phpBB was started by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000. Nathan Codding and John Abela joined the development team after phpBB’s CVS repository was moved to SourceForge.net, and work on 1.0.0 began. A fully functional, pre-release version of phpBB was made available in July.

phpBB 1.0.0 was released on December 9, 2000, with subsequent improvements to the 1.x codebase coming in two more major installments. The final release in the 1.x line was phpBB 1.4.4, released on November 6, 2001. During the lifetime of the 1.x series, Bart van Bragt, Paul S. Owen (former co-manager of the project), Jonathan Haase and Frank Feingold joined the team. phpBB 1.x is no longer supported and virtually no websites continue to use it.

In February 2001, phpBB 2.0.x began development entirely from scratch; the developer’s ambitions for phpBB had outgrown the original codebase. Doug Kelly joined the team shortly afterwards. After a year of development and extensive testing, phpBB 2.0.0, dubbed the “Super Furry” version, was released on April 4, 2002, three days later than intended.

Work on phpBB 3.0.x began in late 2002. It was originally intended to be released as phpBB 2.2, and the first planned feature list was announced on May 25, 2003.[4] However, as development progressed, the developers realised that phpBB 2.1.x (the development release cycle for 2.2) had eliminated virtually all compatibility with the 2.0.x line, the version number for release was changed to 3.0.0, in keeping with the Linux kernel versioning scheme. In September 2005, Paul Owen resigned as the Development Team Leader and Meik Sievertsen was promoted to the role.

In March 2007, the phpBB teams had planned to undergo a short round of server maintenance, however the server crashed during the outage, suffering a double-disk failure and causing phpBB.com to be down for the full week. (The phpBB teams indicated that phpBB, the software, was not the cause of the outage.) However, due to the unexpected outage, the teams decided to change their original plans and launch their brand new website, powered by phpBB3 and the new prosilver theme. This was a big surprise to most, as the theme had been a heavily guarded secret, never before seen by the public, and was originally not intended to be revealed until the final release of phpBB 3.0.0. Initial feedback was split, with many applauding the new theme and others criticising a number of new design decisions, particularly the decision to display the user info on the right side of the viewtopic page (phpBB2′s subSilver theme had displayed it on the left).

On April 30, 2007, phpBB founder and co-Project Manager James Atkinson officially resigned from his duties towards phpBB, citing personal circumstances. With the announcement also came the announcement that phpBB was now newly independent, and that the team leaders would be collectively taking charge of the decisions in the future of the project. At the end of May, an announcement was made that Jonathan “SHS`” Stanley, the other co-Project Manager, was stepping down as well for personal reasons.

On July 7, 2007, the teams announced that phpBB had been nominated as a finalist for the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards in the category of “Best Project for Communications”. At the end of the month, SourceForge.net announced that phpBB had won the award for “Best Project for Communications”, and in honour of the award, SourceForge.net donated $1000 in phpBB’s name to Marie Curie Cancer Care. phpBB also won a “Thingamagoop” from Bleep Labs, and “bragging rights for a full year.”

On September 6, 2007, the teams launched an official phpBB podcast. It was recorded by a rotating group of phpBB team members with occasional guests, and discussed a number of phpBB-related topics, as well as answering questions e-mailed in from listeners.

The first beta of phpBB3 was released in June 2006, and the first release candidate was released in May 2007. The phpBB3 codebase received an external security audit in September, which was done by SektionEins. Finally, phpBB 3.0.0 “Olympus” (also dubbed the Gold release) was published on December 13, 2007.

The teams launched a new phpBB weblog in July 2008. The blog is written by phpBB team members on various topics related to phpBB and provide users with a unique inside look at the activities of the phpBB teams.

The phpBB teams held their first-ever phpBB users conference in London on July 20, 2008, which was titled “Londonvasion 2008.” Londonvasion featured presentations by phpBB team members on various topics important to the phpBB community, MOD authors, and developers. Londonvasion provided a unique opportunity to socialise with members of the phpBB teams. The event also represented the first time that most members of the teams had a chance to meet each other in person.

