Christian Web Resources

3 months after the release of ImpressCMS 1.2, the ImpressCMS developers have released 1.2.1 Final. This release addresses several issues discovered as users began upgrading their existing sites. This is the 35th release from the ImpressCMS project in just over 2 years. 41 issues were fixed in this release, the majority of which focused on the upgrade of existing sites. The other fixes were related to new features added in 1.2

Issues were resolved in these areas -

• Control Panel
• Core Functionalities
• Design & Templates
• Installation Process
• Registration Process
• Upgrade Process

After almost 14 months, ImpressCMS has released another jam-packed major release - version 1.2. Even after having won Most Promising Open Source CMS in this year's Packt Publishing awards, they continue to push forward and deliver time and again.

Some of the key additions to this already feature-rich community and content management system are

• An online image editor
• A new user profile module, with social networking features and customizable fields for your site
  
• A new content manager module
• The ability to assign different home pages for different user groups
• Easier customization for filtering HTML input from users
• Easier customization for verifying user identity through a CAPTCHA image
• Lots of administrative improvements

Each year, Packt Publishing conducts a competition to determine the top open source content management system. Nominations are accepted from the general public for several weeks, then tabulated to determine the top 5 in each of several categories - Best Overall, Most Promising, Best PHP and Best Other. New this year was a Hall of Fame award for previous winners in the Best Overall category.

1st place  winners in the 2009 competition were WordPress, Drupal, ImpressCMS and Plone.

The ImpressCMS development team has released ImpressCMS 1.1.3, a security update for their 1.1 version. The vulnerabilities were not in their core code, but in 2 of the 3rd party libraries used and distributed with their core - Smarty and PHPOpenID. If your site is running on a version prior to 1.1.3, it is strongly recommended you upgrade to the latest version.

Smarty is a template engine, driving the way pages are built and displayed by ImpressCMS. PHPOpenID allows you to use OpenID authentication for logins on an ImpressCMS site.