The release of Geeklog 1.5.0 Beta 1 by the Geeklog Team marked a new milestone for the open source blogging system. Although the software is still in development, Geeklog's developers hope to release the final version of Geeklog 1.5 on May 26th. The end of May marks the beginning of the coding phase for Google's Summer of Code 2008. To mark the occasion, Geeklog is highlighting the work done by students participating in last year's Summer of Code that is going into this new release. How cool is that!

Changes found in Geeklog 1.5.0 incorporates the following projects implemented during the 2007 Google Summer of Code:

• New user-friendly install script
• New Configuration Graphical User Interface
• New Webservices API based on the Atom Publishing Protocol

"Simple Machines is extremely proud to announce the long awaited release of the first public beta of SMF 2.0.

SMF 2.0 has now been in development for over 18 months, and in beta with our Charter Members since August last year. Feature complete, and having undergone considerable testing and bug fixing, we are now ready to put it into the hands of the public for wider testing."

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Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday. As in the past, I wanted to use CMSReport.com as a "live" test site for the beta/release candidates of Drupal as I did with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. However, as this site has matured, so has my reliance on too many contributed modules currently not supporting Drupal 6. So for now, I've decided to place Drupal 6 in a subdomain, drupal6.cmsreport.com.

I am excited with what I have already seen in Drupal 6. I consider version 6 to be Drupal on steroids. Drupal 6 has a lot of performance and power improvements that are already apparent even in the Beta. Put it this way, the day the Views module is ready for Drupal 6, is the day I go live with running CMS Report on Drupal 6.

Mozilla's Firefox 3 Beta 1 has been released. The announcment from Mozilla Developer News:

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the ninth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, and version checking for insecure plugins.
• Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable downloading, full page zoom, animated tab strip, and better integration with Windows Vista and Mac OS X.

If you are reading this post, then congratulations...you are now seeing CMS Report on its new server (a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server).  As I tweak the VPS in the following weeks, I may fall back on the old server from time to time but for the most part, I'm home.  Today officially ends my grand-experiment of running a moderately busy Drupal site on the cheap.

I made some big mistakes by not pulling CMSReport.com sooner from the shared hosting plan and back onto a VPS.  There are some very good lessons I learned this past week.  Once I catch up on my sleep, I plan on writing down my final experiences with running Drupal on a shared hosting plan.  I think when it's all said and done, it could be a good reference for those trying to determine whether Drupal is right for them but are prefering to stay with the lower-end shared hosting plans.  I'm also hoping to take the series of posts I've done on Drupal and Shared Hosting this summer and find some way to contribute them back into the Drupal Handbooks.  I know I'm not the first person that has wrestled with running Drupal on a shared hosting plan.  You can see John VanDyk's post as a recent example.

"After eight months of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first beta version of the Drupal 6.x family. This beta includes a tremendous number of new features and new programming APIs for both users and developers. We improved Drupal's human language related features, interoperability with databases, logging solutions, sign on systems and also included an update notification module for improved security, so it becomes easier than ever to get up to date with the latest security and bug fixes."

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Robert Cambell announced the expected release of CMS Made Simple 1.2 with the beta version expected in a couple weeks.  After the CMSMS 1.2 release all focus will be on development of a 2.0 version of the CMS.

Some of the new features and enhancements can be expected in CMSMS 1.2:

• Graphical HTML Text editor (Frontend WYSIWYG)
• News 2.5 has an ‘extra’ field for additional information (maybe an image)  and supports frontend article submission
• Full permissions for the Admin Group (gid == 1) and not just the first user (uid == 1)

"A lot of bigger media sites took note of our launch of the MT4 beta, and we wanted to take a look at some of the most notable responses. The entire MT team has been ecstatic about the warm reception we’ve gotten from the blogosphere, and a lot of these press stories help explain why."

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A new version of the blogging application Serendipity is now at the beta stage, Serendipity 1.2 Beta 1.  The most significant changes in this new version of Serendipity is the authentication and session scheme for easier plug-in interaction.  Also support for theming/template authoring has been improved using Smartyfield.

The following is a list of some of the new enhancements according to the Serendipity 1.2-beta1 announcement since Serendipity 1.1:

• Templates for Backend (Entry Editor, Master Template) via Smarty
• New session/login system
• Improved database support for SQLite3 and PDO::Postgresql
  
• IPv6 support

Plone 3 beta 3 was released on Wednesday of this week.  The announcement posted at Plone.org also invited users, administrators, and developers to help test the new software.  Plone 3, built on the Zope application server, is nearing a year of development .  By the time the final version of Plone 3 is released you should see the following new features included in the content management system.

• Full versioning, roll-back capabilities, in-place staging (ie. working copy support) and locking for all content.
• Inline editing of content using Ajax.
• Link integrity checking and automatic handling of moved or renamed content.