d-log

As the current Release Manager of ImpressCMS, I am quite aware of the weaknesses we need to look at in following releases.

One of the major weaknesses that makes ImpressCMS a difficult sell is the fact that you need to use an FTP client in order to add modules or themes to the system. Most systems have a capability of installing those elements directly from the administration interface.

MrTheme just demonstrated the power of open source. While ImpressCMS is in feature freeze during its 1.3 release, he had an itch that needed scratching, so he developed his own solution for it.

Granted  it ‘only’ installs the latest stable (ImpressCMS 1.2.4) or the latest beta version (ImpressCMS 1.3 beta – just released), but it can be used to upgrade your sites without hassle. For me, that’s one first step towards an online updater, but now I hope the community will step in and help MrTheme out.

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When you install Skype on a 64-bit OpenSuSE 11.2 system using the installation package on the Skype Linux page, Skype refuses to start after install. When looking at the command line,you get the following error message:

That seems to be an issue with a bad installation package from Skype.

Luckily, Alberto Passalacqua describes on his blog the  correct installation procedure to get  Skype 2.1 on OpenSuSE 11.2 64-bit. I did this on our older laptop which is still running OpenSuSE 11.2, and it works great.

Thanks, Alberto!

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During the preparation of the redesign of the ImpressCMS sites, we are trying to involve the community with the site design. In order to give those participating an idea of what feeling we are striving for, MrTheme pointed out that we might use Moodboards.

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O’Reilly is running an e-book promotion today, where you can get ‘High-performance websites’  for under $10.

Use code DDHPW at checkout to get the special price.

It might be interesting to look at the different techniques to improve responsiveness, even if the book dates from 2007.

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Thunderbird has gotten some more visible momentum now that Thunderbird 3 has seen the light. Project lead David Asher has some more details on organisational topics for the year 2010:

• field-testing new functionalities in plugins
• New upgrade options for users coming from TB2
• making the organisation financially sustainable on its own

Just like Matt, I would love to see an official Gravatar plugin this year.

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Recently, jQuery 1.4 was released, with a maintenance release 1.4.2 a few days ago. In a move comparable to what we are doing with ImpressCMS release 1.3, the jQuery developers chose the jQuery 1.4 release to be a release focused on speed and cleanup of the codebase. Mostly, just cleaning up the codebase results in quite some speed advancements, so those two efforts are frequently combined.

The changelog for this latest release of the Javascript library mentions performance improvements in many areas : CSS methods, Attributes and many of the most-used functions. However, the changelog also details some backward incompatible changes with previous versions. These incompatibilities can be countered by installing this specific plugin. read more »

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Some time ago, I found this cool plugin for Thunderbird (2.x at the time) : MessageFaces (or on Mozilla Addons). It made email conversations much less impersonal by showing images of the persons that I was having an email conversation with. The beauty of the system was that I didn’t have to do anything: images were gathered from gravatar.com, X-faces, or embedded PNG images.

Then Thunderbird 3 came along, and busted quite a bit of plugins. Sadly for me, both MessageFaces and Lightning, the calendar plugin, ceased to work. read more »

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A month or two ago, I came to the conclusion that I was sinning against one of the basic rules of modern communication by having a multitude of blogs, without a very clear distinction between them. I posted family-related news on this blog, along with news about my upcoming 3Mension.com site.

Of course, that’s wrong.

If your goal is to build a brand, you need distinct and clear communication. You can be certain different people will want different types of information when coming to your site. People going to karekiet39 will do so because of family- or home related stuff. People going to the 3mension blog will want to know the latest facts about 3mension, but couldn’t care less if we redecorated the garden last weekend.

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In this post, I’ll try to describe the steps I had to make to get a working Trac installation on Dreamhost. A few months back, Dreamhost started providing a one-click advanced installation package for trac 0.11.1 . With this package, you can get a working trac installation in a few simple steps. You can even use the Dreamhost panel to upgrade to the latest version, if a new release is made.

Trac is a very powerful package, but installing it (and getting it to work) on Dreamhost hasn’t been easy. Several shell scripts exist that provide a Trac installation, but they all need some manual tinkering.

In theory, the one-click installers at Dreamhost are just that : one click, and you have a ready-to-go setup. In the case of Trac, the installation you obtain by simply using the one-click install is not quite usable nor complete. read more »

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It simply had to happen, with more than 6000 plugins on the official Extend site: the WordPress main developers are considering a way to lead the users of the popular blogging platform to the best-in-class plugins.

The plugins would be developed by the community, but there will be a specific category indicating that they are considered best-in-class, and that the compatibility with a new release is guaranteed.

The risk with this type of presentation is that the users will limit themselves to those best-in-class plugins, and that many developers read more »

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