• Acquia Acquired for $1B, WordPress 5.3 on the Horizon, More Open Source News

  Acquia has announced an agreement to receive a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners, which essentially translates into the investment company purchasing Acquia for a colossal $1 billion. The investment will enable the open-source digital experience company to continue growing its presence in the digital experience platform space. “Vista shares our belief that the DXP market is ripe for disruption and we are excited to partner with them to accelerate our plans,” said Michael Sullivan, Acquia CEO.

  Acquia’s press release noted that Acquia will “continue to operate independently”.

  This announcement came shortly after being named to the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100 for the fourth consecutive year and acquiring the first enterprise-grade, low-code Drupal website builder.

• Daily Buzz: Drupal's Big Buyout

• WordCamp Philly returns this weekend in all its open-source, community-powered glory

  In an age where the internet’s attention is hyper focused on the most recent tweet, only to be distracted the next minute, WordPress’ decade-long staying power can be attributed to its diverse and dedicated open-source community.

  WordPress values and strives to grow its community, and one of the ways it does that is through WordCamps. Philadelphia is home to one of the oldest WordCamps in the United States, and the annual daylong event is returning this weekend, Oct. 5 and 6, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

• People of WordPress: Alice Orru

  Alice Orru was born in Sardinia, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. As a child, she dreamt of becoming a flight attendant, traveling the world, and speaking many foreign languages.

  Unable to meet the height requirements of her chosen profession, Orru ended up choosing a different path in life, following the Italian mantra: “You have to study something that will guarantee a stable and secure job for life.”

  The unemployment rate in Sardinia is very high, a challenge shared throughout the surrounding islands. In addition to that, Alice wasn’t that keen on having the same job all her life, as her parents had.

  When Orru was 22 she moved to Siena, Tuscany, to finish her studies. That is when she created her first personal blog. The website was built on an Italian platform named Tiscali, which she later migrated to WordPress.com.

  After 2 years in Tuscany Orru moved to Strasbourg, France. She studied French and worked several jobs while living there. Her first serious job was in Milan – working 40 hours/week in the marketing department of a large, international company. She found herself surrounded by ambitious colleagues and a boss who constantly requested extra —unpaid— working hours per day.

• Digital experience firm Acquia sees India as a global delivery centre

  Acquia, a US-based open source digital experience company, has announced the opening of an office in Pune, expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Taking this next step in its global growth strategy, Acquia looks to bolster its partner network and expand its global customer footprint.

• EPAM Named An Acquia Global Select Partner, Joining Elite Group Of Partners

  EPAM Systems, Inc. (EPAM), a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and software development services, today announced that it has achieved Global Select status in Acquia's Partner Program. Acquia, an open source digital experience company, provides software and services built around Drupal. As one of only a few elite Global Select partners, EPAM leverages its Acquia and Drupal expertise to help its clients design, build and deliver engaging and intelligent customer experiences.

• The Top 13 Free and Open Source Content Management Platforms

  This is the most complete and up-to-date directory of free and open source content management platforms available on the web.

• 4 great Java-based CMS options

  OpenCms has been around since 1999, and it's been an open source Java CMS platform since 2001. Not only is it one of the oldest Java-based CMS platforms, it's one of the oldest CMS tools, predating the popular PHP-based WordPress, which debuted in 2003.

  From a developer's perspective, OpenCms is simple to set up and maintain. It runs as a Java servlet, which makes installation easy. It works with most major databases; whether you prefer MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MariaDB or another popular database, you can likely run OpenCms without much hassle.

  OpenCms probably won't win awards as the most elegant or attractive Java-based CMS. The interface was overhauled in 2019, but OpenCms doesn't exactly feel modern. It works, but it's a little clunky.

  However, OpenCms does enjoy the distinction as a truly cost-free open source Java CMS. There is no freemium pricing model for the product, and there are no licensing fees.

• How open source distribution accelerates Drupal development time by 30%

  Acquia released the latest version of Acquia Lightning, a flexible Drupal 8 distribution thousands of organisations are using to launch new Drupal sites and projects quickly.

  Acquia Lightning offers new capabilities for developers, site builders, site managers, and marketers to build sites faster and deliver richer digital experiences.

  As companies continue to elevate the role of content delivery across every channel, teams face pressure to build sites that are increasingly demanding.

• Acquia delivers open source framework for contextual commerce

• Acquia Delivers Open Source Framework for Contextual Commerce

  Acquia has unveiled the Acquia Commerce Framework, a set of open source Drupal modules that brands can use to deliver seamless, contextual commerce experiences. These open source modules provide flexibility to embed commerce components directly into content-driven experiences, helping remove friction from the commerce process. As a result rich, omnichannel shopping experiences can emerge from content building efforts quickly and easily, without having to assemble troves of data or build complicated navigation paths.

  Using the framework, brands can turn themselves into e-commerce powerhouses. Within Drupal, site builders can create as many virtual catalogues as they need using custom connectors, linking product data to content. Brands can tap the benefits of open source technology to create a smoother shopping experience – connecting customers with lively, useful content and clear, actionable checkout options. Authors can easily embed this product data directly into the content they are creating, which is the basis for contextual commerce.

• GeekHive Open-Source Technical Lead Becomes a Pantheon Hero

  GeekHive proudly announces the acceptance of Technical Lead Drew Nackers into the Pantheon Heroes Advocacy Program for his valuable contributions to the Drupal and WordPress open-source development communities. The Pantheon Heroes Program honors programming professionals who voluntarily dedicate their time, expertise, and talents toward the continual advancement of the Open Web ecosystem.

Websites running the Drupal, Joomla, or Typo3 content-management systems are vulnerable to attacks that could possibly execute malicious code until administrators install just-released patches, developers and security researchers warned.

The vulnerability resides in the PharStreamWrapper, a PHP component developed and open-sourced by CMS maker Typo3. Indexed as CVE-2019-11831, the flaw stems from a path-traversal bug that allows hackers to swap a site's legitimate phar archive with a malicious one. A phar archive is used to distribute a complete PHP application or library in a single file, in much the way a Java archive file bundles many Java files into a single file.