LifeRay – Social Networking & CMS Web Publishing

LifeRay is one of the leading open source CMS software platforms available for social networking, portal development, business intranets, corporate extranets, forums, archives, and general web publishing. LifeRay has already been downloaded over 1 million times, with an average of over 60,000 downloads per month. The software comes with numerous bundled versions and has already won accolades such as the InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Award for Best Open Source Portal.

The LifeRay Portal is composed of two main sections: the LifeRay Journal and the LifeRay Collaboration Suite. The LifeRay Journal is the content management system of the portal, allowing web publishers to easily post content, manage pages, create hierarchical menus, and site structure. The LifeRay Collaboration Suite is the social networking aspect of the portal, which includes forums, wiki collaboration, blogs, email, calendars, and tagging. Both of these can be extended by open source “portlets” that add increased functionality to the system.

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The Top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems

As a web designer working online since Netscape 1.0 building sites for clients, the biggest change I’ve seen in thirteen years in the industry is the advent of the Open Source Content Management System as the preferred platform for development. Nothing is more illustrative of the change between first generation web standards and the web 2.0 evolution than the CMS trend. Providing a great base for social networking, including blogs, forums, wikis, image galleries, comment logs, ecommerce, voting, bookmarking, tags, and innumerable other extensions along with traditional web publishing methods, the CMS is the preferred platform for most web designers building sites today. Open Source has led to the establishment of huge, user-powered development communities that are dynamically changing and constantly upgrading, offering free software, themes, and modules for building professional web sites. The ubiquity of the shared hosting LAMP – Cpanel – Fantastico set up has popularized the CMS far beyond even the developer/design community.

The top 10 Open Source Content Management Systems:

1. Drupal
2. WordPress
3. Joomla
4. Media Wiki
5. Liferay
6. TYPO3
7. Moodle
8. Dolphin
9. Pligg
10. Movable Type

Honorable Mention:
Xoops, Geeklog, e107, Mambo, Nucleus

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