Content Management

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.

I could not help but chuckle when I read this post. Donncha O Caoimh hinted that he may have released WordPress MU 1.1.1 a day earlier then he intended. Sort of like sending that e-mail or blog post sooner then you had intended.  Despite the release of WordPress MU 1.1.1 a day early, it still sounds as if you can expect a good package out of this version.

From time to time we like to see the giants fall.  However, I think in this particular case if the giant falls so does the little guy.  If the Belgian court's recent ruling against Google becomes the "standard" that all sites will be judged, the ruling would likely have a negative effect for most bloggers and the readers who visit those blogs.  As reported by CNET:

Matthew Mullenweg announced at Wordpress.org that WordPress 2.1 "Ella" is available for download. Some of the new features and changes listed in this version of WordPress that I think users will like include:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again. I'm a habitual browser closer before saving my work...so this will be a big one for for me!
• A tabbed editor that allows you to switch between WYSIWYG and code editing instantly while writing a post.
• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.
• You can set any “page” to be the front page of your site, and put the latest posts somewhere else, making it much easier to use WordPress as a content management system.
• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. Domas Mituzas from MySQL went over all our queries with a fine-toothed comb.
• Pages can now be drafts, or private.
• Comment feeds now include all the comments, not just the last 10.
• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

Are you tired of all the Drupal and WordPress posts we've been doing lately here at CMS Report? Not my fault...I only report the CMS news! The fact is that among the open source CMS that I post about...both Drupal and WordPress have been churning out a lot since the New Year started. The release of Wordpress 2.0.7 is just a good example as any.

On Drupal's sixth birthday Dries Buytaert announced that Drupal 5.0 has been released. The 5.0 version of the content management system is considered a very significant release by its open source community. Consider this, it's been almost half a decade since Drupal 4.0 was released.

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.

This just goes to show you how small of a world it is. Traffic to CMS Report is usually rather light over the weekend, but I noticed an increase in the number of people visiting the site Saturday and Sunday. These "new" visitors were coming from Lorelle VanFossen's WordPress blog. She recently posted an article on some of the features expected in the yet to be released WordPress 2.1.

Ryan Boren, one of the lead WordPress developers, has been releasing preview information on WordPress 2.1, along with some other well-know WordPress developers, testers, and users. Here are some teasers about WordPress 2.1, due out soon...

While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.

The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.

The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.

On a recent visit to Drupal's forum I found another post with both Joomla and Drupal in the subject line. Making comparisons between Joomla and Drupal are very common these days as they are currently considered the top two open source content management systems (CMS) out there. The forum post written by Steve Burge contains a link that takes you to a comparison table he did between Joomla and Drupal.