Open Source

OpenLogic by Perforce and the Open Source Initiative Release 2023 State of Open Source Report

MINNEAPOLIS, January 25, 2023 – Perforce Software, a provider of solutions to enterprise teams requiring productivity, visibility, and scale along the development lifecycle; and the Open Source Initiative (OSI), a non-profit that raises awareness and adoption of open source software (OSS), today unveiled the results of their annual open source survey — the 2023 State of Open Source Report. The report is based on data from a global survey of open source users created through a collaboration between OSI and OpenLogic by Perforce, a provider of technical support and services for community open source software.

End of Life for Drupal 8

This is old news but I thought still worth mentioning. Last month Drupal 8 reached its end-of-life. This means that all versions of Drupal 8 core and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 have been marked unsupported and are no longer supported by the Drupal security team.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021. With the end of life approaching, I also updated my two websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

Joomla 3.9’s Privacy Tools Drive GDPR and Regulatory Compliance

As a collaborative community-driven software release, Joomla 3.9 reflects and incorporates global user feedback gathered through extensive community surveys, Joomla forum posts and feature requests. Joomla have incorporated the very latest feedback in Version 3.9 to provide users with a comprehensive ‘Privacy Tool Suite’. This facilitates the compliance of Joomla websites with laws and regulations, most notably GDPR.

Among the new features included are:

Rehabilitating Google AMP: My failed attempt

Back in February I wrote an article saying how I believed Google AMP has been imposed on the web by Google as a ‘standard’ for developing fast webpages, and my dismay about that. Google apparently developed this as an internal project without any open collaboration, and avoiding the W3C standardization processes. Google made implementation of Google AMP a requirement to show at the top of the search results for common news searches.

To many of us open web folk, Google’s AMP violated the widely held principle of search engines not putting bias into search results, and/or the principle of web standards (take your pick – it would not be bias if it was a standardized approach that the wider web community had agreed upon).

15 Years of WordPress

Appropriately, for the wildly popular CMS, it all started with a blog post. Way back in January 2003, Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of WordPress, wrote a short blog on his website, lamenting the lack of updates from his preferred blogging software, b2/cafelog.

Despite becoming increasingly popular since its release in 2001, b2/cafelog’s developer stopped maintaining the software in 2002, seemingly disappearing completely from all community forums.

Chris Graham: Why Google AMP is a threat to the Open Web

Like others in the IT community, I have become increasingly concerned with Google's behavior with their AMP technology.

For those who aren't really aware what AMP is, it's Google's proprietary solution for speeding up mobile pages. Webmasters implement AMP, which is a kind of Google-sanctified and Google-code-driven version of your webpage. It works very well and solves an important problem. Often when you search Google on a mobile device it will show AMP articles at the top of the results, so you get access to fast content first, which is reasonable in and of itself.

Drupal 8.4 Available and Fixes Huge Database Caching Issues

One of my goals in rebranding my website from CMS Report to socPub was to write diverse articles beyond the topic of content management systems. Yet, here we go again with another CMS related article. The Drupal open source project recently made available Drupal 8.4 and for me this version has been a long time coming as it addresses some long standing frustrations I've had with Drupal 8 from the perspective of a site administrator. While Drupal 8.4 adds some nice new features, I'm just as excited about the bug fixes and performance improvements delivered in this new version of Drupal.

Mailbag: DRUD Tech Launches ddev Community Open Source Toolkit

Last week, I received an email inviting me to take a sneak peak at a press release that became public today. In the email, I was asked if I would be interested in hearing "news from new open source startup, DRUD Tech, founded by a couple of long-time Drupal contributors". According to the email, the company has been in "stealth mode" quietly working on their new product which is ready for launch this week. Given that I'm a long time fan of the Drupal content management system of course I said yes.