More on PhpBB

• phpBB2 was the predecessor of the present-day phpBB3. Developed during 2001-2002, the source code was written primarily to run on PHP 3.0 and 4.0 (version 2.0.13 upped the minimum requirement to PHP 4.0.3 due to a necessary security fix), and by the time that phpBB3 was released in late 2007, …
• phpBB3 is the current stable version of phpBB. Following over three years of development and an eighteen-month beta/release candidate stage, it went gold on December 13, 2007. Some of phpBB3′s major features include: Modular design for the Admin Control Panel, Moderator Control Panel, and User Control Panel Support for multiple database management systems, …

Other Information

• Developed by  The phpBB Group
• Stable release  3.0.4  (December 12, 2008)
• Written in  PHP
• Available in  Multilingual
• Type  Internet forum
• License  GNU General Public License

Links

• Website  http://www.phpbb.com/
• Downloads
• PhpBB Mods
• PhpBB Knowledgebase
• PhpBB wiki

Incoming search terms:

• Powered by phpBB
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Plone is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is designed to be extensible. Major development is conducted periodically during special meetings called Plone Sprints. Additional functionality is added to Plone with Products, which may be distributed through the Plone website or otherwise. The Plone Foundation owns and protects all copyrights and trademarks. Plone also has legal backing from the council of the Software Freedom Law Center.

The name Plone is an homage to the Warp Records band Plone, whose music is both simple and playful. The logo represents collaboration with three dots together in a group.

MediaWiki’s “Monobook” layout is based partially on the Plone style sheets.

History

The Plone project was begun in 1999, by Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan, and Vidar Andersen. It was made as a usability layer on top of the Zope Content Management Framework. The first version was released in 2001. The project quickly grew into a community, receiving plenty of new add-on products from its users. The increase in community led to the creation of the annual Plone conference in 2003, which is still running today. In addition, “sprints” are held, where groups of developers meet to work on Plone, ranging from a couple days to a week. In March 2004, Plone 2.0 was released. This release brought more customizable features in Plone, and enhanced the add-on functions. In May 2004, the Plone Foundation was created for the development, marketing, and protection of Plone. The Foundation has ownership rights over the Plone codebase, trademarks, and domain names. Even though the foundation was set up to protect ownership rights, Plone remains open source. In March 12, 2007, Plone 3 was released. This new release brought inline editing, an upgraded visual editor, and strengthened security, among many other enhancements. Up to September 2007, there have been over 200 developers contributing to Plone’s code. Plone won two Packt Open Source CMS Awards.

Design

Plone is built on the Zope application server, which is written in Python. Plone is made such that all information stored in Plone is stored in Zope’s built-in transactional object database (ZODB). Plone comes with installers for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, along with other operating systems. New updates are released regularly on Plone’s website. Plone is available in over 35 languages. Its interface follows the government standard WAI-AAA and U.S. section 508, which allows people with sight disabilities to properly access and use Plone. A major part of Plone is its use of skins and themes. When working with Plone, templates can be used to customize a website’s look. These templates are written with Cascading Style Sheets. In addition, Plone comes with a user management system called Pluggable Authentication Service. Introduced in Plone 2.5, “PAS” is used to properly sort actions from different users to their respective folders or accounts. PAS is also used to search for users and groups in Plone. Most importantly, PAS covers the security involved for users, requiring authentication in order to login to Plone. This gives users an increase in both security and organization with their content. A large part of Plone’s changes have come from its community. Since Plone is open source, the members of the Plone community regularly make alterations or add-ons to Plone’s interface, and make these changes available to the rest of the community via Plone’s website.

Community

Since its release, many of Plone’s updates and add-ons have come from its community. Events called Plone “sprints” consist of members of the community coming together for a week and helping improve Plone. The Plone conference is also attended and supported by the members of the Plone community. In addition, Plone has an active IRC channel to give support to users who have questions or concerns. Up through 2007, there have been over one million downloads of Plone. Plone’s development team has also been ranked in the top 2% of the largest open source communities.

Strengths and weaknesses

Plone excels when compared to other content-management systems in standards conformance, access control, internationalization, aggregation, user-generated content, micro-applications, active user groups and value. It’s available on many different operating systems, due to its use of platform-agnostic underlying technologies such as Python and Zope. Plone’s Web-based administrative interface is optimized for standards, allowing it to work with most common web browsers, and uses additional accessibility standards to help users who have disabilities. All of Plone’s features are customizable, and free add-ons are available from the Plone website.

Plone has an excellent security record compared to other popular content management systems.

Plone’s weaknesses include Python and Zope experience requirements for those wishing to add or extend the feature set, making for a considerable learning curve for developers. Plone has been rated as lagging in repository services when compared to other major CMSs.

Features

These are some of the features available in Plone 3.0:

• Inline editing
• Working Copy support
• Link and reference integrity checking
• Automatic locking and unlocking
• Collaboration and sharing
• Versioning, history and reverting content
• Upgraded visual HTML editor
• Workflow capabilities
• Authentication back-end
• Full-text indexing of Word and PDF documents
• Collections
• Presentation mode for content
• Support for the search engine Sitemap protocol
• Support for multiple mark-up formats
• Wiki support
• Automatic previous/next navigation
• Rules engine for content
• Auto-generated tables of contents
• Portlets engine
• Support, development, hosting & training
• LiveSearch
• Multilingual content management
• Time-based publishing
• Human-readable URLs
• Powerful graphical page editor
• Navigation and updated site maps
• Resource compression
• Caching proxy integration
• Drag and drop reordering of content
• XML exports of site configurations
• Localized workflow configuration
• Adjustable templates on content
• Standard content types
• Content is automatically formatted for printing
• Standards-compliant XHTML and CSS
• Accessibility compliant
• RSS feed support
• Automatic image scaling and thumbnail generation
• Free add-on products
• Cross-platform
• Comment capabilities on any content
• Microformat support
• Installer packages for multiple platforms
• WebDAV and FTP support
• In-context editing
• Backup support
• Cut/copy/paste operations on content

Other Information

• Developed by  Alan Runyan, Alexander Limi, Vidar Andersen and the Plone Team
• Latest release  3.1.7 / #REDIRECT Template:Start date and age
• OS  Cross-platform
• Platform  Zope
• Type  Content management system
• License  GNU General Public License
• Website  http://plone.org/

Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:

• Corporate Web sites or portals
• Corporate intranets and extranets
• Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
• E-commerce and online reservations
• Government applications
• Small business Web sites
• Non-profit and organizational Web sites
• Community-based portals
• School and church Web sites
• Personal or family homepages

Joomla is the most popular open source CMS currently available as evidenced by a vibrant and growing community of friendly users and talented developers. Joomla’s roots go back to 2000 and, with over 200,000 community users and contributors, the future looks bright for the award-winning Joomla Project.

Other Information

• Developed by  The Joomla Core Team
• Latest release  1.5.8 / November 10, 2008
• OS  Cross-platform
• Type  Content Management System
• License  GPL

Links

• Joomla News
• Joomla Extensions
• Website  joomla.org

Incoming search terms:

• ARS Reservation System для joomla 1 5

Overall Winner

1. Drupal – Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website, Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including
   
2. Joomla! – Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone..
3. DotNetNuke - DotNetNuke is an open source web application framework written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. The application’s content management system is extensible and customizable through the use of skins and modules, and it can be used to create, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and web sites.

Most Promising Open Source CMS

1. SilverStripe – SilverStripe is a free and open source programming framework and content management system (CMS) for creating and maintaining websites. The CMS provides an intuitive web-based administration panel, allowing any person to maintain their website without knowledge of markup or programming languages.
2. CMS Made Simple – CMS Made Simple is an open source (GPL) package, built using PHP that provides website developers with a simple, easy to use utility to allow building small-ish (dozens to hundreds of pages), semi-static websites. Typically our tool is used for corporate websites, or the website promoting a team or organization, etc. ..
   
3. ImpressCMS
4. MiaCMS

Best PHP Open Source Content Management System

1. Drupal
2. Joomla!, CMS Made Simple

Best Other Open Source Content Management System

1. Plone
2. dotCMS
3. DotNetNuke

Packt Publishing

Accepting nominations since mid-July, Packt Publishing announced this week the finalists for its 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. Final voting began on Sept. 1 and runs through Oct. 20.

This is the third year for the awards, which are designed to “encourage, support, recognize, and reward” popularity and quality in open source content management systems. The finalists for each of the four main categories are as follows:

Overall Open Source CMS Award Finalists

• DotNetNuke
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Plone
• TYPOlight

Most Promising Open Source CMS Finalists

• CMS Made Simple
• ImpressCMS
• MiaCMS
• MemHT
• SilverStripe

Best PHP Open Source CMS Finalists

• CMS Made Simple
• Drupal
• eZ Publish
• Joomla
• Xoops

Best Other Open Source CMS Finalists

• dotCMS
• DotNetNuke
• mojoPortal
• Plone
• Umbraco

In addition to awards for the systems themselves, an Open Source CMS MVP Award will be given to an outstanding individual contributor. The winners in each category will be determined by a panel of four judges whose votes will be combined with those from the public. Announcements of the winners will be staggered:

Oct. 27: Open Source CMS MVP
Oct. 28: Best Other (non-PHP based) Open Source CMS
Oct. 29: Best PHP Open Source CMS
Oct. 30: Most Promising Open Source CMS
Oct. 31: Overall Open Source CMS Award

The project team for the overall winner gets a prize of $5,000, with an additional $15,000 in prizes going to winners and runners-up other categories.

To learn more about each of the projects and cast your vote, visit Packt Publishing’s finalist page.