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Today, on Drupal’s 6th birthday, the version 5.0 of the PHP content management system that also runs Tim Berners-Lee’s blog, spreadfirefox.com, the UK MTV site and actually quite a few of our client’s web sites, was released.

There have been over 492 contributors to the Drupal 5.0 release submitting 1173 patches, which is 150 more people than our previous record with Drupal 4.7. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, a new Drupal core theme, a web-based installer, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.

Read about all the new features here or watch the video cast here.

Jeremy McAnally has published a book on Ruby, introducing the reader to the programming language on 147 pages. The beginning is about installing Ruby on different platforms. Jeremy elaborates on basic concepts, types in ruby etc. [this is the chapter you should have read if you want to be able to say “I know the basic concepts”.

Later chapters describe proper segmentation of code, methods, objects, classes and modules. The book also covers flow control and exception handling, interaction with the file system and thread handling. Some of the ruby classes are described in detail.

This useful peice of literature is available free online as HTML as well as PDF. You can also purchase it through the vanity publishing platform (that like to be called a technology company rather than a publisher) Lulu for 10 USD.

We met Michael Wechner yesterday to catch up on his thinking and his latest pranks around content management. Some of you might be familiar with the name from around Apache and in particular Apache Lenya. In fact Michael is an active Apache member and the brains behind Lenya together with his development team at Wyona.

As a kind of Lenya 2.0 Michael has been working on a new CMS approach outside of the foundation. As he is still convinced of the Lenya approach and some of the principles remain valid the new project is called Yanel which is an anagram of Lenya as you might have noticed. New is the idea to separate the CMS server from the CMS client. So in addition to the Yanel server you need the Yulup client. Yulup comes as a Mozilla plug-in for Firefox and is what I find a serious step in evolution of CMS interfaces. My first impression was that this client will make all websites editable like wikis without having to deal with things like CamelCase (if you do not want to).

To make sure the two work together a new interface was required:
The Neutron Protocol (NP) is an XML-based application-level protocol to abstract the content management user interface from the server side implementation of a content management system respectively framework.

To ensure the best leverage of the learning from several years of open source content management the Wyona guys have defined a set of guiding principals for their new project. They involve some obvious mentions but also some that we have seen being neglected on other open source projects.

Seth wrote a good post on the details of the content management approach of yanel and yulup. Of course I strongly encourage you to download the code and get your hands dirty yourselves but if you do not want to spend the time but are still interested I suggest you read it.

I am anxious to see how Michael and his team will progress in the next couple of month and how they will achieve their objectives as defined in the road map.