opensource

Yahoo Interviews Matt Mullenweg

Yahoo had the opportunity to have a conversation with Matt Mullenweg when he stopped by to talk with Yahoo! bloggers about the current and future state of WordPress. Some of the topics that were covered in the interview:

  • Turning 24
  • Surprising uses of WordPress
  • The next big WordPress release (new features)
  • Scaling Automattic and WordPress.com
  • bbPress (Automattic’s message board software)
  • PHP4 vs. PHP5
  • PHP vs. other languages for web development

Some interesting things that I picked up from the interview are as follows:

  • Lots of websites are using the core of WordPress for other applications.
  • 2.5 is going to be the largest release since 1.2
  • Lots of things that WordPress users were used to have been reworked.
  • WordPress is going for an even more slimlined, simplified user experience.
  • Automattic still employs 18 people. 14 of those 18 people deal with coding.
  • WordPress.com is still growing by leaps and bounds. WordPress.com seems to be hosting a number of savvy or high trafficked blogs.
  • Talkpress will indeed be a hosted version of BB Press. It will be looked at as an experiment that might or might not be successful. BB Press will reach 1.0 this year.
  • 2.5 won’t contain database changes, it will mostly deal with the use intgerface.
  • PHP 4 compatibility with WordPress will not be broken anytime in the near future.

PHPBB3 Goes Gold – Released

PHPBB Logo

After 5 long and sometimes painful years, the day has finally arrived where PHPBB 3 has reached gold status. PHPBB3 can now be downloaded from here and will be the official supported version of PHPBB. PHPBB 3 also known as “Olypmus” contains over 200,000 new and altered lines of code. When you take into consideration the recent security audit that the PHPBB 3 code undertook, PHPBB3 looks to be one of of the most secure open source projects to date.

phpBB has changed considerably since work on its second major release began. People have come and gone but this day would not have been reached without the hard work and dedication of all our group members, past and present. The phpBB community, all of you, also deserve a large pat on the back for continuing to support this project. Whether it be through writing mods, creating new themes, spreading the word or simply using phpBB to build new communities, our thanks to you too.

So again we say with great pride and many thanks to all those who’ve helped us reach this point – enjoy phpBB3.

Thank you.

For discussions about this announcement, please refer to: Discuss: phpBB3 Gold Released

So for those of you waiting and waiting for this moment to arrive, your Christmas present has arrived :). By the way, I still think Vbulletin is better but you can’t beat the price of PHPBB. (FREE)

FireFox 2.0.0.9 Released

FireFoxLogoI feel like I’m the last to know about these software releases. Maybe I should look into my feed reader a little more often. At any rate, FireFox has released version 2.0.0.9 of it’s popular browser software. This version is in response to the unusual amount of large regressions that occurred in the previous version.

This latest release fixes these particular issues:

  • Bug 400406 – Firefox will ignore the “clear” CSS property when used beneath a box that is using the “float” property. There is a temporary workaround JS/CSS code available for web developers with affected layouts.
  • Bug 400467 – Windows Vista users will get “Java not found” or “Java not working” errors when trying to load Java applets after updating. To fix this, users can right-click the Firefox icon and “Run as administrator”, then browse to a page with a Java applet — doing this once will fix the problem and permanently restore Java functionality.
  • Bug 396695 – Add-ons are disabled after updating. Users can fix this problem by opening their profile folder and removing three files (extensions.rdf, extensions.ini and extensions.cache)
  • Bug 400421 – Removing a single area element from an image map will cause the entire map to disappear. There is no workaround available at this time.
  • Bug 400735 – Some Windows users may experience crashes at startup. There is no workaround available at this time.

I’m still running on FireFox 2.0.0.7 and have yet to receive an automatic update notification. I’ll continue to wait and see if 2.0.0.9 actually fixes more than it breaks. Let me know how your upgrade experience goes please!

OpenWeb – Free User Created Graphics

openwebgraphics logo

According to my log files, quite a few of you are doing Google searches for graphics, buttons and badges. So, it’s only natural of me to include some content for those of you who are looking for it. Here is something I’ve come across recently called Open Web Graphics. A resource of freely available user-submitted graphics that cover web banners, web icons and web backgrounds.

The web icons are generally in PNG format but you can sometimes find them in .gif. Some of the icons also come in various colors and are searchable by TAGS or CATEGORY. Here are a few of the more popular icons that I see blogs using all the time.

RSS Icon Email Button Home Icon User Comment

The Web Banners and Web Backgrounds section only contains 1 page of graphics which means theirs not a whole lot of selection. OpenWebGraphics has announced that they have reached BETA status back on October 1st but as far as I can tell, the site is open for registration. Once of the coolest things about this site is the ability to upload PSD files. This might be one heck of a resource area for photoshop newbies, who want to learn how the graphics were put together. Do the right thing and don’t redistribute these open PSD files.

Click here to check out their existing library of graphics.

FireFox 2.0.0.6 Released

FireFox LogoFireFox’s built in update checker happily notified me of the update as I browsing around today. 2.0.0.6 contains 1 critical security fix and 1 moderate security fix.

 

 

Fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.6

  • MFSA 2007-27 Unescaped URIs passed to external programs
  • MFSA 2007-26 Privilege escalation through chrome-loaded about:blank windows

That about sums up what was contained in the update. Considering one of the flaws that was fixed is rated as critical, I advise you to upgrade as soon as possible. You can download the latest version of FireFox by clicking here