Joomla 1.5 Coming of Age and Looking Forward

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the release of Joomla 1.5, the first major release of the popular content management system.

In January 2008, the first stable release was downloaded almost 200,000 times. Since then, the total number has exploded to over 8 million downloads. Joomla is seeing the highest rate of adoption ever.

That same month, the Joomla Extensions Directory contained 2,600 extensions written for Joomla 1.0.x, a small percentage of which worked with Joomla 1.5. Today, that number is approaching 5,000 and most are Joomla 1.5 native. The JED is a a powerful barometer of the commitment of the community to the Joomla Project and platform.

And that community continues to grow exponentially. The Joomla Discussion Forums contain over 1.5 million posts from almost 250,000 users. The spirit of open source, collaboration, and users helping users has never been stronger.

Read more, click it here.

Drupal Revealed as 2008 Open Source CMS Award Winner

Released as an Open Source project by founder Dries Buytaert in 2001, Drupal has grown substantially and has been downloaded almost 1.5 million times in the last 12 months. It is currently being applied by companies such as Warner Brothers Music, MTV UK, and the New York Observer amongst others.

"These awards are a testament to the valuable contributions from dedicated Drupal community members around the globe" said Buytaert in response to the news. "Working together, the Drupal community is building the future of the dynamic web so that anyone can quickly build great social publishing websites" he concluded.

To read more, click here.

CMS Made Simple: Because the best ideas are simple

If you are an experienced web developer, and know how to do the things you need to do, to get a site up with CMS Made Simple is just that, simple. For those with more advanced ambitions there are plenty of addons to download. And there is an excellent community always at your service.

It's very easy to add content and addons wherever you want them to appear on the site. Design your website in whatever way or style you want and just load it into CMSMS to get it in the air. Easy as that!

Click here to read more...

Microsoft ships Drupal

The Web Application Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce and more. With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items and then install them on your computer.

To read, go to Microsoft website here.

Drupal + Oracle: Inside the OraDrup Project

Why Bring Oracle and Drupal Together?

So where does Oracle fit in? To date, Drupal has principally been a MySQL-oriented system. A very popular deployment choice for Drupal installations is the LAMP stack (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP). Of course, Drupal is equally at home running under any platform capable of hosting MySQL and PHP.

This is all well and good for the average implementation but sometimes the "M" in LAMP is not an option. Some organizations may not have the luxury of being able to incorporate another database server into their operations. In other cases, MySQL simply might not be the right solution for the task. In such circumstances, the adoption of Drupal is unlikely.

Furthermore, with Drupal having such an active developer community, it is difficult to see why it should not expand its horizons to include Oracle technology. In doing so, Drupal will become a viable option for Oracle-based developers and vice-versa. Were that to happen, it would be very exciting to see it taking advantage of or benefitting from such Oracle features as:

• Data partitioning and parallelism
• Replication and queuing technology
• Real Application Clusters
• Transparent Application Failover and other high availability features
• Fine Grained Access Control at the database level
• Automatic segment space management

Furthermore, with Oracle Database having such a huge presence, it would offer the opportunity for Drupal to gain greater exposure where, previously, it would have been overlooked.

Much has been said about Drupal's potential to support an arbitrary number of database platforms. Indeed, support for PostgreSQL is packaged alongside that for MySQL. Why, then, has there been no reported sighting of Drupal running under Oracle? Despite their good intentions, projects embarking on the path of building Oracle compatibility seem to end up in a "Bermuda Triangle." For that reason, an Oracle-based Drupal implementation has attained almost mythical status—nobody has ever seen one.

To read more, click here.

Plain Black Corporation is pleased to announce the release of WebGUI TV

Plain Black Corporation®, maker of the open source content management system WebGUI®, is pleased to announce the release of WebGUI TV. WebGUI TV (WGTV) is a free video library containing archival footage of past WebGUI Users Conference presentations, as well as videos from other training resources. Close to 150 videos on all topics related to WebGUI are currently available, and the collection will continue to grow! WebGUI TV is available to everyone at www.webgui.tv.

Each WGTV video is placed in a “series” so users can easily search for a particular year from the WebGUI Users Conference, for WebGUI Live footage, or by topic related keyword. Most videos in the library contain free supplemental downloads ranging from PDFs of a video's corresponding presentation to full WebGUI Packages ready to deploy on a live WebGUI site.

Throughout the year, Plain Black will slowly release videos from the 2008 WebGUI Users Conference. In addition to videos posted by Plain Black, members of WebGUI's open source community can contribute their own footage by simply uploading their videos to their favorite video websites, then pasting the player code into a WGTV submission form. To learn more about WebGUI TV, read JT Smith's announcement in The Black Blog.

In 2001, Plain Black Corporation® released the first public version of WebGUI®. Today, WebGUI is one of the most popular open source content management systems available. It is downloaded thousands of times per month and is in use as an application framework in Global 1000 companies, government agencies, universities, school districts, and non-profit organizations around the world. Plain Black offers support, training, and customization of WebGUI and the technologies related to it. For more information on Plain Black and WebGUI visit www.plainblack.com and www.webgui.org.

To read more about this news, click here.

First Ever Joomla! Day in Switzerland

Join us in the culture-rich city of Luzern for the very first Joomla Day Switzerland on November 15, 2008. We heartily welcome Joomla users from Switzerland and the German-speaking community at large to a day of Joomla fun for all.

Top Speakers

We are pleased to announce the attendance of Joomla Development Coordinator Wilco Jansen who will be conducting an interactive session on all things Joomla. Also attending will be Ivo Apostolov from the Joom!Fish project, Yannick Gaultier from the SH404SEF project, and Angie Radtke will discuss accessibility pertaining to Joomla.

Bonus Presentation

Switzerland just wouldn't be Switzerland without a special bonus presentation. Get an early look at the new and upcoming multi-language extension Nooku, presented by the JoomlaTools team.

To read this more event, click here.

What Is Xaraya?

Xaraya is a cutting edge open source framework (written in PHP) on which developers can create sophisticated web applications and designers enjoy considerable flexibility.

Selected features of Xaraya:

• Modular design
• Stable, extensive API
• Fully internationalized
• XML based templating with BlockLayout

But you don't have to take our word for it... many sites have been Xaraya-ized.

Click here for more details about this CMS.

What is Bitweaver?

Bitweaver is a free and open source web application framework and content management system. Its speed and power are ideal for large-scale community websites and corporate applications, but it is simple enough for non-technical small site users to set up and administrate. It comes fully featured on install but is modular and easy to extend.



Click here for more details.

Free Demo Tutorials in Drupal

Watch this course's free demo tutorials below (in QuickTime® format). To enjoy all the video tutorials below - and tens of thousands of others-subscribe to the Online Training Library®!

To watch the video click here.