On Monday, October 26, 2009, it was finally done: The Cologne-based papaya Software company (where I’ve been working as a senior developer since 2007) has published the final release of version 5.0 of the open source content management system papaya CMS. This version has already been in use in customers’ projects for quite a while. You can download the PHP-based, enterprise-ready CMS at http://www.papaya-cms.com/download.71.html. On the same page, you can find the 1,300-page manual that tells you all about installation, configuration, and practical use of papaya CMS.
The most important features of the new version include the following:
– Multilevel caching system to increase performance, now including caching of XSLT templates using xslcache
– Clustering and cloud computing abilities (papaya is an Amazon Web Services Solution Provider)
– Mutlilingual websites
– Numerous new and improved modules (most of them are free and included with the basic package, only a few are commercial), e.g. community (a large part of which is my baby ;)), media database, forum/BBS, calendar, multi domain support (VHosts within the CMS), and many more
Apart from the new features, all the strengths of previous papaya CMS versions have been preserved. For example, it consequently uses open standards — especially neither a custom nor a PHP-based templating system, but the W3C standard XSLT: All content is generated as media-neutral XML and then rendered into valid (X)HTML, PDF, or any other output format using XSLT templates. But papaya is not limited to its CMS abilities; it also works as a powerful framework for web applications of all kinds. For instance, it contains a well-designed interface for several databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite) including debugging and logging functions for developers, as well as numerous standard classes that cover any important tool you might need to build websites.
Here is an excerpt of the media coverage for the release (most of it in German):
– papaya CMS at heise.de / ct
– papaya CMS at t3n.de
– papaya CMS at contentmanager.de
– papaya CMS at internet-professionell.de
– papaya CMS at PHP Magazin
– papaya CMS at it-chuiko.com
– papaya CMS at it-administrator.de
– papaya CMS at entwickler.de