Open Source

Appropriately, for the wildly popular CMS, it all started with a blog post. Way back in January 2003, Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of WordPress, wrote a short blog on his website, lamenting the lack of updates from his preferred blogging software, b2/cafelog.

Despite becoming increasingly popular since its release in 2001, b2/cafelog’s developer stopped maintaining the software in 2002, seemingly disappearing completely from all community forums.

Like others in the IT community, I have become increasingly concerned with Google's behavior with their AMP technology.

For those who aren't really aware what AMP is, it's Google's proprietary solution for speeding up mobile pages. Webmasters implement AMP, which is a kind of Google-sanctified and Google-code-driven version of your webpage. It works very well and solves an important problem. Often when you search Google on a mobile device it will show AMP articles at the top of the results, so you get access to fast content first, which is reasonable in and of itself.

One of my goals in rebranding my website from CMS Report to socPub was to write diverse articles beyond the topic of content management systems. Yet, here we go again with another CMS related article. The Drupal open source project recently made available Drupal 8.4 and for me this version has been a long time coming as it addresses some long standing frustrations I've had with Drupal 8 from the perspective of a site administrator. While Drupal 8.4 adds some nice new features, I'm just as excited about the bug fixes and performance improvements delivered in this new version of Drupal.

Last week, I received an email inviting me to take a sneak peak at a press release that became public today. In the email, I was asked if I would be interested in hearing "news from new open source startup, DRUD Tech, founded by a couple of long-time Drupal contributors". According to the email, the company has been in "stealth mode" quietly working on their new product which is ready for launch this week. Given that I'm a long time fan of the Drupal content management system of course I said yes.

WordPress 4.8 is now available and introduces users to new content management tools including three media widgets covering images, audio and video. The "Evans" release also includes link improvements, an updated text widget that supports visual editing, and an upgraded news and events section in your dashboard. 

When Matt Mullenweg announced the release of WordPress 4.8 he mentioned that this new version was built with you in mind. While the updates seem minor, he indicated that users will find that the improvements intuitive enough that "you’ll welcome [the changes] like an old friend".

This week, the Joomla! Project announced the release of Joomla 3.7. This new release in the Joomla! 3 series features over 700 improvements to the popular content management system, including many features which "make administration of Joomla! Web sites easier and more feature-rich, as well as several security updates". The following are the seven biggest new feature improvements socPub.com found in Joomla 3.7.