Akismet announced that a new version of the Movable Type plugin (Version 1.03) has been made available. Akismet is a service for blog applications and other content management systems that filter out comment spam and trackback spam. The new Movable Type plugin for Akismet was necessary because many users were having problems with the previous plugin breaking after users upgraded to Movable Type 3.31.

A download link to the new plugin can be found on the original announcement posted at Akismet.

The folks at Gallery, an online photo album organizer, are working hard developing the newest version of Gallery in the 1.x line...Gallery 1.6. Gallery 1.6 is currently at Alpha 2 which means that the software is intended for testing purposes and not for use on production servers. If your confused with what I just said then I recommend you wait installing Gallery 1.6 until it has been fully released.

InfoWorld has a very good article centering around this week's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo. In their article, "PHP event: Open source accommodation stressed" a few good opening lines to use as a teaser for the article:

Rather than fighting the open source wave, commercial IT vendors do what they must: try to ride that wave...

..."It seems to us from where we sit that there's really no choice," said Tim Bray, a Web-oriented generalist at Sun and a co-inventor of XML. "A substantial portion of the market has made it clear with their wallets that they want to deploy and run open source software."

"We can't go back. It's too late," Bray said.

I always find these type of stories ironic. Last week, I had someone make a comment to an old article I wrote on the Radiant CMS. For those liking Radiant, the commenter remarked "give cakePHP a trial run if you want a cms similar to this but in PHP". One of the reasons I chosen to discuss Radiant was that it was built with Ruby on Rails.

WordPress 2.0.5 was released late last week. This new version of WordPress mainly contains bugfixes, security fixes, and some very minor enhancements. According to the original announcement at Wordpress.org, the fixes center around feeds, custom fields, and internationalization. Links to download WordPress 2.0.5 are available at the "official" WordPress 2 download page.

When open source projects becomes more popular the project leaders often need to increase the time spent on their projects. The increasingly popular Windows-based content management system (CMS), mojoPortal, is no exception to this rule. mojoPortal's project leader, Joe Audette, recently announced on his blog that he is currently making career changes show he can better nurture the mojoPortal project along:

"Or, perhaps, I should say that Oracle is firing a shot at the heart of Red Hat, and commercial Linux? This really, really ticks me off. Oracle's claims as to why it felt it had to make this move are BS."

- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, "Oracle's Red Hat rip-off", Linux-Watch, October 25, 2006

The online magazine CMS Wire recently posted an article titled, "Feeling Blue, IBM Courting Drupal". In the article, author Scott Frangos writes:

Hot off the gossip wire: IBM is falling for Drupal. Hmmmm. ECM leader IBM has developed a series of nine tutorials for Open Source CMS Drupal. And as it turns out, Drupal runs rather well on IBM Linux servers while plugged-into IBM’s DB2 Express-C database. The final tutorial covers just exactly how to do that.

While browsing some of my favorite sites looking for quirks in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) that I needed to be aware of for Web design, I came across one of the most helpful design tools I've seen in a long time. Caleb Gilbert recommended at Drupal.org a site called Browsershots. His recommendation was prompted on the need for non-IE7 users such as Mac users to actually see what their sites would look like in IE7. This is a design tool not only useful for those designing themes for Drupal, but about any other content management system or Web page you may get your hands on.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Alexa, a Web search and site statistics company, had wrongly merged CMS Report with a couple other unrelated sites under uly.net. At the time my traffic rank stood at 218,200. Luckily, Alexa has a procedure that lets you contact them so they can separate your site from the other sites.

In that story, I also mentioned that: