OStatic

Though I'm not as guilty of chronically changing content management/blogging software as I am of switching up Linux distributions, I've used more than a few in my day. I began using WordPress in its 1.x days, and moved through Drupal, Mambo, and Joomla in a quest to see what really worked best for my situation.

A year and a half ago, I ended up returning to -- and staying with -- WordPress. The software was nicely polished, simple to modify and configure on a superficial level (and slightly more complex but not frustratingly so for deeper changes), and third party plugins were available that were useful and worked flawlessly (or at least, without show stopping errors).

The WordPress 2.5 release introduced a very different layout and new features, and the 2.7 beta shows the team shaking it up again. In this release, WordPress is lending a hand to (lazy? Overbooked?) bloggers everywhere.

The Zend Framework, a popular open-source Web application framework sponsored by PHP company Zend, just released version 1.6, and it contains a large number of new features. So writes Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on his blog last week, on the occasion of the release being made available. The most important features associated with this release are the integration of the Dojo framework for JavaScript, better support for automatic testing, and better support for SOAP.

The developers of PHP announced last week that PHP version 4.4.9 is now available. This would not be remarkable in and of itself, except that the developers also indicated that this would be the last release of PHP 4.4. If PHP were commercial software, its end of life would be cause for panic in some quarters. The end of life of an open-source project works differently, of course. It does mean that the official development group will no longer spend time and energy fixing bugs in these old versions. But that's where the similarities between proprietary and open-source software ends.

Want to learn a new programming language or development framework? Books, magazines, and blogs are excellent -- but a growing number of people are also learning from screencasts, tutorials that combine someone's voice with a video of their computer screen. You can watch the teacher develop in real time, describing the actions that he or she is taking while they take place. There are many screencasts for open-source languages and frameworks, many for free and some for a nominal fee. Screencasts are playing a growing role in my attempt to keep up with new technologies, and you might well find them useful, too.

Recently, I got the opportunity to pose a few questions to key people involved with open source efforts at Microsoft, including Sam Ramji (the recently promoted head of Microsoft's open source and Linux efforts), Ori Amiga (Microsoft Group Product Manager, Live Developer Platform), and Susan Hauser (General Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Licensing). They offered up some thought-provoking input on what open source needs, Novell, China, Live Mesh, and other topics. I thank them for taking the time, and please read on for their comments.