Open Source

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.

"While Drupal's growth is impressive, it won't be reaching its potential if it resists incorporating learnings from other systems (e.g. 'this is Drupal, not Wordpress')."

- theneemies, "Chris Messina's Drupal 6 review", Open Source Community, November 14, 2007

I came across another one of those "top ten" lists, this time, "Ten Reasons to choose Wordpress". Among the ten reasons to choose Wordpress were:

• Wordpress is used the world over
• Famous bloggers use Wordpress
• Wordpress is free

I've used Wordpress before and I have to say I chose it for its functionality and not whether a million zillion people used it. I know there are people who use, join, and buy something because it is popular. However, I have thankfully never been one of those people.

Thanks to a post at OpenSourceCommunity.org, I came across a conversion tool to allow you to import the SMF 1.1 database into a phpBB 3 site. Information about the conversion tool can be found in a forum post at phpbb.com. By the way, the script is still in beta, meaning that it works but you might find some bugs since it is not fully tested.

Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

By golly, Joomla has been awarded as the Best PHP Open Soure CMS in Packt Publishing's 2007 awards.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! was selected as the winner in the Best PHP category due to "its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box".

Packt Publishing is starting to announce the various winners in its Open Source CMS Awards.  The first category announced was the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

Judges comments for their decisions included:

The project managing Elgg, an open source networking platform, announced a couple days ago that the software is "now more open than ever".  The project will be opening "the development process, codebase, direction and software roadmap to the community".

More recently, expected changes at elgg.org were starting to take place with expectations of discussions taking place throughout the week.

This will mean structure both in tools to better support community led development of the software but will also mean putting together procedures how to organise it all.

I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.