Plone has announced Symposium for year 2008, it will be held at Penn State University in scenic State College, PA.

The Symposium will feature presentations, tutorials, hands-on training, and networking opportunities for developers, designers, integrators, technical writers, and users of Plone. One session track will be devoted to the unique needs of institutions of higher education using Plone. There will also be development sprints chosen and organized by Plone community leaders and developers.

This is the schedule:

• Training - March 10 and 11
• Symposium sessions March 12 and 13
• Sprints any time during March 8-16. Exact dates will be decided by leaders of each sprint.
• Symposium wiki: sprint organization, birds of a feather, message board

You can go ahead and register here: http://soar.ois.psu.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/SOAR.woa/wa/campusRegister?productId=200708SP017411

Plone is looking for proposals to give a presentation, so Sign up here.

Its been long wait, but second release candidate of 6 line is here! you can download it here: http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.0-rc2.tar.gz

There are still known issues, that being solved rigt now but before that:

we have fixed various issues including the security fixes that come with Drupal 5.6 and others involving caching filtered content, menu item inheritance, missing breadcrumbs, better error reporting in the installer and updates, some translatability issues and lots of code style cleanups, and other small fixes.

The most notable usability improvement since Drupal 6.0 RC1 is that the files directory is now automatically created in sites/default.

Developers promise to release Drupal 6 asap

It is strongly recomended that you update your site right now! There are no new features in these installments only bugfixes.

Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 are now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

See download links here: http://drupal.org/drupal-5.6

We have all heared/read about very lightweight, fast and functional blogging engine: Chyrp (if not, check demo here: http://chyrp.net/demo/ at first it was very buggy and that even stopped people to install/try it.

So now, author Alex Suraci focused on bugfixing and even made tons of enhancements, as well as some small changes to the existing Module, Feathers, and Theme engines. A Tumblr importer is in the works as well.

Whats so amazing about Chyrp? well it is free, lightweight, clean, minimalistic and:

All of your content is powered by a unique Feathers system that allows Chyrp to be whatever you want it to be. You can post anything or everything, or just stick to the default Text feather and run a regular blog. Chyrp destroys the fine line separating a blog and a tumblelog.

So wait till 1.0.4 is out and give it a try, good luck Chyrp ( http://chyrp.net/ )

TutorialMS is an open source script that helps webmasters index and manage tutorials (written by them or by another site). It is designed so users can easily find the tutorial(s) they are looking for. Here comes the best part - it looks Web 2.0 and it’s free of course.

so take a demo here: http://www.tutorialms.com/demo/

Looks cool ha? it has got voting, view counter, submitting, categories, stats and much, much more.

Just download latest version here: http://www.tutorialms.com/downloads.php and give it a try

Good news everyone infamous Invision power board just got updated, at the same time, another product from invision IP.Downloads Manager got upgrade up to 1.2.0

While IP.Board got only maintenance only release, IP.Downloads Manager got some new features, some of them are:

• Estimated download times popup
• Lightbox integration for screenshots (optional)
• Reversed page titles on file information pages (SEO suggestion from James)
• When editing file, indicate that the file is still present
• Optionally add individual custom fields to auto-generated topics
• Ability to search custom fields
• AJAX-enabled progress meter for uploads (Requires PHP 5.2 and APC to be installed on the server)
• Portal plugin: random files
• Portal plugin: top downloads
• Search by title/description/both option (does not apply to soundex search method)
• Ability to email download link
• …

please note that it was also converted to a component from a module, and acts like fully-featured one-click file hosting to me

as of IPB 2.3.4 it got tons of bugfixes, you can see whole story here: http://forums.invisionpower.com/index.php?showtopic=268367

Quote from a recent Magento Forum post:

I have been working with ecommerce software for quite sometime. I am very impressed with Magento. I believe it will become the de facto standard for open source e-commerce software … it is so well done and does so many things right. I wanted to post a ‘congrats’ and ‘thank you’ to all responsible. I look forward to contributing what I can to this incredible project!

Developers of Magento today listed top 5 Magento features that they fave most, those appear to be:

• Layered Navigation
• Multiple site control from a single admin interface
• Multiple themes and design flexibility
• Catalog and Shopping Cart price rules (Magento’s rule-based pricing system)
• Checkout Process - single page checkout and multiple ship-to addresses functionality

If you have not checked it out, you definately should do it here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/

What is plone? you might ask, well Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system. To use Plone, you don’t need to learn anything about Zope; to develop new Plone content types, a small amount of Zope knowledge is helpful, and it is covered in the documentation.

So they are looking for Marketing materials for their Plone Strategic Planning Summit and if you ever sold Plone to a customer, had created any Plone marketing materials to help make the sale, ever presented Plone at a conference that isn’t a Plone conference, or represented Plone at a trade show you can send your materials to

marketing@plone.org

They are also looking donators to cover the travel costs for key participants to attend Plone Strategic Planning Summit which will be held February 8-10, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.

however:

The Plone Foundation will match all funds contributed by the Plone community dollar-for-dollar, up to a total of $5000. This means that a $100 donation to the Plone Foundation ends up generating $200 in travel scholarships for the Planning Summit!

You can donate here: http://www.chipin.com/contribute/id/442a64afab6af3f9

Good news e107 users, after the closure of e107hacks on December 31st, the site has been taken over by another e107 user and brought back online for the benefit of everyone who wants to use it.

Taking over from Oz, who had done a fantastic job of building up a range of mods from various different authors across the e107 community, my name is Simon Paul and I own and manage NSNO.co.uk which is perhaps the most widely used e107 site on the net.

You can read full news here: http://e107.org/news.php?item.825.1

and visit renewd site here: e107hacks.org

We all know infamous MySQL administration tool, Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, manage keys on fields and much more.

2.11.3 line was finished by 10 December of 2007, so new line of 2.11.4 is started today. However this RC1 is bugfix-only release.

You can download it here.