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I've been using Movable Type as my blogging system of choice for several years now -- not just because it's open source but because it's a good program with great features. And yet the newest revision, version 5, feels like it falls far short of what could -- and needs -- to be done.

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It's always compelling news when an open source project of some renown is forked. It's twice as compelling when it's a fork of a project you use and rely on personally. I speak of Melody, a spinoff of the open-source branch of the blogging and publishing system Movable Type.

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Analysts didn't have many good things to say about the recent announcement that ECM vendor OpenText will acquire Vignette, a maker of Web content management software, for $310 million.

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Oracle hopes its Beehive collaboration platform will lead to sales of other Oracle products. And if it happens to shove Microsoft Exchange out the door, that's a bonus.

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Digital Reef swings for the data management fences by indexing and classifying all unstructured data in the enterprise. Top applications include e-discovery and storage management.

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Late winter and spring seem like prime time for content management conferences. If you were so inclined, you could practically make back-to-back reservations so that you're out of the office from March through June. Here's a quick look at a few of the conferences and events coming up for the first half of 2009. Ladies and gentlemen, start your frequent flyer miles!

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Asbru may not snare as many headlines as some other content management systems, but over the last decade it has built up an impressive client base, and has continuously made impressive enhancements to its CMS. The release earlier this month of Asbru Web Content Management v7.0 is no exception and I don't think it's hyperbole to say that it's their strongest release to date.

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This week the SilverStripe team released version 2.3.0 of its open source content management system, which packs in literally hundreds of bug fixes and dozens of enhancements. While I wouldn't consider anything in the latest release to be particularly groundbreaking, the development team is doing a commendable job of adding onto an already solid foundation.

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There's no shortage of people willing to rhapsodize about why their favorite open source content management system is better than everyone else's. So it's sure to be interesting to watch three skilled, dedicated teams trying to prove the superiority of Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, respectively, in a three-way showdown next month at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival.

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I've been keeping an eye on Kentico CMS for a while now, and I've been consistently impressed with its products. With each release, it has been adding substantial new features to an already solid foundation and Kentico CMS 4.0, released earlier this month, is no exception. This release focuses on a number of social networking tools, including support for blogs, wikis, and community-building and management features.

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Up to this point there's been a tremendous amount of excitement surrounding the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), but it takes a lot of work to take something from the proposal stage into something more concrete. As with any issue that requires broad-based consensus building, there's always the risk that two or more parties just won't see eye to eye and the whole project will go flying off the tracks.

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In the content management system world, there's a fine line between "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and simply letting your product get stagnant while competitors race ahead. While it had been starting to look like Iatek's PortalApp .NET might be falling into the second category, the release last week of PortalApp .NET Enterprise 4.0 puts the company squarely back into the thick of things.

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After nearly half a year of heavy development, Radiant 0.7.0, a content management system built on the Ruby on Rails framework, was released this past weekend. This newest version delivers a nice set of new functionality and backend improvements that are sure to make it even more appealing to small teams with basic content management needs.

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Jahia launched version 6 of its open source enterprise content management system a couple of weeks ago, adding some slick new features to the content creation tools, and adding a number of improvements to its document management functionality.

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A new survey shows there's a long way to go before IT and legal make a good e-discovery team.

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As traditional blogging platforms such as WordPress and Movable Type seem to make their products more like full-fledged content management systems with each release, there's an interesting counter-movement bubbling up: content management tools that seek to provide simplicity over deep functionality.

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Almost a year and a half after its last major release, the open source .Net-based Umbraco 4 content management system was finally released this week, and based on the impressive set of new functionality and features, it looks to have been worth the wait.

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You can barely take two steps on the Web these days without tripping over another "picking the best Web content management system" article, but I came across one published earlier this week on Webdesigner Depot that was particularly informative, funny, and certain to stir some mild controversy.

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It's an unfortunate reality that in an economy like this not every content management vendor is going to stay afloat. While many ultimately will make it through, some are certain to be taken over and others simply will be forced to shut their doors.

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Content management tools aren't just used for posting content to Web sites -- they also can be used for authoring and presenting documentation, creating interactive courses, and countless other purposes. Adobe this week announced the launch of two new content authoring suites, each with a separate target audience but a similar focus on delivering compelling content using mature, well-integrated tools.

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Semantic search is like porn: I'm pretty sure I'll know it when I see it. So when semantic search upstart Truevert came by for a visit, I got all googly (I think I might have even screamed "yahoo"). The Truevert system, powered by OrcaTec's discovery toolkit, is narrowly defined around green, but it's definitely an eye-opening, fresh approach to an elusive problem.

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While there's no shortage of collaboration tools for small workgroups, large groups with dozens or even hundreds of individuals are somewhat limited in the ways they have to work together. With a multitude of opinions to consider, authoring and building consensus on a single document can be challenging, and while traditional wikis have their place, a company called MixedInk has launched a new service aimed at making the process easier and more efficient.

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It appears that the Joomla community won't have to wait much longer to kick the tires on the next major release. The alpha release of Joomla 1.6 may be ready for testing within the next month or two, according to a blog posting from a Joomla lead developer Andrew Eddie.

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Content migration can be one of the more technically challenging tasks facing administrators, whether you're running a complex site with thousands of articles or a simple blog with a handful of posts. Hoping to ease the pain a bit for the latter, Google recently introduced the Google Blog Converters project, which features tools intended to make migrations easier to and from a number of popular blogging and content management platforms.

