Via Lukas who’s discussing the release of his company’s framework, an interesting appraisal by the guys at Adaptive Path that asks the question, are Open Source CMSs up to scratch?  The following points are raised:

• Make it easy to install
• Make it easy to get started
• Write task-based documentation first
• Separate CMS administration from the editing and management of content
• Users of a public Web site should never, never, be presented with a way to log in to the CMS
• Stop it with the jargon already
• Why do you insist Web sites have “columns”?

Some good points for CMS authors, including this one, to take on board.

The last system I evaluated had something called “mambots” which, to me, sounded like robotic assistance for breast-feeding.

UPDATE: it’s back!

UPDATE: looks like this has been taken offline, sorry

Ever wonder? Unless you’ve got a Mac, or have Linux running

PEAR PC, you’d be hard-pressed to find out. Unless you use this handy tool.

A great AJAX overview uncovered by, not suprisingly, Simon.

Thanks to Red Hat for putting out a user-friendly video clip on the difference between BSD and GPL licenses:

In this video, Mark Webbink, Deputy General Counsel for Red Hat, delivers a broad
overview of the software licenses around open source, in layman’s terms.

The term "Free and Open Source Software," or FOSS for short, has come to
represent software that falls under one of two definitions: the Free Software
Definition of the Free Software Foundation, or the Open Source
Definition of the Open Source Institute. These licenses differ
slightly, but they agree fundamentally on three freedoms:

• The freedom to copy
• The freedom to make derivative works
• The freedom to redistribute

There are many open source licenses of various kinds, and all of them
agree absolutely on the nature of the first two freedoms. But the
third freedom—freedom to redistribute—is trickier. Two
prominent licenses, the GNU General
Public License (GPL) and the Berkeley
Software Distribution License (BSD) differ on this key point.
Mark explains the implications of these differences, and why they
matter.

Watch the video here.  Red Hat, unfortunately however, have managed to get bitten by GPL problems and the new White Box Linux phenomena.

Hello,

I’m posting this to clear up how to find the PEAR path on most servers, and then at the end are instructions how to use PEAR in your PHP programs.

Editors note: this article is for beginner to intermediate level users, and I think will be useful to many as reported problems installing PEAR are still widespread in the forums, etc. – Demian

Finally a stable 0.4 release! Highlights in this iteration:

• the last of the FC bugs squashed
• config ini files now unreadable even if your var directory is web-viewable (Georg Gell)
• Seagull now works for CGI installations of PHP
• configurable auto-login (Rares Benea)
• module generator improvements
• German and French translations completely up to date

This basically marks the end of
all the front controller work which has been extensive, and now makes way for some of the
other higher priority stuff: separating out a core Seagull, making modules
installable the PEAR package mgr’s 1.4 release, improving i18n support and
hopefully moving translations to the DB to allow for truly multilingual support.

I’ve begun work on a release script in etc which should make more frequent
releases a possibility. I’d also like to start addressing upgrade scripts to
make the product more user-friendly, my company’s product Max Media Mgr
(phpAdsNew) has some good code we could look at here for ideas.

I’ve also just added badBoyWebTests.bb to the etc directory, this is a
deceptively small script (windows only) that mimicks UAT testing by ‘clicking’
on every link in the app and testing that no errors are present. ‘No errors’
means no php notices/warning and no PEAR errors, both of which Seagull
intercepts and wraps. The assertions are done by running a regex on the html
sgl outputs.

This is a great help in ensuring that the hundreds of links in the app still
work after each vigourous round of mods/patches/improvements we put in. It is
no replacement for unit tests which we are still largely lacking, but should
help trap some of the nastier errors.

I strongly recommends anyone interesting in reducing their test cycle to try this
mostly free software out:

http://www.badboy.com.au/

I run it in vmware – while you’re at it, please feel free to add to the sgl
tests, there only partially complete at the moment.

Thanks as always to the mountains of patches, suggestions and feedback that’s
come in, keep up the great work!

Like many Core 3 users, you may have found that the latest kernel update blew away your VMware installation, especially if you’re running 4.5.2. There is a fix, apply this patch to repair the problem:

http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-any-any-update90.tar.gz

A very interesting article by Joel about how his company ported their ASP code to PHP so their unix customers could enjoy FogBugz. Of course if they’d written the code in PHP in the first place …

But if Joel was a PHP programmer we’d most likely not have all the interesting stories he’s shared for some time now.