January 2007

On Drupal's sixth birthday Dries Buytaert announced that Drupal 5.0 has been released. The 5.0 version of the content management system is considered a very significant release by its open source community. Consider this, it's been almost half a decade since Drupal 4.0 was released.

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.

This just goes to show you how small of a world it is. Traffic to CMS Report is usually rather light over the weekend, but I noticed an increase in the number of people visiting the site Saturday and Sunday. These "new" visitors were coming from Lorelle VanFossen's WordPress blog. She recently posted an article on some of the features expected in the yet to be released WordPress 2.1.

Ryan Boren, one of the lead WordPress developers, has been releasing preview information on WordPress 2.1, along with some other well-know WordPress developers, testers, and users. Here are some teasers about WordPress 2.1, due out soon...

I have never really worried whether I was certified or not. This Computerworld article gets right to the point:

Depending on whom you talk to, certification programs are either borderline rip-offs that provide little useful knowledge, or valuable hiring tools that make it easier for IT execs to pick the most promising new employees.

Available from vendors focusing on their own products, or outside organizations offering multi-vendor training, these certificate programs are expanding to fill the many specialized technology subsets that have multiplied along with the growth of data storage and other IT areas.

Now this isn't to say that I don't have a few IT certifications under the belt and didn't receive some benefit from them. One of the most intensive IT certifications of recent years was in IT security and another to "please" the crowd was a certification for migration to Microsoft's Server 2003. By the time I was done with those certifications though, I didn't know enough to get the job done.

Philippe Archambault wrote to us that he is working on a PHP version of Radiant CMS. Radiant CMS is based on the Ruby language. Mr. Archambault has appropriately named his CMS, phpRadiant. If imitation is a sincere form of flattery, then lets hope the Radiant CMS folks are blushing!

Mr. Archambault isn't the first person to suggest taking what they liked in Radiant CMS and migrating it from the Ruby language to one that is PHP based. However, his project is the first one that I know about which has actually seen the light of day.

While most bloggers are using the new year to look ahead, I am not quite ready to make promises to the year of 2007. In fact, I am more inclined to looking at the past thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

I'd like to challenge anyone who has designed a web page to find the oldest site in the archive that they authored and post the Wayback Machine link in the comment section of this post. There are no prizes being awarded in this "contest" but I promise you can have some space for bragging rights. Feel free to include any history on the page that you feel is necessary to tell your story.

The archive contains archived web pages from 1996 to the near present. The oldest web pages I could find that I authored was from 1997 for the National Weather Service's forecast office in Sioux Falls, SD.

The above site actually originated in March 1996, but this 1997 image is the earliest I could find in the archive. Not very impressive is it? However, you have to remember that I was authoring with HTML 1.x and worried that Netscape's introduction of the blink element was pushing the envelope further than I wanted to go.

With the first release of two release candidates, Gallery 2.2 will be arriving before you know it. Some of the new features in Gallery 2.2 will include: