Net Data Design, LLC Blog

There are times when a product that you use, like, program for and have become very familiar with begins to lose it’s luster. I’m speaking of a very well known CMS, who will at this point remain nameless. We’ll just refer to it as BrandX for now. That time comes when you have this “feeling” and its confirmed by a long-time good client. It’s at that point you know that ignoring it won’t make it go away.

Over the past year or so I have become more familiar with and almost comfortable with the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.) I have been a die-hard Microsoft developer and admit that my strength is in the IIS, MSSQL, and .NET stack. All developer have they’re comfort zone, but I digress. Lets talk Joomla!.

Lets start with the test server. It’s VM running Ubuntu 9.10 with the LAMP stack installed. A freshly downloaded copy of Joomla! 1.5 in place and the installation begins. Here is where some other CMS’s can take a lesson (including BrandX)! The installation was very straight forward and took literally a minute to complete! A few minor configuration settings,a database name, user and presto, your in business.

That was the easy part. Now what to do in this new interface? A new world compared to BrandX! As with any “new” product a learning curve is a certainty, but Joomla! is truly a whole new world. I’ll write back with my finding and I look forward tou your comments.

While there are some that say that a MySQL/InnoDB “monopoly” isn’t healthy in the long run. What is a bit puzzling is the Oracle acquisition of Innobase Oy (the makers of InnoDB) a few years ago. The question in regards to this acquisition is whether Oracle is serious about seeing MySQL grow and prosper, or was that a means to get a strangle-hold on a vital piece of MySQL?

To Oracle’s credit, they have published  a press release stating their commitments regarding their acquisition of MySQL by way of acquiring Sun. Personally, I’m not buying it.

For years Oracle worked, behind the scenes to discredit MySQL and tried hard to understand how their customers could ever consider using such an “immature” product instead of their lead product. In fact, it was so important to Oracle that they offered some very substantial discounts to customers who were using MySQL and Oracle. The good news is that this strategy didn’t work. MySQL had and has a staunch following that has always been a little leery of Oracle.

I’ve been a CTO at two locations that used Oracle and have found their practices to be cut-throat, sometimes bordering on ruthless. Is Oracle a serious threat to the open-source community? In my estimation, it certainly is, more than most of my colleagues, although a huge percentage of them would agree that this acquisition is not good for MySQL. Does Oracle participate in the open-source community? Sure, in a manner that supports themselves through commercial offerings. This is not the true spirit of open-source and leads to a slippery slope.

I’ve posted a poll on the right of this post, feel free to participate.

While the newest DotNetNuke release (5.2.1) is primarily a stabilization release, it does pack a much needed new caching provider that allows the application to run much better under load with improved performance. There have been a few cases, from what I can see, with some minor upgrade issues but as a whole this is a worthwhile upgrade.

The major highlights are:

• Fixed issue where banners were not properly rotated according to the specified views/clicks.
• Fixed issue where upgrades could fail if the the user account did not have permission to update objects in some db schemas.
• Fixed issue where list values were visible outside of the Portal where they were created.
• Fixed issue where caching providers were not rendering unicode characters properly.
• Fixed issue with missing Telerik assembly in the source package.
• Fixed issue where Ajax HostSetting was not properly set on upgrade from 4.x installations.
• Fixed issues where upgrades would fail with a unique index violation.
• Fixed issue with the Starter Kit which was missing HTML module files.
• Fixed issue where page templates were not working correctly.
• Fixed default settings for the module and output caching providers.
• Fixed issue which prevented Blog module from working after some upgrades to 5.x.
• Fixed issue when creating a new module in the Module Definition Wizard if the .ascx extension was not specified.
• Fixed issue where localization was not working if the application virtual directory name was also part of the module name.
• Fixed issue where the FriendlyName for Schedule Items was not being saved.
• Fixed issue where GetUserCountByPortal was making excessive database calls instead of using cached values.
• Added binding redirect setting in web.config to prevent versioning issues with Telerik assembly.

Providers:

• FileModuleCachingProvider 05.02.01
• MemoryModuleCachingProvider 05.02.01
• SchedulingProvider 05.02.01

Wordpress version 2.9 is getting closer to it’s “RTM” release. Now that the RC1 build is available, the community of developers should start hitting the keyboards.

If you’ve been waiting for your moment to pitch in, it’s now. First we need tech savvy testers to upgrade their blogs and kick the tires, make sure everything is rolling like you expect it to. Here’s a list of all the fun and geeky new stuff in 2.9 to try out. Second, and more importantly, we need everyone to test out their plugin compatibility.

If you’re a user of plugins, there’s a groovy new compatibility feature on the plugin directory where you can vote on whether a plugin is compatible with a version or not and it’ll get registered in the new plugin compatibility checker. This is as a replacement to the old wiki-based lists we’d do before. To see it in action check out this Akismet plugin page, as you can see 14 people have already registered that it’s compatible with 2.9.