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Those that have followed my writings (even from the WebCMSForum days) know I've spent about the past year or two dealing with an aging  PC.  Even the wife, who doesn't always appreciate the geek part of her husband, says it is time for a computer upgrade.  When she says it's time, you know the deadline is near to order up a new computer.

For the past several years I've configured my home PCs with a dual-boot of Windows/Linux.  While there are some things I don't like about Apple's propriety hardware for it's OS, the need for something different has me considering purchasing a Mac.  However, as I posted at the Open Source Community, I've started to wonder if over time the desktops for Linux and the Mac won't be that much different from one another.

KDE 4.0: Why I likely won't get a Mac -

Desktop Linux has an article and shapshots out on the first alpha version of KDE 4.0. The article is titled, KDE 4.0 alpha arrives!.

Features in this alpha version of KDE include:

• A new visual appearance through Oxygen (think Aqua)

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.

Until this post by Nick Lewis, I've been in the camp with the folks that say PHP-based content management systems such as Drupal should be compatible with both PHP 4 and PHP 5.   After reading his post, I'm convinced he's correct that new development should be geared toward PHP 5.  It's hard to fight for the future when you continue to hold on to the past...

Should Drupal move to PHP 5?

In one word: absolutely.

In one sentence: if we don't, the drupal project will die along with PHP.

CMS Watch has a very good article on their site titled, "Question CMS Consolidation". The article serves as a reminder for IT and managers that, although technically feasible, an organization may not want to put everyone on the same content management system (CMS).  Why would an organization want to to consolidate their systems in the first place?  For those at top of the organization there may be some obvious reasons to unify the organization onto a single CMS.

Many organizations are looking at a portfolio of dozens of content management systems running somewhere on their network. From sheer tidiness alone, it’d be nice to have a shorter list. And such tidiness can have real benefits: better negotiating leverage with vendors, reduced overhead to manage contracts, reductions in the number of servers and hence in datacenter space (with attendant power and operational costs), and so on. Finally, increased demands for compliance and control are placing a premium on simplifying information management.

In my own organization, we have had both Internet and intranet servers since the mid 1990's supporting operations and administrators.  While we moved our Internet web servers onto a CMS a few years ago, it is only the past few months that many of our offices and departments have shifted their intranet from static pages to much more dynamic system.  As many of our field offices migrate their servers to utilizing newer Web 2.0 and collaboration applications, IT and management have a strong desire to consolidate those applications and servers.

CiviCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7:

"Brad" from Joomla! wrote "RobInk hit the big 10k posts  today." at the Joomla! forum.  He goes on to write:

There is a thread going where you might like to add you congratulations etc.

It’s incredible to reflect upon just how many people have been helped by Rob’s posts, as well as the posts of all those who help out. Did you know, we have 28 members at the moment who have 2000 posts and above, and more than 70 with 1000 posts or more. Now that is CONTRIBUTING!

A special congratulations to Rob, and to everyone else THANKS for your continued help and support.

I've been a little negligent in providing some of the latest news for CMS Made Simple.  Hopefully, the information provided will satisfy some of the CMS Made Simple fans that visit this site.  The news...CMS Made Simple 1.0.6 was released last week!

The update to this CMS not only provides some security and bug fixes but also a few new features.  The following are a list of changes that were introduced with version 1.0.6:

•  Fixes a potential SQL injection hole in stylesheet.php
• A new installer that uses smarty templates and classes.
• Show the footer on tags about and help pages.

Development teams have quickened up the pace with the release of Mambo 4.6.2. The release marks the completion of the complete revision of the Language Manager that began with the initial 4.6 release.  The Mambo core is now fully translatable.

Other features introduced in this minor version release include:

• Stability & security improvements
• Lighter database footprint
• A number of bug fixes
• Improved compatibility with older 3rd party extensions
• Added support for 4.5.x style SEF URLs
• Updates to many of the internal extensions
• MOStlyCE WYSIWYG editor enhancements (cross browser compliance issues addressed via an update to TinyMCE v2.1.0)