Open Source

One busy Joomla member: 10,000 helpful posts

"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.

OpenSourceCommunity.org - A Drupal site

For some time I have wanted to promote and write about a new Drupal site that went online recently.  The site carries a similar mission I've tried to have with my own sites where those from competing projects, products, and organizations can come together for discussion.  In this case, a site with the desire to build a "place for those of us interested in open source solutions and community issues".  The site is OpenSourceCommunity.org.

osCommerce 3.0 Alpha 4 Released

osCommerce logoosCommerce, an open source shopping cart, is one more step closer to reaching a 3.0 release.  Although the journey to completing the  osCommerce 3.0 software continues to take users and developers on a very long road,  Alpha 4 was released to the public on March 30th.  As a reminder,  alpha releases of osCommerce are for "testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release".  In other words, you shouldn't use the software for a "live" store.

We've already talked about the new features added in earlier alpha versions of osCommerce 3.0 so there is no need to mention them in this article.  New features in Alpha 4 that have been added to the shopping cart since Alpha 3 include:

  • Administration Tool access levels (about time)
  • Administrator Log
  • Administration Tool batch action capabilities

OSCMS Summit over there and I'm still here

I'll be honest, I'm envious of those people that are able to attend the Open Source Content Management System Summit (OSCMS).  As Boris Mann pointed out in his post, the interest in the conference was so overwhelming that registration closed as quickly as it opened.  I sat on the fence in my decision to go or not to go way too long that I was flat out of luck.  That's alright though.  I wouldn't have wanted to take up someone's seat who may have been more deserving of attending OSCMS.  While I spend a lot of time writing about CMS, a lot of the people in the crowd spend a lot of time creating  their project's CMS.&nbs

Battle of the CMS Bands

As most of you probably know by now, Jeff Robbins from Lullabot and Drupal genre recently released "The Drupal Song".  What you may not know is that Wordpress and Joomla! also have their own songs.  Well this fact hasn't gone unnoticed by Amy Stephen in her own blog in which she says it's time to vote for the top song of the week.

OK. Normally, I am adverse to pitting one open source content management system against the other, but it appears we have no choice. As of today, we have three songs and only one can be the #1 Open Source CMS Song of the Week. It is time to pick the winner. Sorry, it’s how it works. I didn’t make the rules. If you object, you need to contact Casey Casem.

WordPress community member Devin Reams released his song and video back in January. Joomla! community member Anand Omka released his Joomla! song back in November and the video was released last week. Today, Jeff Robins released his Drupal song and Dries Buytaert announced the video will be shot on location during the OSCMS conference at Yahoo later this week.

Any has invited the open source communities to vote for their "favorite song" and as far as I can tell, the vote will take place through comments at her blog.  What?  Wordpress and and Joomla don't have their own poll module built into their core?  But alas, we're not voting for the best CMS here but instead the best song.

Joomla 1.5 beta-2 Overview

In a blog on the Joomla! Developer Network, Wilco Jansen posted an article describing the changes that have taken place between Joomla!  1.5's beta-1 and beta-2.

The following are some of the changes in user features for Joomla! 1.5 beta-2 that caught my eye: 

  • Implemented caching
  • Refactored session management for JSession, database, files, APC, and eAccelerator.
  • Complete refactoring of the installer
  • Added new archive libraries to better support zip|gzip|tar file extraction
  • Several improvements on default Joomla! templates, including support of newest browsers
  • Added open-id support
  • Further LDAP improvements
  • Further improvements on the media manager like the ability to remove multiple files, or image preview option
  • Added windows support on the FTP layer

Of the above features changes, I'm probably most interested in the implementation of caching as well as the the refactored session management.  These changes should really help improve Joomla's performance on the server.  Plus, as most of you know, I'm a big fan of eAccelerator and any other tools to get the server humming along.

Why open source gets my attention

From CMS Report's very beginning, I had every intention to talk about not only those content management systems (CMS) that are open source, but also those CMS that are considered propriety systems.  I personally don't have a problem seeing companies making profit for the products they develop and promote.  Yet, if you look at the majority of posts I have written in the past year you'll find that about 95% of the articles center around open source CMS and not propriety systems.  Part of the reason I don't talk much about propriety CMS is that I just don't have the same access to them as I do with open source software.  However, a tiny article in one of the IT trade ma

Find the open source survey, Save the doctor

Here is your chance to help out the academic scholars figure out what open source is all about. Lara Thynne, a PhD candidate at Deakin University Australia, is running a survey to be used in examining the motivation of open source users when it comes to participating in open source projects and using open source software. Ms. Thynne's difficulty is that she is needing around 1500 completed surveys and hasn't quite connected with the open source communities to "get the job done".