Outerthought, the Open Source Java and XML competence support center, proudly announces the next release of Daisy, the Open Source CMS/Wiki framework.

Daisy 1.3 has been in development for 6 months, and packs many new features while providing a wealth of improvements to ensure easier implementation and integration. Daisy 1.3 has been reviewed favorably ("Very Good") in Infoworld's IT Product Guide.

Notable new features in this release are:

• the introduction of document variants, to support different document branches and multi-linguality
• document tasks for the automation of batched document operations
• easier installation with more defaults and less configuration work
• scriptability using JavaScript (based on Rhino)
• support for multiple authentication schemes (ships with LDAP and NTLM support)
• multi-value fields for management of keyword-like metadata fields ("tags")
• a faceted navigation browser for metadata-based exploration of large document sets
• improved role management providing "group"-based access control organization
• a totally revamped and vastly improved skinning and publishing mechanism, allowing easier creation of custom look-and-feels, and easier implementation of custom Daisy-based applications
• preliminary RSS feed support

Daisy 1.3 is available - free of charge and liberally licensed - from http://cocoondev.org/daisy/.

Furthermore, Outerthought will be expanding its range of services around Daisy in the near future: managed Daisy Hosting, and fixed-price, turn-key Daisy-based CMS and knowledge management projects. Keep an eye on our corporate website for news updates: http://outerthought.org/.

For more information, please contact us at info@outerthought.org or +32 9 338 82 20.

• start of the new and improved XSLT-based skinning system
• a new, powerful Publisher request model, supporting the development of custom publishing application
• RSS feed and various other publishing demo applications
• various fixes and little tweaks

Basically, this release is starting the work to enable people to easily implement custom publishing applications, against a solid contract, with minimal effort.

Daisy 1.3 M3 is available from here. Enjoy!

At first, I was thinking how the mainstream IT press would report on this:

• JSPWiki leader throws towel in ring
• Wiki wars: Daisy declares victory
• Professional Open Source aims for the Big Win

... and more mindless editorial headlinery to capture eyeballs and sell advertising.

What I read however was the rupture of two worlds, separated at their heart and soul.

Obviously technically JSPWiki and Daisy are two totally different beasts, if only because the former is a Wiki and the latter is a hybrid Wiki/CMS. JSPWiki is about managing a set of text files and breaths Wiki all the way down, whereas Daisy's Wiki-dness is more UI-oriented and it doubles as a full-blown content manager, albeith with some twists. And we do HTML WYSIWYG editing, though Janne has been looking into that as well. Daisy's default front-end webapp is Cocoon-based, whereas JSPWiki is - well - JSP-based. But even there the amount of difference depends on how you look at it - what level of similarity or dissimilarity you want to check. Both are Java-based, for instance. Both are open sourced. Daisy under the Apache license, JSPWiki under the LGPL: there's a fundamental difference in "license beliefs". JSPWiki's easy installation, compared with the slightly more elaborated architecture of Daisy, and the installation burdens coming naturally with that.

In my opinion however, there's a different type of rupture to be explored.

The world of the lonely hacker-for-love-and-passion vs. the one of business-supported open source development. I suppose Janne works on JSPWiki in the evening hours, stealing an hour here and there from an already busy schedule. Daisy is a 9-to-5 coding effort, or rather 10-to-6. Looking at the SVN history, that has accumulated into 16 solid manmonths of continued design and development - 8 hours a day. So it's kinda normal that Daisy has more features than JSPWiki.

Another thought about his post however was more along the lines of "Gee, it would be cool if we would be able to attract more Janne-like contributors to Daisy".

Daisy and JSPWiki are just two totally different beasts, with a different mindset, a different audience and a different business model. Yes, we've seen people moving up from JSPWiki to Daisy. But when we think competitive about Daisy, we never compare it with JSPWiki. Confluence, and JotSpot, and OpenCMS and Lenya. Magnolia as well, and XWiki. Those are projects we're happily competing with. JSPWiki however and the relentness energy put into it by its developers, has served as an inspirational example. Without JSPWiki, Daisy would never have happened.

So Janne, don't feel frustrated: you're one of the giant's shoulders we're standing on. Thank you for that!

Most notable new features are:

• support for different authentication schemes (LDAP is one of them)
• multi-valued fields ("keywords")
• multi-role support (think "groups" instead of roles)
• "delete" is now a separate ACL permission (next to read|write|publish)
• better handling of filenames for parts up- and download
• our übercool faceted browser, take 1

Daisy 1.3 M2 can be found at the usual location. Enjoy!

Daisy is 7 months old now - counting from where its public life began. We're trying to make a two-fold difference with Daisy: first of all, we want Daisy to be a compelling CMS framework with innovative design concepts, solid production-quality code and lots of nifty features. Looking at our current feature set, I think it's safe to say that we're leaving lots of the established players behind us - we might be missing on some of the eye-candy but that's irrelevant for now: if they have to choose, people prefer stuff that works anytime over stuff that just looks good. The strong separation between repository and editing/publishing web application seems to be hitting a sweet spot with a lot of its adopters. The second difference we want to make, is to show the world that serious open source development can be done, without commercial-unfriendly dual licensing, and without VC funding, by a small, yet committed company, actively seeking both volunteer and commercial co-ownership of a shared codebase.

BTW, did you know that the aggregated Daisy documentation is almost 100 printed PDF pages so far?

We fixed some 1.2 bugs in 1.3M1 as well, so users are kindly advised to upgrade at their convenience. Next month, we'll be adding LDAP support, multivalue field types, and then some more goodies - funded by a nice reference customer we just signed up. For Belgian Daisy users, it might be of interest that our work on Daisy has triggered some press attention. I'll post article URLs if and once they are published.

Daisy 1.3 final won't be out until (late) summer, and 1.3M1 is believed to be quite stable, so this release should be the preferred option for new Daisy adopters.

Have fun!

Nazareth is a small town between Ghent and Oudenaarde (Belgium).

Adding onto the Valentine's Day festivities, Outerthought released Daisy 1.2 as of today. Daisy is an Open Source content management system, composed of a standalone, ReST-accessible repository server, and a powerful Wiki-on-steroids editing and publishing application.

New in this release are:

In the Daisy Wiki:

• an easy-to-use graphical site navigation tree editor to define site hierarchies and navigation
• user self-registration with password and account reminder
• a general document commenting facility with public and private comments
• enhanced support for human-readable website URLs

In the repository:

• comprehensive support for arbitrary-sized document parts (or "BLOBs"), with streaming support both on front- and backend (making Daisy capable of hosting media libraries)
• generalized database access layer to easily run Daisy on top of any standards-conforming relational database engine
• improved full-text indexing support for MS Office document formats

And of course, many other minor feature enhancements, issues and performance improvements have been implemented as well.

For the next release (summer 2005), planned features are:

• publish-only website publishing for easy publication of non-editable Daisy sites (using the Wiki as a powerful editing application)
• Daisy Books: management and production of manuals and paper documentation
• more sophisticated repository versioning and querying
• support for facetted classification and navigation using Daisy's metadata support
• furthermore, we expect to upgrade Daisy's internals to reflect the current state of the art in component containers and messaging frameworks

Daisy is available under the Apache License 2.0 from http://cocoondev.org/daisy/, with commercial support services available from http://outerthought.org/daisy.html.