Back in the IT world

As some of you may have noticed, I returned a few days ago from my low-tech week. It's taking me awhile to adjust being stuck at the computer so you'll have to bear with me. It's been tough enough to spend the PC time at work, so spending my "free time" on the PC is challenging. It's kind of like not eating fast food for a week and then suddenly having to ingest it for every meal. Drupal addict and Yoga for Geeks guru, Sarah Pullman, mentioned a similar experience in one of her posts. To add insult to injury, I blew up three sites on my VPS and had to put the pieces back together.

phpBB 3.0 Beta2 released

As the title says, phpBB 3.0 (code name Olympus) is now out as a second beta. I see a lot of encouraging things about phpBB 3.0 and it will likely be seen as a big improvement over 2.x. The features and improvements to phpBB from version 2.x to 3.x are numerous and I'll probably chat about them as 3.0 near its actual actual release date.

The only comment I'll really make here is...I'm sure glad I didn't build a near production site on phpBB 3.0 Beta1. If you read the few lines below you'll see that no update path is offered between the first and second beta. Ouch!

From phpBB:

Rails discloses security vulnerability to heroic users

Ruby on RailsThe past couple days has been a busy time for those involved in the Rails open source project. Just as busy as the Rails core developers were the users running Ruby on Rails applications (such the Radiant content management system). On Wednesday, the project's developers released Rails 1.1.5. In the announcement of the Rails release, David August called upgrading the new version "mandatory" since the security vulnerability was so severe.

Providing Original Content and News Feeds

Given that this site, CMS Report, is less than six months old...I am truly amazed with the number of visitors the site receives in a day. While the number of visitors may be small compared to other well known sites, this is the first time I've had a site of my own that has drawn some attention. What a cool experience this has been!

I was flattered to see Drupal blogger, Greg Knaddison, mention CMS Report in one of his posts. Mr. Knaddison could have chosen for discussion so many other Drupal sites but for whatever reason he likes what he sees here. However, as postive as his message was for CMS Report, he also indicated through his post that the current mix of original content and aggregated news isn't for him.

With a tip of the hat to CMSReport. CMS report aggregates lots of content about all CMS, but they also have some original content. I'd prefer more of the latter and less of the former, but that's just me.

While CMS Report still needs to evolve and mature, its purpose was defined from the beginning. The primary mission of the site is to inform readers of the latest happenings in the world of content management systems. Now how that job gets done is another matter and readers have preferences.

Mambo 4.6 to be released soon

Mambo 4.6 is expected to be release soon. While interest in the content management system has diminished over the past year (due to increased interest in Joomla) the open source project and community still remains active. Mambo is by no means a dead project.

With Mambo 4.6 currently available as a release candidate the folks at MamboServer report the following as the most significant new features and enhancements you can expect in the new release: