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."

The third development release of the Habari blogging platform is out. You can download it from the Habari Google Code repository or read more about this version on the Habari Wiki.

According to Packt Publishing, WordPress wins best Social Networking CMS. And I think it's a complete sham.

From their site:

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

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 .