Amy Stephen, site leader for Open Source Community, submitted her 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum. The Joomla! community makes a big deal out of these type of achievements and we've covered some of their milestones in the past. You know what? It's hard not to celebrate someone else's contributions to open source communities. Congratulations to Amy!
Amy Stephen's 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum
In 2006, I helped bring a friend's Fish and Tackle store online using open source osCommerce. The project was ugly in both appearance and code as I was merging a legacy site with an SMF forum together with the osCommerce software. As I indicated back then, while osCommerce was functional I was not pleased with the software. I kept on thinking how much easier this project would have been if I had used what I consider as modern CMS's. Specifically, I was thinking Drupal and perhaps even Joomla!.
A couple months ago, I experienced a number of errors at my Drupal site that all pointed to a corrupted database. I believe the problem likely was the caused by a sloppy export/import I performed with the MySQL database while moving the site to a new server.
While my particular database problem was an easy fix, if you really don't know much about databases you may find that you really need some guidance on how to solve problems like these. This article is the process I went through to correct this particular MySQL database problem in Drupal 5 and some general database rules that show why this problem occurred in the first place.
I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site. The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World". Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.
"It is fair to say the GPL does not intend to make it easy for proprietary software.The intention is to liberate code and ensure continual downstream benefits to users. So, yes, it's going to be easier to integrate open source code into a GPL'ed environment. And, as it should be!
It is important that community environments also ensure that open source developers benefit more than proprietary developers. It hasn't been that way in J! [Joomla!] or in Mambo."
--Amy Stephen, OpenSourceCommunity.org, Comment to CMS Report's Is bridging a GPL application with a non-GPL application legal?
Until this post by Nick Lewis, I've been in the camp with the folks that say PHP-based content management systems such as Drupal should be compatible with both PHP 4 and PHP 5. After reading his post, I'm convinced he's correct that new development should be geared toward PHP 5. It's hard to fight for the future when you continue to hold on to the past...
Should Drupal move to PHP 5?
In one word: absolutely.
In one sentence: if we don't, the drupal project will die along with PHP.
"Brad" from Joomla! wrote "RobInk hit the big 10k posts today." at the Joomla! forum. He goes on to write:
There is a thread going where you might like to add you congratulations etc.It’s incredible to reflect upon just how many people have been helped by Rob’s posts, as well as the posts of all those who help out. Did you know, we have 28 members at the moment who have 2000 posts and above, and more than 70 with 1000 posts or more. Now that is CONTRIBUTING!
A special congratulations to Rob, and to everyone else THANKS for your continued help and support.
I really can't display every open source project's invitation for college students to apply to Google's Summer of Code. But just like the invitation from Drupal, WordPress would be another one of those projects I wouldn't have minded working on when I was going to college.
Dries Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, invited students on his blog to participate in Google's Summer of Code and at the same time help improve the Drupal core. This is Google's third year for the program which hopes to encourage college students to work on open source projects. Chris Dibona, Open Source Program Manager at Google, wrote: