and externally.
My initial goal was to analyze the internal and external dynamics of a FOSS project, especially constitutionalizing the internals, the identify the issues being faced, possible recommendations, outcomes and such.
Now, I am wiping what I’ve done so far, and opening this into a collaborative article. Feel free to add your opinions in the comments section. Once it’s ready to become an actual article/case study, I will contact the posters individually asking for their blessing about adding their pieces in the finalized paper.
Thanks in advance for your input.
Posted in Blog | 5 Comments »
Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Could it get any better ?
WTFPL – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The WTFPL (Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License) is an uncommonly used, extremely permissive free software license. The original Version 1.0 license, released March 2000[2], was written by Banlu Kemiyatorn who used it for Window Maker artwork.[3] Samuel “Sam” Hocevar, a French programmer who was the Debian GNU/Linux project leader from 17 April 2007 to 16 April 2008, wrote version 2.0.[4][5] It allows for redistribution and modification of the software under any terms—the licensee is encouraged to “do what the fuck [they] want to”. The license was approved as a GPL-compatible free software license by the Free Software Foundation.[1]
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
14 rue de Plaisance, 75014 Paris, France
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
MiaCMS released a beta version of the next minor release of the project, version 4.9. The changes for this release are as follows:
General Changes:
- PHP 5 is now required (PHP 4 users must stay on the 4.8 branch until they can upgrade to PHP 5)
- Accessibility cleanup added
- PHPMailer upgraded
- Updated the MOStlyCE editor to latest TinyMCE core
- MOStlyCE support added for skins and content templates
- Added a new content bookmark component/module
- Added a new tag cloud module
JavaScript Related Changes:
- Fixed minor JavaScript issues identified with the 4.8 configuration
- Increased performance
- JavaScript now loads either in the document <head> or just before the closing </body> tag instead of scattered throughout the page; most of the time it will load just before the closing tag, since there are additional performance benefits to that method (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#js_bottom).
- Upgraded the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) from 2.6.0 to 2.7.0
Since the JavaScript architecture was fully rewritten with the 4.8 branch and again refined with 4.9, we’ve created a new starter doc on the wiki that details more about working with JavaScript (and YUI) within MiaCMS – http://docs.miacms.org/wikka.php?wakka=JavaScriptForDevelopers.
Posted in CMS, MiaCMS | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
As the MiaCMS Team, we recently gave an interview at OpenSourceCMS.com.
Here is a tiny excerpt from the interview;
Chanh:
7) There is a plethora of open source CMS’s available out “there” for people to choose. Why should people consider MiaCMS?
MiaCMS team:
Chad: The MiaCMS team is focused on producing an simple, yet powerful content management system. The team is focused on stability, security, innovation, web standards, performance, and our users. We are community focused and take pride in our product. MiaCMS is not a toy, an experiment, or a hobby. It is a robust CMS which can be used for sites of all types and sizes. Furthermore, MiaCMS has a very powerful extension system which can be used to develop custom extensions to enable functionality not found in the core by default.
Cem: One of the good things that we inherited from Mambo is the mindset of “simplicity”. Can we make it simpler, yet better! We are working on it.
You can read more a http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?o…….08&Itemid=188
If you’re in the quest for an Open Source CMS, and don’t want to download/install a bunch of them till you decide, I would surely recommend that you visit OpenSourceCMS.com, play with the demos that they refresh hourly.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, Open Source | Comments Off
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
MiaCMS was one of the Open Source projects that was presented at Thailand OSS Festival 2008. Love it. !!!

MiaCMS at Thailand OSS Festival (presented by Akarawuth Tamrareang, a.k.a Krit)
You can see the rest of the Flickr set here.
You can download the presentation from http://miacms.org. And see few surprising news too.
Posted in MiaCMS, News, Open Source | Comments Off
Friday, April 18th, 2008
moseasymedia, a sort of well known video embedding extension in the Mambo Joomla! community, has a new release. moseasymedia 2.0.x version is released in mid April with a few neat features.
I’ll try give some highlights from the readme.txt that’s in the zip package.
Please read on,
(more…)
Posted in Blog, CMS, News, Open Source | Comments Off