A set of extensions to bring blogging power to Joomla! CMS.

My friend, designer Arno Zijlstra , just pinged me regarding a new Joomla! project that promises to bring "blogging power to individuals and communities" on the Joomla! Content Management System. The project is called Tamka (Speak Up!)

As a long-time Blogger (this blog is Blogger-powered) and WordPress user, it's good to see Joomla! getting some attention in the blog tool department but what exactly we'll be getting we don't know yet.

I've never seriously used Joomla! as a pure blogging tool and, quite frankly, it's not supposed to be. Not only is there a ton of core code but Joomla! is a far more powerful fully-featured CMS and a blog should be considered as one channel of your web offering.

is4profit.com, the SME resource website, is a Joomla! powered portal for small business information & advice and apart from the many sections within their site they would benefit from a business blog, so let's see if the new Tamka.org can pique their interest when it's released.

We'll keep you posted or you can follow Tamkaorg on twitter.

UPDATE: Tamka is live and looking good. Congrats to the team and here's looking forward to testing :)

Labels: blogging, CMS, joomla

At last, after nearly 2 and a half years, the rebel alliance that broke away from Mambo CMS and became Joomla, has finally given birth to a new CMS...

Labels: CMS, joomla, news, open source, software

Some people have reported Joomla! 1.0.x security issues and whilst the Joomla! core dev team have been busy working on Joomla! 1.5 they've not been slack in getting a fix for old 1.0.x users.

As such today sees the release of Joomla! 1.0.14 RC1, so if any users could install and test for issues we could soon see a 1.0.14 stable and even a 1.0.15 :)

Labels: CMS, joomla

Joomla! CMS rolled in its 100,000th verified forum user yesterday. That's 100,000 users in just over 18 months and officially "Joomla! has the largest Open Source CMS focused forum on the planet."

Stats-wise the Joomla! forum has:

• An average of 172 new user sign-up each day
• 765,000 posts
• More than 1200 posts daily

There's even a funky Free Joomla! A3 poster to commemorate the ocassion.

Now if the next landmark can be just to get Joomla! 1.5 out of the door, that would be awesome.

Labels: CMS, news, open source, software, tools

New Life in IT is a premier web design company specialising in the provision of Open Source Software solutions.

With a firm footing in the Joomla! CMS arena, New Life in IT provide a depth of experience from Business Analysis & Consulting through Professional Training to some pretty funky enterprise level web development solutions... we know because we've had the pleaseure to work with them.

Andrew Eddie, Director of New Life in IT, is well known as one of the original developers of Mambo CMS and the recent Joomla! CMS so they're headed not only by a sharp programmer & consumate professional but all-round nice bloke too.

Be sure to check out New Life in IT.

Labels: CMS, consultancy, design, development, news, open source

There's new bug fix and security releases in versions Wordpress 2.0.9 and Wordpress 2.1.1

Labels: blogging, CMS, software, tools, wordpress

If you are a commercial organisation using an Open Source Content Management System then you may be interested in participating in Isovera's Open Source CMS Survey between Feb 22nd and Mar 19th.

Just 10 minutes long and optionally requiring an email address & web address (neither will be published) the survey aims to "better understand how satisfied organizations are with specific systems across implementation stages and functional areas."

You can see the previous results of their Open Source Survey for non-profit organisations.

Take the Open Source CMS Survey .

Labels: CMS, open source, survey

Last weekend I couldn't log in to Blogger under my old username & password, I kept being redirected to the new Blogger login page. Whether it was a quirk of cookies, my machine or blogger forcing me to upgrade, I don't know but I was desperate to post quickly so, until I moved to new blogger, I couldn't porogress. So I signed up.

This other blog site is hosted on its own server with its own domain name and simply uses blogger as the tool to publish the articles there. The Atom XML feed has always been at the path http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml

And yet I noticed in one forum that uses that exact xml feed path that the "Recent blog:" link displayed next to my profile on every post I made is pointing to blogger.com/feeds... I checked my control panel and the path is http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml... yet viewing my profile and posts the link is blogger.com/feeds...

With numerous links to my feed and my site, my domain has accumulated, since 2004, a reasonable amount of InBound Links (IBLs) which may or may not have helped with both traffic and a reasonable PageRank... PR5 for a personal blog.

Recently my PR has gone down from PR5 to PR4 and the number of IBLs has gone down by over 150... I suspect it may have something to do with the feed now pointing to blogger.com/feeds rather than http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml

Whatever has happened I'm a little annoyed at losing links, annoyed at losing PR and annoyed that MY links to MY feed are hijacked by blogger which uses it's own URL and not mine.

Looking at the page source of my blog I see a new format for the feeds. So here's the new lines that blogger places within the <body> tags of my blog and not within the head...

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Domain - Atom" href="http://www.mydomain.com/atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Domain - RSS" href="http://www.mydomain.com/rss.xml" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="My Domain - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xxxxxxx/posts/default" />

It seems to be this new service.post that's getting all the links.

I've been good to Google and stuck with Blogger despite all the time outs, down time etc... but maybe it's time to move on... I really do like WordPress and the other WordPress sites I run have caused me no trouble like this at all over the last few years... and if I want the xml feed to MY domain I'm sure WordPress will b ehappy to allow me to do so...

I'm off to do some experimenting, I'll report back my findings.

And if anybody knows any workarounds or hacks for this problem please let us know and we'll share it here :)

Labels: blogger, blogging, CMS, tools, xml, xml feeds

WooHoo. WordPress 2.1 Released today. It's named after Ella Fitzgerald, the jazz singer, but hey, that's up to them. 500+ bug fixes and some new features, requires PHP 4.2+, MySQL 4.0+

OK, we're off to do a few installs :)

Labels: CMS, tools

Drupal 5.0 is released today on the 6th birthday of the Drupal CMS.

For those of you who don't know it, Drupal is the CMS behind such as as WestHamFans.org, SpreadFireFox and the homepage of the man himself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Labels: CMS

OK Beta testers, go get your latest copy of Joomla 1.5 Beta now, and test, test, develop, test like there's no tomorrow!

Labels: CMS