Web

David Burns of Lullabot makes a comparison of using Panels and Context for building page layouts in Drupal.

The software powering the Mini Seven Club Nederland forum has reached its 10th birthday. Happy birthday phpBB.

Dat horen we graag.

I've recently been saying that one big advantage Drupal and WordPress have over Joomla is the centralized hosting of "third party" contributions (plugins/extensions/modules). Yes, Joomla has the extensions directory, but come actually downloading the software, you get directed to the individual developer's island website to do the download (where you might actually need to first register, are likely to needing to do some digging to find the actual download, etc.).

Semantisch web? In dit filmpje wordt uitgelegd wat het inhoud.

Student Kate Ray interviewed a flock of researchers, entrepreneurs and other innovators for her 14-minute documentary, Web 3.0.

Our friends at Joomlatools are advising against updating Joomla to the latest version, 1.5.17, and remain at 1.5.15 (1.5.16 was released in between, but was quickly sperseded by 1.5.17 due to another problem). Version 1.5.16 introduced a mechanism that will disable a plugin automatically when it runs into an error condition.

Instead of throwing an error the plugin is disabled and prevented from executing under normal conditions. This can lead to a site visitor experiencing unexpected behavior or worse the site could go down.

WordPress 3.0 is nearing completion, being marked with the release of the second beta.

Of course, you put a site live, and you run into trouble. Turns out the widget I chose for displaying my Flickr photostream uses the file_get_contents() PHP function to fetch the contents of the Flickr feed. Whether this is at all possible is governed by the PHP setting allow_url_fopen, and my hosting provider has it turned off. This is not at all uncommon, because when a script is not coded carefully, it would be possible to load a remote file into a script that was only ever intended to load local files. Scary.

And once again, I have changed the platform under my personal site. Why? Like we say in Holland: "Gewoon, omdat het kan" ("Just because it can be done") :)

A very interesting talk by two Google engineers and its ramifications on the phpBB project. Even if you're not into phpBB, the Google talk is very interesting for anyone in Open Source. Which is why I'm embedding it here :) I especially love the term "bus factor".