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While there are plenty of options to choose from if you're looking for free, open source PHP-based content management systems, the list is much shorter for organizations using Microsoft's .NET framework and coding in C#. While DotNetNuke has received the lion's share of attention over the past year or so, it certainly isn't the only game in town.

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The past couple of days have been an interesting roller-coaster ride for sites using the hosted SoapBlox content management system. From all appearances, SoapBlox's servers were compromised by hackers earlier this week, and Paul Preston, the president of SoapBlox, came close to shutting down the service completely.

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Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group posted his 2009 picks for the best-designed intranets in his Alertbox column earlier this week, and while there are no earth-shattering surprises, the list and his views on the state of intranets in general is always an interesting read.

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AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management, has long been a useful resource for established content management industry professionals as well as organizations just getting started with piecing together a content strategy.

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I've never been one to make grand predictions about the future of technology, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy hearing what others have to say. As 2008 comes to a close, a handful of prognosticators are stepping forward to offer up their vision for the future of content management. Here are some of the more interesting lists ...

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As more household names from print make the migration to the Web, it will be more critical than ever for them to focus on certain principles that lay the foundation for a successful site. From my point of view, there are three basic things they need to get right: the content itself, the design, and the content management tools.

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Few tools are as effective as a wiki when an organization needs to quickly post and collaborate on content. Dozens of free and paid options for creating a wiki exist, but when it comes to quickly and easily creating a wiki with minimal technical headaches, I keep coming back to PBwiki.

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Last week, after a long process of drafting and refining the documents, W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative released the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). It's been nine years since the guidelines have been updated, and while the technology behind Web sites has vastly changed, the basic need for accessibility hasn't.

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Alfresco continues to blaze the trail when it comes to real-world implementations of the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. Its latest step forward was the release this week of a module that allows integration between Alfresco and Joomla systems.

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Vendors are teaming up to tackle e-discovery -- and rake in cash.

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A new, open source web content management system hit the scene this past week, making its debut as the engine behind Visitmix.com. But what sets Oxite apart isn't its feature set, but rather the development team behind it - Microsoft.

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It's usually no fun hearing about a party you weren't able to make it to, and while I wasn't at the Gilbane Content Management Conference in Boston last week, a number of highlights caught my attention.

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FatWire this week announced the release of Content Server 7.5, the newest version of their flagship content management system.

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The DotNetNuke team has a few things to celebrate. It recently closed on a round of financing, won a pair of awards in Packt Publishing's Open Source CMS Awards, and is getting ready for the release of DotNetNuke 5.0.

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O'Reilly Media, in conjunction with two of the authors of its forthcoming Using Drupal book, is presenting a webcast titled "Everything You Wanted to Know About Drupal but were Afraid to Ask" on Friday, December 5.

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FierceContentManagement last week published their list of the Top 10 content management websites. While compiling a top 10 list of this sort is always tough - what you leave off is usually just as controversial as what makes the list - I can't find fault with anything that they've included.

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With so many sources for content management industry information -- print, news sites, RSS feeds, podcasts -- it can be tough to know where to wade into the flood. The launch of ECMHUB.com, the ECMInstitute's new portal, hopes to change that.

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With deep cuts in newsrooms and ad revenue shrinking, it's a tough time to be a journalist of any sort, whether online, print, or broadcast. So it's a breath of fresh air when someone comes along and does something nice for our colleagues in the Fourth Estate.

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Day Software is having an outstanding year so far. It landed squarely in the Visionaries quadrant of Gartner's 2008 Enterprise Content Management Magic quadrant report just a month ago, and its year-to-date revenue as reported at the end of last quarter was up nearly 10% from 2007. But probably the most exciting accomplishment is the release of newest version of its flagship Web content management system, Communiqué (CQ) 5.1.

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It's been an interesting two months since the announcement of the proposed Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard. While some vendors rapidly got on board -- Alfresco, for example, released the first implementation of CMIS -- other companies, such as Day Software, have alternately supported and gently poked holes in the proposal.

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It can be easy to fall into the trap of focusing so much on content management tools that you end up forgetting that they don't mean much of anything without good site design. Smashing Magazine this week published a great piece on newspaper Web sites that serves as a strong reminder of that very point.

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With the release of version 1.1 of its content management system in late October, ImpressCMS has capped off an exciting year that would be the envy of almost any open source project.

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Unnecessary copies and older versions of documents clog up employee hard drives and make discovery exercises longer and more expensive. One vendor's software aims to help companies get smarter -- and more aggressive -- about deleting digital fat.

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Today, Nov. 7th, 2008, is World Plone Day. No, it's not some obscure holiday you've never heard of, but instead an opportunity for the community of developers and users of the Plone content management system to try and get the word out.

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WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 was released this past weekend, and although it's always tough to make a full assessment based on beta software, its improvements to the administrative functions are making it look like a compelling upgrade.

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Apparently feeling a pinch (somewhere) and choosing to focus on the paid side of its video hosting and provisioning service, Brightcove issued a notification late last night that it would be shuttering the free versions of its services: The Brightcove Network (where video could be freely published YouTube-style) and Brightcove.TV (the distribution channel where videos published by Brightcove Network users as well as Brightcove's paying customers were featured online).

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