RicShreves.Net

The Mambo project has just undergone another fork -- with the core developers deciding to step away from the Mambo Foundation and start an independent project.

The new open source CMS project is called MiaCMS and is based on the recent Mambo 4.6.3 codeset. The project team is an all star list from recent Mambo history: Chad Auld, who was the Mambo Dev Team leader for nearly 3 years; Ozgur Cem Sen, who lead the team after Chad's departure about 6 months ago; Richard Ong, who has worked on Mambo docs and development for years; and finally Al Warren, who was with the Mambo project on and off for years and just recently lead the Mambo dev efforts. All-in-all, MiaCMS is comprised of the core of the Mambo Dev Team for the last 3 years.

~ A new version of the Drupal open source CMS is released ~

The Drupal Association today announced the release of version 6.2 of the popular open source content management system. As explained on the Drupal site:

"Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement."

Learn more here: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.2

~ even Google has usability issues ~

Google, a favorite poster child for simple and easy to use site design, is not without its own issues. My biggest pet peeve with Google is the way the system handles erroneous logins. I'm not talking about not talking about simple username/password mismatch, but something a tad more complex. Let me explain:

~ making twitter a useful communications channel ~

I started a little experiment last week and it seems to be getting traction. The idea was to see if there was some way to extract more value from Twitter. Like a lot of my friends, I found Twitter to be less than useful -- jammed up with announcements about mundane habits and trivia which really was just a waste of time. Micro-blogging wasn't living up to its potential. The question became: How to get some quality content out of this medium?

~ a review of BBC web design over time ~

One of my favorite news sources, the BBC's online news site (http://news.bbc.co.uk), just underwent a minor facelift. The changes, while aesthetically small, show improvements in usability and reflect the ongoing logical evolution of the site.

Here's a quick snapshot of how the interface of this influential site has changed over the years. For comparison purposes, all the screenshots below show the use of screen space relative to a 1024 x 768 display setting.