As a Web developer, I like to visit some sites that talked about programming, build application, or pointed out some cool software tools. For me, it’s indeed a strange experience to go back to some sites that existed on the Web for a while, but I did not profile it on my blog, and Intel’s cool software platform is one of them.

I first thought it’s no longer maintained by Intel anymore, but the top result at the time of writing, i.e. with the vote of 29 is illustrative of trend that this Digg clone will likely be accepted by the Internet users, and proudly served as a Web product that will sustain for a long period of time. Frankly, in a noisy world out there, if a site carried a brand name like Intel, it will always has the advantage to lure in users. When I first started TagEdge, I did profiled a lot of Digg clone (check out this Digg link at TagEdge), but Intel’s cool software is one of the Digg clone sites that makes people want to go there, visit and revisit again, simply because of it’s an Intel product.

Intel’s cool software platform, like any other Digg clones, the article submitted by registered user with the most votes will always be appeared on the main page. In evaluate how its offering can bring value to the software lovers, it does its founding mission. However, when I pay close attention to the community participation on the site, it still did not generate the same kind of buzz as generated by Digg, not to mention how this site will help Intel to find out “the next Google,” as written by VentureBeat in October last year. Perhaps all those so-called “the next Google” are still the small and lean ventures, and definitely not that easy be found by the ordinary Internet users, only private investors and venture capitalists will know how to access them in the first place.

This site is said was powered by Pligg, a famous open source content management system. When it is developed using an open source tool, I still curious how it cost around $40,000 to develop.

Drupal.org, a popular open source content management system (CMS) provider is officially launching the Drupal version 6.0. For a seven years old CMS startup since its first inception in January 15, 2001, and with the released of six major versions, for them it’s no doubt a remarkable achievement. In launching this version, Drupal reported that there are more than 1,600 issues have been resolved during this release cycle, and it also took them more than one year of development since the previous version 5.0. From this, you probably know how much contribution that Drupal community, comprised of over 700 individuals have submitted to this latest version. As expected, the core idea behind Drupal is to give its users a very good PHP & MySQL framework in building the powerful and robust Websites.

This version 6.0 began by satisfying some immediate and recognizable requirements and needs, such as an improved installer, ease the users in setting up the Drupal sites whether their purposes are for blogging or building the Websites. Language features have also been revamped, so if an user want to translate a post, translation can be done through the built-in interface, without having to install any additional module. Perhaps the most notable change in this version is the OpenID support. The OpenID client module has been added to the core of this version. In other word, users can sign on to a site with their OpenID accounts. To do this, Drupal has moved the long time favorite Drupal.module out of the Drupal package. Additionally, jQuery 1.2.3 is included in this version, a feature that jointly effort between the jQuery and Drupal communities.

Currently, there are over 100 third-party plugin modules already available for this newly Drupal release. With Drupal version 6.0, Drupal.org is poised to further growth, they should expected reaching more than 300,000 users by end of this year (Now they have registered 240,000 users).

via [CenterNetworks]

The popular open source content management system (CMS) Joomla has released the newest version, i.e version 1.5. Overall, this is the latest stable version after they have recently organized the “Squash Bugs” events with the purpose to fix the priority 1 & 2 bugs in this version before it went public download. Since Joomla first inception in two and a half years ago, the version 1.5 represented a milestone for them, as several new enhancements can be found on it. Building extensions will be much easier and faster with the new API released by Joomla. Other than this, new user interface for site administrators, with several functional improvements ranging from single installer, media manager, core article manager to friendly search engine URLs. As stated by them, one of the most powerful features of the Joomla framework is the new component objects based on the Model-View-Controller programming pattern, in which Ruby on Rails, another Web development framework that heavily based on.

Until now, for existing Joomla sites that still using version 1.0, this version remains as a “caution” if they want to migrate their sites to this newest version. The main reason was that this upgraded version has nothing to do with any of the security problems found on the previous version 1.0 and the version 1.5 is still under refinement when refers to the migrating issue.

Chyrp is a very lightweight blogging engine, created by the same person and ideas that worked on the Lingua Project, as profiled in this blog in April this last year. When a blogging engine initially was designed as a very lightweight application, it tend to support a specific group of users that want to personalize it as easily as possible. On the other hand, there also mean it will be less room for an user to build something out of it and trying to make this blogging engine a fully functional content management system (CMS).

The first version of Chyrp was released in December last year. I found myself delayed in writing the review of this application because of the immature of its functionality. And after the version 1.0.3, the last stable release, I can see some of the bugs or problems have been addressed by Chyrp. Chyrp indeed can be considered as a post-project of Lingua, driven by PHP and MySQL and the additional capability of Ajax. As I look at the availability of extensions in Chyrp community, there is a very small number of developers that currently working on improve the Chyrp engine. However, a differentiation advantage can arise if you compare this blogging engine with WordPress or Movable Type, both open source blogging engines, Chyrp seem to be relatively easy for beginners to maintain and they’re apparently headed in this direction.

A content management system called Xaraya is releasing a newest version, i.e. Core 1.1.4 today. Xaraya is an open source content management system (CMS) that is written entirely in PHP programming language. This version includes several enhancements and improvements, such as New OrderSelect Dynamic Data Property, General XHTML correctness, etc., however it only can be seen as the last version in the branch 1.0 before Xaraya release the upcoming version 2 in this year.

Many of my contacts are using open source CMS in delivering the client projects. Though I found that Xaraya is good especially it supports MySQL, MySQLi, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, among all the other features, but Xaraya is indeed less well-known and much too heavyweight for them and many people I found on the Web preferred Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, phpNUKE, Plone and Typo3. As a consequence, there is very few commercial book that talked about Xaraya. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the deployment and development of Xaraya is low, there is a page prepared by Xaraya that comprised of a long list of all the sites that were built by using Xaraya.

Joomla!, one of the popular open source content management systems (CMS) is organizing the “Squash Bugs” events in the U.S., Canada, and Belgium. The squash bug days will fall on 8th, 9th and 10th of December, in the following cities that include Washington, New York, Mountain View, San Francisco, Vancouver and Brussels. The purpose of organize these events is to fix the priority 1 & 2 bugs in its newest version, i.e. 1.5 since this version is not that popular as version 1.0 in the eyes of several users, and after any bug fixed of this Joomla! CMS, it will be carried forward as the upcoming stable version of version 1.5 Release Candidate 4.

It is important to organize this kind of events in order to raise the confidence of Joomla! users when come to using version 1.5. There is still a huge crowd of users throughout the world that still prefer Joomla!’s previous version 1.0 as it provide the most stable compatibility to some extensions, one example is the shopping cart VirtueMart, its 1.0.x series is officially not compatible to Joomla! 1.5, as stated by VirtueMart. In addition, several Joomla! templates provider when they sell their templates to the end users, the key features of the templates also Joomla! 1.0 compatible.