BlogsWeek.com

On July 14 the Packt 2008 Open Source CMS Award has launched, “inviting visitors to submit nominations for their favorite Open Source Content Management Systems. Now in its third year, the Award has helped to support a variety of Content Management Systems gain recognition in a crowded and high quality marketplace.”

In 2007, Drupal was the overall winner of the Award. With the introduction of four new categories in 2007, the Award succeeded in expanding the opportunities for a wider range of Open Source Content Management Systems to benefit.

A new category for 2008 is the Open Source CMS MVP Award, which will recognise the contributions to projects made by individuals that often go unnoticed.

Packt Publishing has opened up nominations for people to submit their favourite Content Management System at www.PacktPub.com/Award. The top five in each category will go through to final, which begins at the start of September.

For more information, please see the Press Release by Packt: 2008 Open Source CMS Award Launched.

Shortly before its seventh birthday the PostNuke project, born as a fork of PHP-Nuke, has been renamed. It’s now called the Zikula Application Framework.

A few commenters noted the resemblance of Zikula’s new name and logo with the name and logo of the very popular Joomla! CMS and Web Application Framework. Others applauded the end of the rather long rebranding process, hoping to concentrate now on new release development. Many more expressed their satisfaction with the new name and branding, which denotes the project willingness to be part of the Web 2.0 era, moving away from the *Nuke past.

The first accomplishment of the Zikula team will be the release of Zikula 1.0.0 (formerly PostNuke 0.8). For details, please read Welcome the Zikula Application Framework.

Drupal 6.0 final is now available.

This new release of Drupal offers “major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework” plus many other smaller improvements.

Usability: a new friendly installer, drag and drop administration for e.g. menu items, forums, taxonomy terms, uploaded files, and an improved multilingual interface make Drupal 6.0 easier to use.

New core modules: actions and triggers let you build a custom workflow with no programming knowledge, OpenID support is built in, the Update status module keeps you informed of new versions of Drupal, your modules and your themes.

Theming: customization of the look and feel of your site is more flexible, with improved theming structure and support for translations, usage of new jQuery 1.2.3 and a powerful Theme Developer module (a separate download) that offers handy tools to develop your own themes.

Security: password strength checking and more granular permissions let you better manage your site security, and with the core Update status module and a subscription to the e-mail Security Announcements list, you are promptly informed about new security updates.

Performance: most core modules are split into smaller pieces and only loaded when needed, resulting in less code per page, and the menu system, rewritten from scratch, is much more efficient and powerful.

To learn more on Drupal 6.0, please read the detailed release announcement.

What started two and a half years ago with a letter to the community is culminating today with the release of Joomla! 1.5.

“Joomla! 1.5 boasts remarkable advances over Joomla! 1.0 in the areas of extensibility, usability and internationalization.”

“Over the last 2 1/2 years the code base has been melted down and reforged into a carefully organized, object-oriented framework. The user interface has been thoroughly refined to improve usability and simplify administrative tasks. To simplify life for designers, the templating system has been expanded to allow meticulous control over core markup as well as an all new template configuration interface.”

The article Joomla! 1.5 Overview details the major strong point of Joomla! 1.5 for site administrators, designers and developers:

Site administrators: many improvements in the installer, in global configuration, a simpler article manager and menu manager, and the new functionality of Search Engine Friendly URLs;

Designers: total control over how Joomla!’s content is presented, with use of custom layouts instead of the typical table heavy output from Joomla! core; no need to manually edit variables and settings in template files, now users can change settings from within the template manager interface;

Developers: architecture and design of the code base follows current development methodologies and design patterns; object-oriented, pattern based API organized into well structured framework packages; support to PHP 4.3 and to the most current versions of PHP 5.

For additional details, please refer to the Joomla! 1.5 release announcement.

After many years spent with open source CMS projects (Xoops, then E-Xoops, then RunCms) EsseBe took the leadership of the RunCms project in August 2006.

Today, after little more than one year, other duties claim his time and EsseBe has to leave that position. He has already announced that his successor will be Netshark, currently an active member of the development team.

Many thanks to EsseBe for his contributions to RunCms and to the open source world, and congratulations to Netshark on his appointment as the new leader of the RunCms project!