December 2007

Yes, WordPress and XOOPS are two completely separate projects, but they do have at least one thing in common. Both Web applications were updated this past week to address known security vulnerabilities.

WordPress 2.3.2 was released to fix some very significant security bugs. The release addresses an exploit that can be used to expose your draft posts. WordPress 2.3.2 also "suppresses some error messages that can give away information about your database table structure and limits and stops some information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations".

Yesterday, I talked about CMS Report's five most read articles that were published in 2007. Today, let's talk about seven of our articles that remained at the bottom of the dog pile. Listed below are Seven Great CMS Report Articles that you few people read.

What a great year we had at CMS Report! In 2007, we posted over 800 articles. Below are the five most read articles that I posted in 2007. Interestingly, three of the top five stories have little to do with content management systems.

A new version of Elgg, the open source social networking platform, has been released. New features in Elgg 0.9 include:

• New "content" function for static pages editing
• Improved sidebar customization
• Simplified visual installation
• Security improvements
• Refactoring more functions into /mod
• Improved access permissions for admin to all areas/objects

Elgg 0.9 can be downloaded from SourceForge.

Except for some Python programming, I've done very little software development this decade with most of my efforts in the 80's and 90's (BASIC, Pascal, Perl, Tcl, etc). Those that know me know I've wanted to dig more into PHP and Ruby, but I have been distracted by one sorry excuse after another.

Josh Clark sent an e-mail to us the other day saying that his Web content management system, Big Medium 2, is availabe for public consumption. While he sent the usual press release, I thought I'd go ahead and paste his full e-mail to me. Sometimes it's good to note that it's not just a "company" pushing a product but instead to actually see the people developing the software pushing their own products.

Bryan,

First off, thanks for all you do. You offer such terrific coverage of the CMS space and the challenges facing practitioners. Super-professional but with a personal feel. I love it.

I posted a comment on one of your posts introducing Big Medium 2 a couple of months ago and now, at long last, it's out of beta. I'm passing along the press release below in hopes that you'll find it of interest to your readers. Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions, and thanks again.

All best,

Josh

 PARIS, DEC 17, 2007 -- Josh Clark and Global Moxie announced the release of Big Medium 2, a web content management system aimed squarely at web designers.

This is why I'm very cautious in using any type of search engine toolbar (Google, Yahoo, etc).

Google is working to fix a bug in the Google Toolbar that could allow criminals to steal data or install malicious software on a system, a security researcher warned Tuesday.

The flaw lies in the mechanism Google Toolbar uses to add new buttons on the browser. Because the toolbar does not perform adequate checks when new buttons are being installed, a hacker could make his button appear as though it was being downloaded from a legitimate site when in fact it came from somewhere else.

PC World recently released their list of the 15 biggest disappointments of 2007. Two of the items on that list didn't surprise me, but two other items were shocking to see on the list but in reflection absolutely true.

I wasn't surprised to see that both Apple's "Leopard" OS 10.5 (#8) and Microsoft's Windows Vista (#1) on the list. I've been talking about my disappointment on the state of the computer desktop for sometime now. I'm just glad to see others have noticed the problem so I don't look like Mr. Glum to everyone.

However, I was surprised to see two content management system related items that made the list.

Recently posted at XOOPS.org was a how-to for optimizing XOOPS on your server.

Optimizing Xoops, its modules and your server - Sometimes, people are telling that Xoops is rather slow and it can be true but there are ways to improve things.

Instant Zero is in charge to maintain some websites using Xoops, so we decided to share with you our knowledge in this domain and we hope that you will find it useful.

In this article, and in 5 points, you are going to see what you can do for your site.

The latest review I've read on the KDE desktop is from Ars Technica, A first look at KDE 4.0 release candidate 2. While the author notes that a lot of improvements still need to be made to KDE 4.0, overall it should be an impressive desktop. I'm contemplating that my next laptop will be fully Linux and hoping KDE 4.0 will bring enough Wow to impress others on why I didn't choose to go the Windows or Mac route.