Open Source Content Management System Research Articles

Extensible open source content management systems and frameworks: a solution for many needs of a bioinformatics group

A common challenge for bioinformaticians, in either academic or industry laboratory environments, is providing informatic solutions via the Internet or through a web browser. Recently, the open source community began developing tools for building and maintaining web applications for many disciplines. These content management systems (CMS) provide many of the basic needs of an informatics group, whether in a small company, a group within a larger organisation or an academic laboratory. These tools aid in managing software development, website development, document development, course development, datasets, collaborations and customers. Since many of these tools are extensible, they can be developed to support other research-specific activities, such as handling large biomedical datasets or deploying bioanalytic tools. In this review of open source website management tools, the basic features of content management systems are discussed along with commonly used open source software. Additionally, some examples of their use in biomedical research are given.

Message from the president

Welcome to the first edition of our new E-Quarterly. The volunteers in ACM SIGGRAPH have been quite busy the past several months and I would like to give you a brief progress report on our activities. We have put in a large amount of effort on the new website. It is based on Plone, which is an Open Source Content management system. We plan to offer expanded member services with this system.We have formed a new Digital Arts Committee (DAC), Chaired by Masa Inakage. They are working on a new SIGGRAPH Arts site to help better support the digital artists in our community. This site is currently in beta test and should go live within a few weeks.We have passed two new policies to enable better support for our small conferences. One policy reduces the costs and the other allows for succeeding conferences to use some of the profit from previous conferences. We want to significantly increase the number of small conferences and especially those that are co-located with the annual SIGGRAPH Conference. If you are interested in putting on a small conference please contact our Vice-President, Alyn Rockwood (rockwood (at) siggraph.org) or the Small Conference Coordinator Scott Lang (scott_lang (at) siggraph.org).This past year we have moved the International Resources Program (IRP) and Committee from a SIGGRAPH Conference Program to an ACM SIGGRAPH Program. This program is under the Vice President who has appointed Kirsten Cater as the IRP Chair. One objective of this transition is to engender more year round activities. Suggestions can be sent to Alyn or Kirsten (kirsten_cater (at) siggraph.org).Another major effort this year has been in strategic planning. We had an expanded meeting in January that included the Executive Committee (EC), the Conference Advisory Group and several members of the ACM SIGGRAPH Advisory Board. This resulted in the formation of three working groups: 1. the structure of the annual SIGGRAPH conference, lead by Rob Cook, 2. member programs and benefits, lead by Mk Haley, and 3.) the structure of ACM SIGGRAPH, lead by Tony Baylis. At the March EC meeting there was more discussion and this was followed by much email discussion. Most of the upcoming June EC meeting will be devoted to this topic. We plan to have draft plans by SIGGRAPH 2006 so we can solicit feedback from our members.I welcome any comments or suggestions so please email me at owen (at) siggraph.org.

Adaptive reuse of libre software systems for supporting on-line collaboration

In this paper, the adaptive reuse of Plone; an open source content management system is described. In one instance, Plone has been used as the backbone of a collaboration and communication support infrastructure within a large research project. In the other, Plone has been used as the main web-presence of a specialist group of the British Computer Society. This paper analyses the benefits and problems of reusing Plone to support collaboration. Based on this reuse experience, a more systematic approach to supporting Plone reuse is proposed. This approach takes into account the special case of reuse support relevant to open source software developments.

MMBase: An open-source content management system

MMBase is an open-source content management system (CMS) with portal functionality, originally created by the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO. MMBase, which is particularly suited for multimedia environments, is based on the concept of presenting objects on different channels. The system is highly platform-independent and has adopted standards such as JavaTM, XML (Extensible Markup Language), J2EETM (JavaTM 2 Enterprise Edition) and JDBCTM. Initially used only by public broadcasters, MMBase has been adopted by a growing number of organizations. This paper presents the history of MMBase, introduces its community of users, and discusses its architecture, focusing on the innovative technical process underlying MMBase and its organizational structure. We identify and discuss three challenges facing the user community: the need to motivate and organize both users and developers to contribute to the development of MMBase, the need to make the software modular, and the need for more and better documentation of the MMBase core and its component packages.

Content Management Systems For E-learning:An Application

This paper discusses our approach to the tailoring of an open source Content Management System to use it as a Learning Content Management System, by providing modules for the management of Learning Objects and for their retrieval and indexing via Metadata. Both the description of what a Content Management System is and the key requirements that a Learning Content Management System must posses will be presented in the paper. Then, a working definition of Learning Object will be provided, and finally we will show how this model can be implemented using MD-PRO.