Posts for the ‘Open Source’ Category
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards
Packt Publishing has anounced the winners in the 2008 Most Promising Open Source CMS category of their annual competition. Silverstripe and CMS Made Simple took home first and second place. I am very happy report that MiaCMS came in 3rd place overall tied with another terrific Content Management System named ImpressCMS.
And also kudos to the master, Chad Auld, for being named in Packt Publishing’s 2008 list of “Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems“.
It is absolutely delightful to experience this kind of recognition for our project.
Posted in MiaCMS, News, Open Source | Comments Off
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Book Excerpts:
In historical terms, the digital computer is very, very new. The science of computing is yet newer. Compared to its older sister – mathematics – which is thousands of years old, it is hardly in the embryonic stage of development. Yet, computing science is already having a major influence on our problem-solving skills, amounting to a revolution in the art of effective reasoning.
Because of the challenges of programming (which means instructing a dumb machine how to solve each instance of a problem) and the unprecedented scale of programming problems, computing scientists have had to hone their problem-solving skills to a very fine degree. This has led to advances in logic, and to changes in the way that mathematics is practised. This book forms an introduction to problem-solving using the insights that have been gained in computing science.
http://www.freetechbooks.com/about373.html
Posted in Open Source, Stuff | Comments Off
Monday, April 28th, 2008
I recently across this post on http://forum.mambo-foundation.org. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the project after I stripped myself off my official Mambo Foundation duties. The post below is truly saddening and it’s not even funny for someone who has some idea of what’s going on inside.
Informal Survey – what can we do to improve the team and community?
In April 2001, Mambo became open source under the GPL – its our foss birthday month right now! Over time, and particularly in the last three years, Mambo has undergone a lot of changes. 2 1/2 years ago we went through the biggest change of all with the Joomla! fork.
At the moment, the team is going through a restructuring so that we are set up properly to take Mambo forward into the future. The way the team worked in 2005 worked well for bringing Mambo back from potential disaster. We have made a few changes along the way but we know we can do better.
One of the things we are looking at doing is taking development discussions out into a mailing list that anyone can join and can contribute ideas to (and even code suggestions). Do you think this is a good idea? If you are a developer, would doing this encourage you to participate?
What else should we look at doing? Are there any barriers to your contributions that we may not be aware of?
The team works hard at being here, on the forums and part of our community. We want Mambo to be inclusive and friendly, and to encourage contributions. How can we improve this?
Share your thoughts here please (constructive only – we want this thread to be something of value that we can use for improving things, not an opportunity for criticism that would only discourage the team).
link to the post
Since I do not want to discourage the team – or whatever is left of it – I prefer to vent here. For those who do not know already, Mambo Foundation lost three elected team leads in the last 4 months; and I am one of those folks who departed.
I’ve been an active member of the Mambo Foundation, QA & Release Team Lead at some point, and took over the Core Development Team Lead after Chad‘s departure. Being known as a patient person, Mambo’s internal political dynamics even got to me, resulting in a not so nice resignation letter. Funny it is, I personally and with Chad collaboratively accomplished more than six months of work if we were to stay with the foundation, in a week.
Al takes over the reigns after my core team departure, and in less than a month, he gives up too. And knowing Al, his resignation letter was probably a bit more colorful than mine.
Now, let’s go back to the drawing board for a second and pop two questions.
Why would three Team Leads depart a big FOSS project in 4 months?
And why the board is still looking for a solution by doing informal public surveys?
I guess, we’ll all just sit tight and watch the fireworks.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
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Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Excerpt from http://www.wareprise.com/open-source-php-content-management/
- People with average knowledge of word processing can create the content directly.
- Little or no HTML knowledge needed.
- Content is managed through a cycle of capture, storage, retrieval publication, presentation, versioning, and archiving.
- Users are assigned roles and permissions that prevent them from editing content which they have no rights.
- Publishing of content can be time-controlled, hidden for later use or require user login with password.
Posted in Open Source, Stuff | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Link exchange between the sites just don’t cut it anymore. “Cross-site information sharing” paradigm is growing into a greedy monster requiring new ways to expose your content. RSS has been holding up really good in that front. Given that you can put together – mash up- a website filled with thousands of articles in a matter minutes; it seems like, RSS over-accomplished its task. So what’s next ?
Today, core Mambo and Joomla! are both lacking good RSS facilities. You can only share your “Front page content” via RSS in Mambo (probably the same for J!). If you are keeping only one content item with some “never-updated-flashy” short content, your RSS feed is technically useless to the rest of the world. You can find a good RSS extension, which would cover that scenario.
Question
What if you want to expose more from your CMS site ?
Answer:
With the addition of the Brilaps REST API, MiaCMS, Mambo, Joomla! will allow for advanced external interaction. Meaning that interaction with the site and its content no longer has to occur directly through normal browsing methods. For the first time you can start to consume Mambo’s internals as external services via the data type of your choosing (i.e.) JSON, XML, or Serialized PHP.
How?
Brilaps REST API, MOStlyREST provides the com_rest as a base library that takes care of the message receipt and packaging back to the caller. Brilaps also released a few other goodies that goes along with the base implementation that the other 3rd party developers can use as samples or extend from those. com_rest_content and com_rest_stats components sit on top of the base component(com_rest) and expose your “top ranked”, “most popular” articles, or articles for certain sections/categories, or your site stats to any application that’s capable of parsing some simple XML.
Why?
Why do want to REST enable your Mambo or Joomla! site? One simple answer to that is, larger audience. Larger audience is both audience as in visitors and utilizing applications.
A few examples:
- You can have one MiaCMS site as a content repository, and expose parts of content to multiple other sites that you own. See the sample application, SMRC, to imagine different possiblities.
- You can have a widget like Bridget,
that you can distribute to your visitors to track or search your site at the comfort of a desktop application.
- this list can go on and on, but I leave it up to the implementers and site owners imagination
Next?
I believe, REST enabled MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla! sites will change the landscape of the content management landscape covered by MiaCMS, Mambo and Joomla!. Indeed, that’s a pretty large landscape. I guess, we just sit back and watch what’s gonna happen next…
For questions and comments about the REST API for MiaCMS, you can visit http://forum.brilaps.com
*Same article is also posted on Chad’s site; http://www.opensourcepenguin.net . If you’d like a take a peek at some other cool stuff, browse on.
Posted in Blog, MiaCMS, News, Open Source | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Comparing Open Source Licenses
I StumbledUpon this chart during StumblingUponing. More about it can be found here.
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Saturday, June 13th, 2009
Could it get any better ?
WTFPL – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The WTFPL (Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License) is an uncommonly used, extremely permissive free software license. The original Version 1.0 license, released March 2000[2], was written by Banlu Kemiyatorn who used it for Window Maker artwork.[3] Samuel “Sam” Hocevar, a French programmer who was the Debian GNU/Linux project leader from 17 April 2007 to 16 April 2008, wrote version 2.0.[4][5] It allows for redistribution and modification of the software under any terms—the licensee is encouraged to “do what the fuck [they] want to”. The license was approved as a GPL-compatible free software license by the Free Software Foundation.[1]
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
14 rue de Plaisance, 75014 Paris, France
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
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Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Freevo is an open-source home theatre PC platform based on Linux and a number of open-source audio/video tools. MPlayer and/or Xine can be used to play audio and video files in most popular formats. Freevo can be used both for a standalone PVR computer with a TV+remote, as well as on a regular desktop computer using the monitor and keyboard.
http://freevo.sourceforge.net/about.html
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