Open Source

In times of war, you may be asked what you can do for your country. In modern times, your country may be asking you to do your part by updating your WordPress plugins.

The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), through the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), issued a public service announcement last week recommending website administrators to update their Wordpress sites. More specifically, the bureau wants you to update your third-party WordPress plugins.

This Tuesday, March 24, 2015, the Drupal community lost Aaron Winborn who was diagnosed with ALS a few years ago. In honor of Aaron, the Drupal Association and Angie Bryon recently announced the Aaron Winborn Award. The announcement reads as is:

SiteSupra, a hosted CMS and website builder, has now released their software as an open source CMS and development framework. SiteSupra Open Source Edition brings a new dimension to the web development market, as an open source product that may be hosted outside SiteSupra's own servers.

Somewhere along the way, I admittedly lost sight of TYPO3. It's not that I ever thought TYPO3 wasn't a good content management system but it never seemed like there was ever a lot of exciting things to write about TYPO3. When a CMS has a history that dates all the way back to the late 1990', well it's difficult to shake it off as as anything but a legacy application. So in my slumber I failed to notice that there was a new CMS on the radar, TYPO3 Neos.

Acquia has announced the appointment of Christopher Stone as senior vice president of products and development. Stone has more than 30 years of experience in software development and pioneering open source solutions for the enterprise. Stone will be responsible for engineering, DevOps, and product management of the Acquia Platform, helping lead the expansion of the company’s suite of SaaS solutions for building and managing integrated digital experiences.

WordPress 3.9 has been released with a number of refinements that WordPress hopes you'll "love". The changes and new features are solid but perhaps not as many as we've come to expect given past WordPress point releases. Some of the new features that can be found in WordPress 3.9 include improvements in the media editing experience, gallery previews, and live editing of widgets and headers.

Paul Rubens’ February article in CIO magazine, 7 Reasons Not to Use Open Source Software, has received quite the backlash in open source circles. I’d like to take a moment to add my own two cents, but I won’t be fanning the flames of the hardline open source fire. Let me be clear—I take issue with this article, but I don’t disagree with most of it. Instead, I think it only tells part of the story, failing to give open source credit where it’s due.

Today, we received an announcement from the folks at Joomla! which we couldn't pass up. The Joomla CMS has been downloaded more than 50 million times. Just as impressive, Joomla is currently being download at 1 million downloads a month.

Jimmy Atkinson from The Web Hosting Database recently sent us a note about WHdb.com updating their Top 50 Drupal Reference & Tutorial Sites. Jimmy asked us to help spread the word about the page (see his email attached below).

Moodle, an open source software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites, has released it's latest version...Moodle 2.6.1. This latest version provides a number of bug fixes and small improvements as well as fixes to security vulnerabilities that were recently discovered. The new features in Moodle 2.6.1 include: