XOOPS.org: "The XOOPS Development Team is pleased to announce the release of XOOPS 2.3.1 Final.

This release is mainly focused on bug fixes for XOOPS 2.3.0 release according to community feedback.
A couple of bugs in upgrade scripts from 2.2 to 2.3 have been fixed, as well as profile field access problems.

Debug information visibility has been improved according to community demands, debug information level is enabled as a temporary solution.  Meanwhile XOOPS news aggregator has been improved for non UTF-8 charset websites, multiple feeds are enabled."

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With the polls closing in ten days for some of the best open source CMS out there, if you haven't voted already, you need to head over to Packt Publishing and let your voice be heard.  There are five finalists for differing categories to choose from.  Voting for the winners in each of the categories opened September 1 and ends on October 20, 2008.  This "public vote" will then be combined with votes by a panel of judges for the top three CMS in each category will then be voted for by a panel of judges.

This year, I'll be on the panel of judges for the Most Promising Open Source CMS.  The five fanalists in this category are:  CMS Made Simple, ImpressCMS, MemHT, MiaCMS, and SilverStripe.  I'm hoping to submit my choices for most promising CMS early next week.  This is going to be a tough choice for me as I have found myself impressed with each of the open source projects.  Many of these newer crops of CMS already have their eye on the ball by making sure they're ready to be used globally (multi-language capable, right to left text, etc).  Some of the older more established CMS still struggle to this day to make this happen in their projects.  

Drupal 6.5 and Drupal 5.11 were released yesterday.  These new versions of Drupal are maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities.  If you take a look at the release notes, you'll find that Drupal's core developers and security teams have been hard at work improving this open source content management system.  With all the hard work done for you, it only makes sense to upgrade your Drupal site today (yes, we're running Drupal 6.5).

Details and download links can be found at Drupal.org.  

I began running this website on Drupal 6 shortly after the official release.  Before then, I periodically installed development versions of Drupal 6 on the production server during the weekends so others could judge the progress that was being made.  During this period, I made the claim that I didn't really need any contributed modules to run my site 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.

It could have been a bold statement that I made at the beginning of the year.  Although Drupal 6 interest has finally overtaken Drupal 5, there still are a number of popular modules still under the designation of release candidate, beta, and even alpha.  My site has shown that you don't have to always wait for contributed modules to upgrade a site to the latest version of Drupal.  However, my statement was a lie. By the time Earl Miles released Views 2.0 Beta 1, I found I didn't want to live without my essential modules for very long.

The following are a list of contributed Drupal modules that I wouldn't want to do without here at CMSReport.com.  I am neither the first word nor the last word of which modules you should be running for your Drupal site.  In fact, by coincidence, Kathleen Murtagh has just written a similar list of contributed modules that should be considered.  Some of the modules on my list are still going through their development phase and you'll have to assess the risk of using the modules on your own sites.  Personally, I like to take the risk for my hobby sites such as these, but I am more cautious when using development code for sites managed at my day job.  Whichever modules you choose, be sure to thank the developers that have made your site possible. 

Contributed modules used at CMSReport.com

Sends e-mail to notify both registered and anonymous users about new comments on pages where they have commented. The goal is to drive one-time users that comment back to you site to convert them to real registered users. This conversion step is an essential one in building a blog comment community.

Oateck.com: "Overview: Its fitting I should start with Graffiti CMS since this site was built with it. What better way to review a product then actually using it to review it. For those who love and hate Community Server(CS) where you love it because of its powerful features, and hate it cause of it powerful features, Telligent(www.teligent.com) has created a CMS for the mid to small size projects that require the publishing features of CS with out all the horsepower."

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Packt Publishing, the publisher of computer related books, announced the release of its new book OpenCMS 7 Development.

OpenCms is a professional-level open-source Website Content Management System, based on Java and XML. Many companies or organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the standard OpenCms application. Thankfully, OpenCms can be used by Java developers to create sophisticated add-ons and customizations that extend the power of OpenCms in virtually unlimited directions.

Targeting version 7 of OpenCms, this book is for Java developers interested in extending and further customizing OpenCms through its Java API.

eZ Systems and eZ Partner Mitsue-Links Co., Ltd. will join forces to found eZ Systems Japan this November in Shinjyuku-ku, Tokyo. The primary purpose of this new office is to promote eZ Systems’ Open Source Content Management System (CMS) eZ Publish in Japan.

"eZ is not new to the Japanese market, as we have been building a partner network and working with significant customers in Japan for the last two years. We are now experiencing accelerated growth in the market and, naturally, the next step is to get direct representation in the market to support further growth. We are thus very excited about this new office," explains eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad.

eZ Systems Japan will focus on the following:

• Being the base for eZ Publish marketing activities in Japan
• Providing development and support specialized for the Japanese market
• Providing expert consulting services
• Delivering training to eZ Partners in Japan

The grand opening of eZ Systems Japan will take place on November 5, 2008.

This Drupal site of mine has taken quite a bit of beating the past couple weeks.  While Mollom has been protecting this site well enough from the comment spammers, it isn't designed to prevent the bots from trying to ping me so much.  It has been an incredible experience to see the bots try to open every possible URL and directory here at CMSReport.com.  But probably the real stress on the site has been my testing of numerous contributed modules that are still under development.  Probably using a production server to test new modules isn't the smartest thing for anyone to do, but it does provide a nice adrenaline rush from time to time.

To make a long story short, I'm testing a number of ways I can use a Web content management system more efficiently to run this site.  I also want to do some restructuring of the site so that I have more flexibility in the look and feel of the site as well as how the content is delivered.  For the most part, I'll be using Pathauto, Views, Panels, and one of the aggregation modules.  I'm currently testing the FeedAPI module for aggregation, but none of the aggregation related modules really do what I want them to do.  I'll put up a site recipe in the next month or two on the modules I finally settle on to support this site.

Now it is time for me to go.  Evidently, one of the modules I've installed is causing some cron issues.  Am I having fun, yet?  Yes, I am.