Drupal 6.0 released. The smoothness of D6’s interaction with both user and developer is really breathtaking these days: as close to one-click installation as you’re likely to get on shared hosting; modules to help you port your own modules over from D5; and even automatically downloaded updates to (unhacked!) core. I had a look at the release candidates but owing to other responsibilities I haven’t had a chance to sit down and play with the actual release.
After having been stuck on version 2.0.1 for over two years, I’ve just upgraded to the most recent version, 2.5.1. The only hiccup was needing to ask my web provider to give me a new MySQL database: since 2.5, Wordpress has required MySQL 4.0 or newer.
Otherwise, it all seems to be running very smoothly. Do let me know if you see anything crazy. I hope to upgrade more frequently in future, as it was a far better experience than I’d expected.
After much wrestling with hexdumps, Matthew highlighted an issue for us today of the stealthy ninja linebreak. Here it is. Are you ready? Right: " "
Did you spot it? Unlike all the other linebreaks in this Wordpress post, it hasn't been converted to a <br/> or <p/> tag, so Wordpress didn't. Not entirely fair of me to expect it to, though, as strictly speaking it's the line separator, \u2029.
I'm really quite astonishingly happy to be joining Tim Hall in co-authoring Python 3 for Absolute Beginners. It's Tim and APress' project, but I've been lucky in getting to author two of the chapters.
The book's aimed at those learning to program, through the medium of Python 3, rather than those already experienced in Python 2.x.
Nick Davies, Guardian journalist and author of Flat Earth News, will be speaking at the Town Hall tonight:
The Oxford branch of the National Union of Journalists invites you to a public meeting with Nick Davies, Guardian journalist and author of Flat Earth News, at the Town Hall on Thursday January 29 at 6.30pm.
Via Sean McGrath comes a reasonably lucid and comprehensible redux of the argument about of whether or not the XML standard should (or should have) stipulated draconian error handling.
It's heartwarming, really encouraging to see that Drupal 7 is undergoing a usability review. Drupal's a massively functional CMS, but all the functionality in the world won't help you when the average (for which read: can't write HTML, let alone PHP) CMS user can't discover it.
David Yelvington mentioned back in December 2008 that his Drupal site had over 30 content types:
Why on earth so many content types? It's easy to see good reasons for news items to be structurally more complex than a simple blog post. But we also have some types of content you probably wouldn't think about at first. Wire stories are an interesting case.... Promos are another....
Beth Kanter advocates Creative Commons in the latest post on her blog about not-for-profit organizations and social media. She discusses how she's managed to introduce often quite recalcitrant nonprofit sub-sectors to the concept.
I can't comment on not-for-profits in general.