Simple PHP Blog 0.5.0.1, a maintenance release, went public on Tuesday of this week. I know I don't talk too much about it here, but I still like to keep at least one eye open on this particular blogging application. For you see, I consider Simple PHP Blog my very first Web content management system (WCMS).
Amy Stephen over at Open Source Community has put together a good summary for how differing open source CMS projects have interpreted the impact the GPL has on third-party extensions/modules/plugins/add-ons. Movement in the Joomla community ensuring GPL compliance for extensions is what prompted her comparisons of license interpretation between Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress, and XOOPS.
This post you are reading has been saved unpublished for a few days as I have feared it reads too much as a rant. In this post, I'd like to discuss the difference between good and bad competition when it comes to similar "news sites" such as my own CMS Report. I also want to touch on about how a CMS such as Drupal and Joomla brings both the good and the ugly online. Unfortunately as with all technology, the modern CMS not only has been a blessing to sites dishing news for their writers and their users...but also a curse.
"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes. Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."
-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.
Now that Summer 2007 is finally here, it is time to step back for a couple weeks and spend less time in front of the computer. As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to use some of this time to publish online a professional report I did on IT user support. This report was submitted a couple years ago as a requirement for a Master of Science in Administrative Studies with an Information Systems track. You'll get bits and pieces of it in the following weeks and once I'm done, I'll regroup them similar to the research paper I posted earlier this year.
Not long ago, Development Seed posted a fantastic comparison of multilingual handling between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.
If the project leaders and users of your favorite content management system are still debating when they should drop PHP 4 support, it looks like the PHP development team has helped make that decision for them. PHP.net just announced the End of Life for PHP 4. Starting in 2008, only security updates on a case-by-case basis will be provided...and PHP 4 is dead in August 2008.