mojoPortal 2.1.3 was released over the weekend. Since mojoPortal 2.1.2 was released just a day sooner...we'll lump all the changes since mojoPortal 2.1.1. New features and enhancements in the new versions of mojoPortal include:

I just got done reading an interesting and important post by David Baron of Mozilla. Although his initial focus is on the Firefox 2 browser, he makes some valid points that easily carry over to lessons learned involving software development and general project management.

In case you missed it, yesterday was Talk Like a Pirate Day. On those days when you feel too much like a geek (in a bad way), you can rest assure that there is someone out there geekier than you. Meet Dougal Campbell, the rambling geek:

I should have put something out about the new version of CivicCRM (1.5) last week, but it got buried with other priorities. My apologies to all the CivicCRM fans out there. I have not loaded CivicCRM myself, but my understanding is that CivicCRM is now based on the Drupal 4.7 code.

For those that do not recognize what CRM stands for, try customer relationship management at Wikipedia. Here is how CivicCRM describes the software in their announcement:

CiviCRM is the first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

New features and enhancements you can expect in CivicCRM 1.5 include:

• A new membership management component
• Search Builder - a new tool for building complex search queries
• Significant memory and speed optimizations

Mambo users rejoice! Mambo 4.6 was released on Monday this week. In August, we discussed the some of the new features and enhancements you can expect in this new version of Mambo. Mambo 4.6 is the first major release of the content management system in two years.

A series of posts and questions on the CMS blogs are asking whether Microsoft should help finance the costs of open source projects. I have no opinion to give that would add value to this topic. However, I'm happy to give the rundown so far of the posts that speak the loudest regarding Microsoft and open source projects.

The thread of blog posts seems to originate with a post at Dave's Tech Shop. In that post, Dave talks about the need for Microsoft to better support open source projects. Dave's reasoning:

Last night, I was up late doing some administrative work for my sites as well as writing some posts. This was my attempt to procrastinate working on an osCommerce site that I promised someone would be done by the start of October.

A few months ago, I posted that I use Akismet in both Drupal and Wordpress. Akismet is a spam filtering service that can be used in content management systems via plug-ins and modules. The Akismet plugin ships with Wordpress 2, but some setup is required.