Content Management

A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

Jeff WhatCott, Acquia, asked some important and thought provoking questions on his blog, "A Dormant Drupal Opportunity". While the post focuses on Drupal, I think the contents of his post can apply to almost any content management system (CMS) out there.

In the article, Jeff asks whether defining Drupal as a CMS does more harm than good in describing the scope of features Drupal has to offer. In his words, the term CMS is a "20th century term that completely undersells what Drupal is capable of" as social software and a means for collaboration. Considering I really didn't understand what a CMS was until the 21st century, I beg to differ that the term CMS is as ancient as he makes it sound. However, he is entirely correct...many of today's Web applications that we call a CMS, really are not just a CMS.

Jeff asks three questions in his post:

1. Do you think we should put the CMS term to bed?
2. Would it be possible to grab some of that team collaboration social software market opportunity for the Drupal community?
3. Why isn’t there already a billion dollar Drupal services ecosystem for team collaboration? What’s missing?

While I appreciate comments here, please be sure to go over to Jeff's post and respond there too. In fact, if you only want to comment at one site...go there so we don't steal any of Jeff's "thunder". I've already made my comments at his site and I've attached my response to the above questions below.

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.

First, there was HOT or NOT where you could rate the pictures of men and women. A great site to visit if you're single and don't have a date on a lonely Friday night. But life changes and now you have a family. Do what do you do if you're married with nothing to do on a Saturday night?

Yes, you can always watch Curious George with the family, but how do you get back to your old life in a responsible manner? Well, now you have an alternative, Web Hot or Not?

David Sifry (Technorati) explains how webhotornot.com came to exist.

How did it come to exist? When I was in Madrid visiting my friend and investor Martin Varsavsky late last year, we had a fun time brainstorming ideas to help find and rate interesting web sites, and we came up with the idea. Who knows, perhaps the ratings might even be useful if people start using the site - sort of a "prediction market" for web sites. Most of all, we just wanted to create a simple site that was fast-loading and fun to use. We both love Hotornot, so we figured we'd do an homage.

A very nice article on RSS found at IBM's developerWorks:

Realize the power of RSS in Ajax and Web 2.0 applications - Tap this article's fully functional PHP code snippets that show you how to use PHP-based server-side functions to develop your own customizable RSS feed aggregator. [IBM developerWorks]

Gadgetopia pointed their readers to a website hosted by Michigan State University with a number of screen captures for how the Internet looked like in 1996. Almost a year ago, I posted a screen capture of the first site I did in that era. I'm somewhat pleased that the appearance of my site was no worse than the sites of well known companies. The author of the Internet '96 article brings up the point that you have to consider the technology back then to why sites looked the way they did.

Mambo 4.6.3 was released earlier today in recent weeks. Besides the usual security improvements and bug fixes, this version of Mambo came with some new enhancements. Some of the more notable enhancements in Mambo 4.6.3 include:

• Mostlyce upgraded to 2.4
• Mostlydbadmin upgraded to 1.5
• Geshi upgraded to 1.0.7.20
• Enhanced editor initializing
• Enhanced weblinks component, so the target param is not confusing anymore

I briefly wanted to mention that the stable release of Joomla! 1.5 has finally arrived! Needless to say, there are some very happy people in the open source community to see this version of the content management system go gold.

I haven't taken a serious look at Joomla! 1.5 since Beta 1 and Beta 2 were out the door. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to taking a look at the finished product over the course of the next few weeks. Until then, below is a brief glimpse from the announcement at Joomla.org of what you can expect from version 1.5.

Matt Mullenweg announced this morning that WordPress.com users will now have 3 GB of free drive space for their blogs. Previously, WordPress.com only offered 50 MB of free space to those that signed up for the free service. Why are they doing this? Looks like Wordpress.com has no longer decided to play nice guy against their biggest competitors, TypePad and Blogger.

The following is an excerpt from Mullenweg's announcement at WordPress.com:

Robert Accettura, a Mozzila contributer and web developer, has placed a follow-up to his original "Secrets in Websites" post, appropriately titled, Secrets In Websites II. When reading this type of posts on the Web it truly puts people like you and me into geek paradise.

This post is a follow up to the first Secrets In Websites. For those who don’t remember the first time, I point out odd, interesting, funny things in other websites code. Yes it takes some time to put a post like this together, that’s why it’s just about a year since the last time. Enough with the intro, read on for the code.

One thing you may miss in this post though is Page 2, be sure not to skip it. On the second page he has a section called Presidential Campaign Analysis. As I commented on Accettura's blog, I began a number of times doing a similar analysis focusing on the U.S. presidential campaigns, but I never quite got around to completing the task. I'm so glad that someone has done this. In the post, where applicable, Accettura also tries to identify what type of CMS the presidential candidates are using. So far he's identified Drupal, Wordpress, Archos, and Typepad.

Hopefully Accettura is open to corrections and perhaps we can help him identify better which CMS are being used? I already see one commenter identifying what may have been Drupal is actually a Wordpress site ("Chris Dodd’s site uses Drupal while Bill Richardson’s does not"). Either way, isn't this great stuff from Accettura?