Droopress #004 - Planets, Design and Rumours

What a week. As soon as I am seven days on the road and fight my way through snow storms, interesting things happen. Also in this issue of the weekly droopress-column for the first time a heading (see above) and a rumour mill (see below).

News

WordPress 3.02 is available. After a good practice with a haiku

Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard

The update fixes 9 errors (by the way actually thought clicking the update button). In the Drupal community probably tears of joy are rolling down cheeks looking at the the release candidate of Drupal 7. With all my heart, congratulations! Joomla! just published the latest issues of their community and haikus are in vogue too.

Planet CMS

The word planet refers in the ancient greek world to "wandering stars" in contrast to "fixed stars". You will find planets often in open-source projects. Most are collections of feeds that deal with the issue of the project and they are mostly written in English. The planets themselves offer usually a possibility to subscribe via a feed and provide a good overview of 'the wandering stars' around the project. WordPress has such a planet and also Drupal. Joomla! has no planet, but a community magazine. In the German-speaking countries, there are also German planets. For Drupal, there is the drupalcenter.de and for WordPress you can find wordpress-deutschland.de. Joomla! publishes an international community magazine, unfortunately without German articles. Perhaps the German-speaking community has not noticed the international magazine in absence of a planet  :-)

Templates and Themes

Often you need not that much information on planets but "only" a fresh new look.
In Drupal a fresh look is called 'theme' and they provide nearly 1,000 free themes on drupal.org.
WordPress calls it a 'theme' too and you will find 1,300 of them in the Free Themes Directory at wordpress.org. By the way, in WordPress, you can search and install themes directly from your website administration area.
Joomla! calls a theme not theme, but template. Unfortunately, you will not find a template on Joomla.org. So it is necessary to find independent directories. While these directories are not easy to create and maintain, many firms related to Joomla! started so called template clubs. They simply sell templates or more accurate, they sell the membership of the club in which a member is able to download a template. In most cases there are also some free templates. As this business idea in Drupal and WordPress was initially neglected, many Joomla! template clubs extended their portfolio to Drupal and WordPress (for example RocketTheme, joomlart, or yootheme).

Rumour mill

• In 2011 there will be a common German speaking Joomla! Day, probably in southern Germany. The word common refers to participants and organizers in Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein and Germany.
• At this event there will be a discussion about the Joomla! country pages (.ch, .li, .at and .de) which leaves a confused impression about the Joomla! project.
• We will see this wonderful WordPress plugin, by the end of the year, for Drupal and Joomla! too (for people outside of Germany this rumour is hard to understand - here is a chart to describe the workflow of the new law made for people with websites and an on-line petition against it) .

If you know fresh rumours for the next issue, contact me or post a confirmation of the particular rumour as a comment.