Roxen has switched to open source MariaDB for version 5.5 of its web-based editorial portal.

The developer - currently celebrating its twentieth anniversary - has also added improvements and functionality including additions to article templating and a style extraction capability for Adobe InDesign.

It also premieres a notification system that informs users of events such as story assignments, completed background tasks or unexpected errors, and adds a text compare feature.

The MariaDB database engine replaces MySQL used in earlier versions, drawing congratulations from MySQL and MariaDB founder Michael Widenius.