PacktPublishing recently announced the finalists for the 2008 Open Source CMS Award and much to my surprise WordPress wasn't among them! (Click here for the nomination page.)

Drupal and Joomla! are there, and it might be a fight for the Best Overall and Best PHP between the two of them. (My votes went to Drupal, of course!)

ZenPhoto, my favorite open source stand-alone photo gallery, has released version 1.2. (Changelog here.)

The Habari project just released version 0.5 of its blogging software!

You can download Habari from this link or you can read more about the project here.

Zikula. Okay.

Last night I decided to visit the PostNuke CMS site and was a bit suprised to find I was taken to something called Zikula. And it appears that the folks at PostNuke got help in choosing a new name. From their announcement:

June 15, 2008 marks the one-year anniversary of the downfall of Joomla! On June 15, 2007 Joomla! made their infamous "Open Source Does Matter" post that infuriated extension coders to no avail; the post that limited Joomla!'s coders (and users) options in the name of the GPL.

So should we have a cake?

Drupal 6 is here!

All I can say about this release is wow. Looking at that release note (from the link above) really makes me glad I switched away from WordPress. What Drupal loses in ease of use more than makes up for in functionality and forward thinking. I really do think this is the best Drupal release ever. Congrats, Drupal developers.

Now once some of my modules are updated I can start the upgrade process!

If the developers of WordPress make only one change in the software for its new 2.4 release (which is due out at the end of January) I want it to be this:

Remove the "Howdy, so-and-so" message in the admin section.

Howdy? Come on. We're not juveniles (as much as Matt may think we are.) We're not a bunch of 5 year olds wearing faux cowboy boots and hats running around our yard playing cowboys and Indians. We're grown-ups. And "howdy" is just ridiculous.

Grow Up, Matt and the other developers. Lose the "Howdy."

There are a couple open source projects that I've been following where the development has seemed to stalled or stopped. One of them is Textpattern and the other is Nucleus.

I went to the Nucleus site and it said that the last release, 3.24 (a security/maintenance release) was out in November, 2006. I then went to their forum to discover that 3.3 was released in August!

And it still hasn't made it to the front page. I'm thinking it's bad Karma .

One of the things that really bothers me about WordPress is polls. Now there are a couple of really good poll plugins for WordPress, but if you want to make the poll as part of the blog hierarchy, as part of the normal chronology of the site, you have to create the poll in one screen then add the tags to your post. Not really a friendly way to go.

In Drupal, you create the poll, and if you have the polls content type set to appear on the front page, it'll be there after you submit it.

Follow the conversation on Habari Dev's Google Groups.

Here's the reason I feel that Habari should be using categories in addition to tags:

Structure.

Categories, as archaic as some may think they are, are useful in giving sites a basic structure to build on, to navigate by, and to design around. And, I believe most importantly, gives users the ability to extend Habari better than with tags alone.

I've always believed that a content management system should be able to 'go beyond' it's basic premise. Textpattern is more than a blogging platform. And Habari can be, too.

But does this jive with the Habari mission statement? The first part reads:

Habari represents a fresh start to the idea of blogging. The system is fast, easy to use, and easy to modify. New users should have no problem using and enjoying Habari. Advanced users should have no problem tweaking Habari to do exactly what they need it to do.

So it's a blogging platform with the promise to do exactly what they want. Going on...

User-created plugins make Habari do nearly anything imaginable, and a robust theme system permits the use of several popular templating solutions.

But in order to do anything I want, Habari needs structure. And tags aren't structure. Well, they're a basic categorization system. But tags are very limited.