Moodle 1.7 has been released. Moodle is a course management system (also called a learning management system) and used by educators to build online learning communities.

The five most significant features added to Moodle according to the release notes are:

• Roles - Moodle has a complete new architecture for assigning people permissions. Permissions based on fine-grained capabilities allow all kinds of roles to be created and assigned in all contexts around Moodle. This creates a great deal more flexibility in the permissions that you can grant to people.
• XML database schema - In addition to MySQL and PostGreSQL, Moodle also supports Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.
• New administrative interface - A new admin interface with accessible design and cool features to make access to settings fast and easy.

A new version of Tikiwiki has been released, Tikiwiki version 1.9.6. This version of Tikiwiki fixes the usual list of bugs and security vulnerabilities that come with the usual point releases. However, 1.9.6 also comes with some new features and enhancements including:

If you have not heard, Drupal 5.0 went into beta last week. I had intended to write a little bit about the new features users can expect with this new version of the content management system. However, I've been so busy with a couple IT projects as well as some family events that I have not had time to even touch Drupal 5 beta 1.

Luckily, there are smarter and more dedicated people out there already posting about anything I could say about Drupal 5. The following are links to what I consider as the top three blog posts on Drupal 5.0:

The start of November is big news for users and developers of PHP applications with the release of PHP 5.2 on the 2nd of the month. According to the release announcement, this "release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements".

Significant features of PHP 5.2 include:

• New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
• Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
• JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
• ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
• Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
• Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
• Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
• Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
• Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
• Many performance improvements.
• Over 200 bug fixes.

Website owners rejoice! Forgent Networks has dropped their claim on owning the patent rights for JPEG. While this hasn't been a huge concern for most Web designers it's still one less worrisome thought to worry about! Groklaw was the first site that I came across this story:

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.