The bottom line, there are alot of very intelligent people working on the various CMS projects. On top of that, other brilliant IT folks are choosing differently when it comes to which system is best.

"By now, most of you should know that there are three versions of WordPress available and one awesome forum software program, bbPress, which works seamlessly integrated with two versions of WordPress. Let’s look at your WordPress options and see which one is right for your blogging needs. Wordpress.com Wordpress.com is the free but limited version of WordPress..."

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Believe it or not, but the first time I tried the Opera Web browser was a month ago. Until recently, I was content in calling Mozilla's Firefox the alternative browser. Opera 9 is now out and contains a wide range of features. Some of the features unique to Opera and not provided by Internet Explorer and Firefox includes BitTorrent built into the browser and Site Preferences. Site preferences allows you to accept cookies and pop-ups according to specific sites you're visiting (as opposed to settings for all sites you visit with the browser).

I thought eweek did a decent review of the product. The following are some of the things they had to say about Opera 9 in their article:

In our tests, we found Opera 9 to be one of the best Web browsing tools we've used in a long time, which is why we are giving Opera 9 an eWEEK Labs Analyst's Choice award.

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Unlike Opera 8, which had significant browser interface changes, Opera 9's big changes are mainly in the areas of management and configuration options.

A couple days ago I opened my Thunderbird e-mail client on my Windows XP system and found an e-mail from Joe Audette of the mojoPortal project. "Mojo whata?", I asked. I thought I knew most of the content management projects (CMS) projects around, but this one didn't ring a bell. After reading his e-mail, I understood I likely have not heard much about his project because my focus on CMS has been a little too narrow lately.

In his e-mail, Audette writes, "Hi, just wondering if you only cover CMS's using php technology or if you would consider giving any press to .NET/Mono based projects? Any coverage of my project mojoPortal would be much appreciated."

As I've mentioned in past posts, I have a strong desire to cover more than just PHP Web applications. mojoPortal, named after Audette's dog, is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac. Already the talk of a CMS using a blend of Microsoft and open source tools was peaking my interest.

It has been more than a year since I looked at Serendipity. Since my experience with the CMS blog pre-dates the 1.0 era, the best I can do at this time is send you over to NewsForge for their latest review of Serendipity. From time to time, they have been kind enough to include me in their NewsVac. It's only fair that I do the same for them.

New kid on the blog: A look at Serendipity 1.0 - Serendipity is a PHP-based content management system (CMS) for powering blogs and other sites, and has a feature set that should make any blogger happy. After several years in development, the Serendipity team hit the 1.0 mark on June 15. Let's see how the 1.0 release shakes out. [NewsForge]

Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.

Why is there such a disparity in viewpoints for using Drupal in content management? For many first time users of Drupal, Drupal doesn't leave them with a very good first impression. It's only after you spend some time with Drupal that you begin to discover it has a number of traits that make it an outstanding application to build your website around. While Drupal doesn't give you a good first impression, it will eventually give you a second or third good impression.

Let's take a look at some of the reasons to why people may not like Drupal. The review written by Justin James for Drupal 4.7 is in an article titled, A product review of the Drupal Content Management System, does it make the grade? The author states that "Drupal does not make the grade". He bases his opinion on issues with usability and ease of installation. With regards to usability he says: