Curently as a release candidate, dotCMS 1.6.5 is shaping up to be feature packed.  While you may want to wait for the official release, there is no reason to wait on finding out what's new with dotCMS.

The new 1.6.5 version includes almost 200 improvements and fixes.  Highlights include:

• Widgets
• Major Performance Improvements
  • Now uses enterprise ready JBoss Cache.
  • Velocity Files cached in memory across cluster for speedier parsing.
• Simplified Configuration, Maintenance, Installation and Upgrades
• webDAV file access
• User Interface Improvements / Simplified Inline Editing
  • Less user confusion:  new user interface cleanly distinguishes content from widgets/dynamic pulls.
• PDF export
• Web Form Improvements
  • Online webform builder allows end users to create forms without knowledge of HTML.
• Other Improvements:
  • Google Maps Macro.
  • TinyMCE WYSIWYG upgraded to 3.1.
• Over 120 bugs squashed.

Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com on Drupal 6

As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.

As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.

As most Drupal users already know by now, Drupal 6 is currently at a Release Candidate 3 stage of development. For the Drupal community, this is a time when the developers are wanting people to test, report, and help fix any bugs found in these development version of the Drupal software. At this stage of development, Drupal.org still does not recommend Drupal 6 to be ran on the production server.

As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running release candidates on a live site. Also, always be sure to make a backup of your data before performing any upgrade or starting testing.

Although, I started CMS Report with a beta version of Drupal 4.7, I was a little more cautious when it came time to upgrade to Drupal 5. During the past few months, I've been very cautious in running the site live with Drupal 6 as I haven't wanted to distract visitors to this site from their routine due to a Drupal meltdown.

However, I have found that I'm lousy at testing software if the software is not being used "live". There just isn't the adrenaline rush I need when I play it safe. So I've decided, when time allows, that I'm going to start running my site on Drupal 6 during the weekends.

Harald Ponce de Leon: "We are proud to announce an advancement of the osCommerce 2.2 release
series with the new osCommerce Online Merchant v2.2 Release Candidate 2
release. This second release candidate addresses issues introduced in
the previous release candidate release and addresses longer termed
issues from 2.2 Milestone 2."

Complete Story

  New minor versions of Drupal were released this week, Drupal 4.7.11 and Drupal 5.6 (see excerpt below). In case you're wondering, I have already updgraded this site to Drupal 5.6...no problems, no worries.

Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 are now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

• Download Drupal 5.6.
• Download Drupal 4.7.11.

read more

As a sidebar, Drupal 6 Release Candidate 2 is also out. I promise, we'll be one of the first sites to go Drupal 6 once the software goes "gold". We may break a few things, but well worth the price for some IT glory!

The first release candidate for Drupal 6 has arrived. I sadly haven't been able to dig into all the new features of this release, but what what I have seen so far has been pleasant surprises.

Drupal 6 RC1 released

Following four beta releases, and with tons of bugs fixed and user interface improvements added, we are proud to present to you the first release candidate of Drupal 6.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing for you, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the last beta version was released two weeks ago, we have improved on the embedded developer documentation, strengthened several update functions to ensure that updates are properly applied for Drupal core and contributed modules, revised most user help text and form descriptions to be more understandable and accurate, made user logins more secure, improved right to left language support for several features, and improved table indexes to help with referential integrity and improve performance.

read more

 

A release candidate is out for Wordpress 2.3.1.  It seems like only yesterday that I installed Wordpress 2.3.  These type of updates for bug fixes are typical and, in my opinion, actually a good things to see.  Wordpress 2.3.1 will be fixing over twenty bugs. Some of the notable fixes are:

• Tagging support for Windows Live Writer
• A login bug that affected those with a Blog Address different than
  their WordPress Address is fixed
• Faster taxonomy database queries, especially tag intersection queries
• Link importer fixes

I was really surprised not only find out that Joomla! 1.5 is going through a third release candidate, but will likely be followed with more release candidates.  In most projects, the release canddate is a nearly-done final product where the only thing left is to make sure all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed.  Not so with Joomla! 1.5.

Johan Janssens's writes in his post, Is Joomla! 1.5 RC3 really a release candidate?:

In the last two weeks after the release of RC3 I have seen this question popping up on forums and mailing lists. I have seen complaints about RC3 being more of a break in development then a real release candidate. Some people seem to feel that we are still adding features and making functionality changes.

In this post I will try to give, in all honesty and openness, a status update on development and provide an answer to this question.