Joomla! version 1.5.3 (Vahi) was released today to the community, correcting a database name validation error that was introduced in version 1.5.2.

Users of Joomla! 1.5 are encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible. The patch is available from the Joomla! website, along with instructions on how to do a complete install of version 1.5.3 or simply patch from a previous version.

The legacy 1.0.15 version is unaffected by today's release.

John Galvin of io1 describes the process his company went through in transitioning from their own XML/XSL content management development to Drupal. After looking at Joomla! and other PHP-based CMS solutions, they settled on Drupal in large part because if its strength with handling taxonomies.

If you or your company have been considering implementing a content management system, John's post is worth a quick read.

It's long been efficient coding practice to reuse proven blocks of program code. After all, if you've already written something that works, why reinvent the wheel the next time you need the same function or operation? With open source coding, the resources for good, proven code are even greater. Thousands of solid scripts and code blocks are available for use in a new project, just by searching online. This not only improves reliability, since the code you borrow has already been battle-tested, but it also reduces development time and costs.

So why are there are so many social media sites apparently being developed from scratch?

I've discussed the positives of building a business site around a blog, or adding a blog to an existing site before. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also listed the pros and cons of converting a website to a blog format in a recent post. I believe that the interaction between you and your customers that a blog-style site can create is essential in today's business communications.

The number of businesses and organizations looking to develop seems to be growing every week. Jeff Whatcott of Acquia took a look at the number of job postings related to social applications and found a large disparity between those just looking for PHP programmers (which he assumes means they're planning to write their own code from the ground up) and those mentioning Drupal (which assumes they understand the advantage of starting with an established, robust content management platform). Jeff notes:

There are currently 816 social app building jobs mentioning PHP skills and only 89 mentioning Drupal skills. As you page through the actual job postings, you see evidence of lots of social publishing application development going on out there, but a lot of it appears to be heading down a path of custom PHP development.

So what's up with this? Drupal is the killer social publishing system. It's built on PHP. It saves a ton of time over building a custom system from scratch. Why are so many people who are friendly to LAMP and PHP in particular decide to reinventing the wheel? Which of the following do you think it is?

1. They've never heard of Drupal
2. They're vaguely aware, but not sure why it might be relevant to their projects
3. They've actively evaluated it in the past, but rejected it.
4. They know Drupal and like it in general, but it's just a poor fit for the current project for some reason

Companies that are looking to develop a next generation web site need to understand that content management systems have matured to a level where, at a basic administrative level, it's not a requirement to be a PHP expert to implement a CMS-based site. It's nice, but it's not absolutely essential unless you're looking to completely customize every element of the site. Requiring multiple years of experience in PHP and MySQL in order to qualify an applicant to create and maintain a WordPress, Drupal or Joomla-based site is like asking someone who'll be using Microsoft Word to be fluent in C++. It'd be nice, but hardly required for the task at hand.

From an evangelism point of view, those of us who are marketing these new technologies to clients need to emphasize the time and cost advantages of starting from a solid, proven base instead of building a web application from the ground up.

UPDATE: Nick Lewis weighs in with "Top 5 Reasons Developers Don't Use Drupal."

What's a Blogroll - Can I Get a Side of Friends with It? - by Nettie Hartsock from Beneath the Cover - "The best way I can explain a blogroll is that it’s a list of your favorite websites, bloggers you admire, and even blogs that might be good resources for your readership. I think it’s good to have a blogroll because it helps visitors to your blog understand what “neighborhood” you live in."

Open Source Business Conference Day 1 - by Jeff Whatcott from @FIRST_LIGHT - "The social publishing opportunity is even bigger than I thought. The need for integrated systems for publishing content, creating social networks, and enabling collaboration just keeps coming up again and again in panel discussions, customer interactions, and presentations."

The Ready, Fire, Aim, Reload Strategy for Social Media Success - by Brian Clark from copyblogger - "Let’s take a look at the mind and skill set that’s required to develop profitable new media assets with agile content development. It all comes down to understanding the social media feedback and iteration process."

Semantic Search - Web 3.0 for Drupal - by duvien from duvien.com - "Looks like the future is nearer than we expect. Semantic search is created by Jonathan Hendler. The original development was made possible by LINC and CivicActions. It uses an RDF store as a search index. It allows you to dynamically creates default search interfaces, for many searches per site, configurable via admin interfaces.

Website for blind and vision impaired developed with open source CMS - by Stan Beer from iTWire - "IT consultancy Energetica and not-for-profit benevolent group Media Access Australia, have developed a website specifically for the blind and vision impaired community. The site aims to overcome challenges blind and vision impaired users face when accessing websites by enabling far greater access to audio description."

Joomla was updated to version 1.5.2 on Sunday. The patch includes bug fixes from the previous version, including the handling of dates and some improved OpenID functionality. While Joomla 1.5.2 isn't specifically a security patch, it's always a good idea to keep your Joomla installation up-to-date to avoid potential problems.

Users of legacy version 1.0.15 are not affected by the upgrade to the main branch.

You can download the latest Joomla package here. Instructions for new installations or patching existing 1.5.1 installations are on the announcement page.

A rather extensive test of the current versions of the two popular CMS packages was published yesterday on AllDrupalThemes.com. The results: Drupal 6.1 had faster pageload times than Joomla 1.5.1 in all four test setups. Tester "peach" notes that the absolute numbers are dependent on your server setup, but the comparisions between Joomla and Drupal should be valid in any case.

Commenter Sjakk Dekker suggested that Joomla's "global caching" only turns on view caching, not page caching (in which case it's not terribly global :) ). I can't confirm that since I'm not using version 1.5.1 for the one site I've developed with Joomla; I'm still using legacy version 1.0.15. It's potentially a significant point, however, and might have affected the results.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Tip of the hat to Bryan Ruby of CMSReport for pointing this one out.

A few weeks ago I highlighted an article by Acquia's VP of Marketing Jeff Whatcott. In it, Jeff came up with a definition of something he calls "social publishing." He described it as a blend of what we currently expect from a web content management system, aspects of online networking such as blogs, wikis and sites like Facebook and YouTube, plus the ability to create web applications using a common framework.

I liked Jeff's terminology then; I like it even better today. For the purposes of this discussion, I include Joomla, Drupal, Plone and other similar software as content management systems and WordPress, Moveable Type and Blogger and their kin as personal publishing, or blogging, platforms. But as open source developers have extended the capabilities of these packages, they are coming closer to each other's niche markets.

Plenty of bloggers are using CMS software to run their blogs; New Tech Heroes is just one of many sites that are primarily blog-driven using Drupal in that way. With the modules and extensions available for WordPress today, and more expected when version 2.5 is introduced, it's more than just a blog platform now. Is it a CMS yet? Does it matter?

Bryan Ruby examined the "social publishing" terminology on his CMSReport blog last Thursday. Noting that we're now dealing with "something more than a CMS," Bryan writes:

What do you call a Web application capable of publishing and managing not only content, but is an application that also manages wikis, social networking, documents, forums, photos, and blogs? Some people will tell you these diverse features are best described under such terms as social software, Web 2.0, social networking, and Enterprise 2.0. While these terms may help create a lot of buzz, I have some difficulty in using these terms to describe the information system model being used by the applications. If you think the definition of a CMS can be a fuzzy or limiting term, wait until you start using the term "social software" in a business setting. Personally, I don't think my boss is in the mood to deal with such vague terms.

The imprecision of terms does make selling this technology difficult to our employers and clients. Not only is "content management" difficult to define for them, the whole idea that there's any "content" to "manage" is baffling to many decision makers. Don't we just want a web page? Haven't we progressed enough if we get that far? Now we're supposed to be "social," too?

It reminds me of the rise of "desktop publishing" twenty years ago. Large print shops hated the term - and the technology - because it implied anyone could do what they'd been doing with their big Linotype machines and composition tables for years. (The fact that not anyone could actually do good layout work became apparent soon enough. I still see brochures laid out using Microsoft Publisher that feature eight or more fonts.) Yet we needed some term back then to describe what PageMaker could do, and desktop publishing did the trick. Interestingly, you rarely hear the term "desktop publishing" anymore, because now everyone - including the big print shops - does layout work on computers now.

So maybe in the long run it won't matter with social publishing, either. For now, though, it seems like we need to have a term that describes this evolving type of software that's driving how individuals, businesses and organizations are communicating in 2008. "Social publishing" works for me. What do you think?

There's another killer on the loose. Who's the target this time? Sharepoint again? If the bullet misses the target, though, will open source CMS platforms get caught in the crossfire?

Since 2005, the following products have been described as a "Sharepoint killer:" Oracle Workspaces 10g, Groove (even after being obtained by Microsoft - apparently it was supposed to be an inside job), Alfresco, CPS Project, O3Spaces, Lotus Quickr, Google Apps Team Edition (just 19 days ago) and, today, Google Sites. Google Enterprise product management director Matthew Glotzbach fingered Google Sites as a "Sharepoint killer" today when it launched, according to Michael Arrington on TechCrunch.

I played with Google Sites for awhile this morning. It's not bad at all, though a bit buggy, as Dennis Howlett describes on ZDNet today. It looks like a slightly more sophisticated Google Page Creator. It doesn't suck, but as a killer, it's a little light on the firepower. Let's say it looks like Sharepoint can walk down dark alleys without any concern about an ambush. But does Google Sites have enough functionality to affect the market for open source CMS platforms?

CMS software alternatives come in three general flavors: traditional proprietary solutions (Microsoft Sharepoint and others), open source solutions (Joomla!, Drupal, Plone, etc.) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions (Google Sites, wetpaint, Ning and yesterday's newcomer BricaBox, among many others). Businesses looking to create or improve their online presence don't know or care about these distinctions. They want at least a simple website, maybe add some cool bells and whistles like they've seen on bigger sites - and they don't want to pay a lot of money for it.

Is something like Google Sites or BricaBox the answer for those users? Maybe. If the business isn't looking to spend much money on the site and they don't have the time to learn how to set up a hosted CMS site themselves, I'd even say probably. But many businesses will need a greater ability to customize and add features than Google Sites will be able to provide in the near future, and it's in that market that the open source CMS solutions, and the designers and developers who provide support for them, will continue to have the greatest potential.

If they were really looking to be a Sharepoint killer today, I'd say Google Sites came equipped for a gunfight with a jackknife. Not much of a killer - yet. If it continues to improve, Google Sites may eventually become a challenger to more complete CMS solutions, even Sharepoint. But for today: put down the knife, Google, and get back to work.