Open Source

I just can't believe the year Drupal is having.  There has been an explosion of Drupal sites almost everywhere you turn.  Drupal is very popular with the masses in 2007.  So popular in fact, that I wonder as with all things popular if we'll be seeing 2008 as the backlash year against Drupal as it has quickly evolves as a litmus test for open source CMS (one of my predictions for 2008).

The latest Drupal-based site to flash on the screen of my browser is the portal (currently in beta) for the European Commission sponsored Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF ) project.  The site aims to be a community-driven platform for the production and distribution of educational materials. Its sustainability depends on the building of a strong community of users and participants of the platform.  The site may actually be live by the time you read this post.

eWeek has a slideshow of Microsoft's top 25 open source projects.

With a bid underway to obtain the blessing of the Open Source Initiative for two of its software licenses, Microsoft is working to burnish its open source credentials. Here are the 25 most active projects, as of August 21, on Microsoft's CodePlex open source project hosting Web site, along with the licenses under which the projects have been released.

Let me ask you this, what would likely happen if Microsoft opened up Windows Vista?  Do you think open source developers would pitch in to improve Vista or would they gut the code and start building a new Windows operating system from scratch?

Amy Stephen over at Open Source Community has put together a good summary for how differing open source CMS projects have interpreted the impact the GPL has on third-party extensions/modules/plugins/add-ons.  Movement in the Joomla community ensuring GPL compliance for extensions is what prompted her comparisons of license interpretation between Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress, and XOOPS.

Not long ago, Development Seed posted a fantastic comparison of multilingual handling between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

Starting Monday July 16, Packt Publishing will be accepting nominations for their 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.  Last year, I had fun watching closely as the top five open source CMS were nominated and I even made some predictions for which projects would be declared the winners.  This year, I'm also honored to announce that I have been selected as a judge for the Overall Winner category!

That's right, while I have my favorites when it comes to CMS, it looks as if I've proven myself to be non-bias and open-minded enough to be on the jury.   Ironically, I'm not the only one from Sioux Falls, South Dakota that will be on the judging panel.  Deane Barker, Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, has also been selected as a judge for the social networking category.  Evidently, the long winter months in this part of the country has given us too much time to talk and discuss various topics such as technology, content management systems, and innovation.  Then again, it's also possible Sioux Falls is a lot more forward-thinking then people typically give credit to the city.  Either way, neither Deane or myself know anyone from Fargo.

If you recall, this is the award that last year, Joomla was declared by the judges as the winner, with Drupal in second place, followed by Plone in third place.   Different this year then in 2006 is that the CMS projects may be nominated by various categories and more prize money is being offered.

To be honest, I've had problems getting excited in the past about XOOPS as a CMS or as an open source community.  There just didn't seem to be a whole lot of buzz about this CMS and I was seriously thinking about dropping it from my personal "top 30 list" found to the left under "CMS Focus". 

Here at CMSReport.com, I use a slightly modified version of the Zen theme.  Jeff Robbins is currently working on expanding his ideas via a series of default templates and variables added for the PHPTemplate engine.  This work is currently under the project name Zengine.  Lullabot.com recently underwent a new site design using Zengine and I guess there has been a number of comments for the site's new search tab.   Lucky for us, Mr. Robbins has decided to share with us how to code in the search tab.

A couple weeks ago, I found on my doorstep Hagen Graf's book, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 Beta 1.  The book was sent to me by the book's publisher, Packt Publishing, in hopes that I would review the book on the Joomla! content management system here at CMSReport.com.  While I do not promise to review every book or Internet link that comes my way, I always appreciate the opportunity to do such reviews.  In this case, I was eager to review the book since I have lost track of the new features introduced in version 1.5 since Joomla!