Earlier today, Matthew Mullenweg announced the official release of Wordpress 2.7. This new version of WordPress is a dandy with significant improvements made to the WordPress administrative interface and dashboard. The choices you now have to customizing our blogging workflow is almost endless.
While we could start reading off from the changelogs for all the new features in WordPress 2.7, It's probably just as easy to show you the video.
For the second straight year, Packt Publishing has announced Drupal as the recipient of its Overall Open Source CMS Award. Drupal was also the winner this year in the award category for Best PHP Open Source CMS.
Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.
Joomla! also placed second in the Overall category followed by DotNetNuke for third position.
Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing's 2008 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS.
The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.
There is so much that I want to do here at CMS Report, but my time has been limited these past couple weeks. Some things that have been going on in my world:
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.
Amit from Joomlatools contacted me to introduce me to their new company as well as their new product, Nooku. The introduction is somewhat ironic given the fact that Johan already contacted me last Spring. I have also had a link to Joomlatools' blogs in my Blogroll for a number of months!
However, it sounds like they're doing exciting stuff over at Joomlatools that should make quite a bit of the Joomla! community happy. Nooku looks like a great product and the extension/framework should help Joomla! 1.5 users create multi-lingual websites more easily. I wish the best for Joomlatools.
Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal. According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet using Drupal 5. Electric Pulp, a local Sioux Falls company, also contributed to the project by doing the design and CSS work.
I don't think I've ever met Tim Broeker, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a Joomla! Core Team connection. Yes indeed, open source does matter.
Updated Sep 8 2008 per comments at CMSReport.com
WordPress 2.6 was released just a couple days ago. During the time I have covered WordPress, I have always considered WordPress more as blogging application and not really a full featured content management system. However, ever since I installed Wordpress 2.5 on one of my sites, I can't help but think that WordPress now rocks as a CMS.
If you haven't looked at WordPress in the past year or so, I recommend that you do yourself a favor and take a look at what you may be missing out.
The release of Ubercart 1.0 was announced earlier today. Ubercart is an open source e-commerce package (shopping cart) that fully integrates your online store with the open source CMS, Drupal. We've been watching Ubercart for some time and like some of the look-and-feel it borrows from osCommerce.
Some of the features in Ubercart 1.0 as reported by their shopping cart's Website include: