"The last thing you want your IT department to be is a joke because you waited too long to make changes. The easiest thing in the world to do is to play it safe, but it's probably not the best strategy for your professional development or the bottom line of your organization. You have to push new technologies that are going to propel your company forward or you risk being the IT equivalent of a company that waited too long to move to the next generation of technology."

- Ron Miller, "What your IT department could learn from Sony's disruption", CITEworld, May 17, 2013.

LANDesk Management Suite 9.5 helps Halfords provide robust user experience and on-demand access to information

LANDesk Software, a global leader in PC lifecycle management, endpoint protection and IT service management, today announced that Halfords is now using LANDesk Management Suite 9.5 and LANDesk Patch Manager to manage its IT Support Center environment, which includes over 720 devices across two offices. As the UK’s largest retailer of car maintenance, cycling and touring products, Halfords requires a powerful IT environment to keep all systems updated and running at all times.

MDS today announced the launch of MDS Accelerate, the newest version of its integrated revenue and customer management platform. MDS Accelerate delivers flexibility for Service Providers to bring new services and business models to market quickly and effectively

At the 2013 CMS Expo Learning & Business Conference I have the privilege of moderating a panel focused on the Cloud. That's actually a broad topic, but I think it's a topic that is increasingly becoming well understood by the CMS community. Last year, I moderated a similar panel and, in my opinion, we spent way too much time trying to define the Cloud. This year, I'm hoping we're past the "what is it" phase and spend much more time talking about real problems, real benefits, and the challenges the content management industry may be facing by moving toward a Cloud solution.

WordPress 3.6 Beta 3 is now available!

This is software still in development and we really don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.6, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

Beta 3 contains about a hundred changes, including improvements to the image Post Format flow (yay, drag-and-drop image upload!), a more polished revision comparison screen, and a more quote-like quote format for Twenty Thirteen.

As a bonus, we now have oEmbed support for the popular music-streaming services Rdio and Spotify (the latter of which kindly created an oEmbed endpoint a mere 24 hours after we lamented their lack of one). Here’s an album that’s been getting a lot of play as I’ve been working on WordPress 3.6:

Plugin developers, theme developers, and WordPress hosts should be testing beta 3 extensively. The more you test the beta, the more stable our release candidates and our final release will be.

As always, if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

We’re looking forward to your feedback. If you find a bug, please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. We’ve already had more than 150 contributors to version 3.6 — it’s not too late to join in!

In the March 2013 Open Source Matters (OSM) board meeting, the board voted to accept changes to the OSM bylaws that were proposed by the Community Oversight Committee (COC) upon their dissolution. For more details about those proposed changes, please read this previous blog and the public forum discussion.

By voting to accept those proposed changes to the OSM bylaws, OSM has become a self-governing group. In simple terms, this means that OSM is now empowered to add and remove board members on its own, without the approval that was previously required by the COC.

dotCMS, an open source, Java-based content management system, is proud to announce the release of v2.3 – which continues to add features that address real world challenges faced by content managers, web developers and java developers in the modern enterprise.

Drupal.org and its sub-sites (api.drupal.org, groups.drupal.org, etc) will be going down for 30 minutes Thursday, May 9, 17:00 PDT (May 10, 0:00 UTC). This maintenance window will be used to remove a core hack. Please follow the @drupal_infra twitter account for updates during the downtime and thanks for your patience!

Critical Media, whose Critical Mention real-time broadcast intelligence platform is used by more than 1,500 clients including nine of the world's top 10 brands, today announced the addition of Sky News to its rapidly expanding UK broadcast content selection.

"So much ink has been spilled deriding the false concept of a "Facebook friend," but I can tell you…

Thanks to numerous optimizations and improvements, ProcessWire 2.3 is our fastest, smartest and most capable version yet. In version 2.3 of ProcessWire, major upgrades have been made throughout the entire system. If you are using an older version of ProcessWire, now is a good time to upgrade to ProcessWire 2.3. Below the fold is a partial list of what's been added and changed.

I've been pitching one of Canada’s largest and most interesting brands for about 5 years now. It’s…

Since 2010 the VEL team have organised the Vulnerable Extensions List on behalf of the Joomla community. Since then the list has been hosted on the docs.joomla.org pages.The VEL team felt that now was the time to move the vel project onto its own website.

WordPress 3.6 Beta 2 is now available!

This is software still in development and we really don’t recommend that you run it on a production site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. To test WordPress 3.6, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”). Or you can download the beta here (zip).

The longer-than-usual delay between beta 1 and beta 2 was due to poor user testing results with the Post Formats UI. Beta 2 contains a modified approach for format choosing and switching, which has done well in user testing. We’ve also made the Post Formats UI hide-able via Screen Options, and set a reasonable default based on what your theme supports.

There were a lot of bug fixes and polishing tweaks done for beta 2 as well, so definitely check it out if you had an issues with beta 1.

Plugin developers, theme developers, and WordPress hosts should be testing beta 2 extensively. The more you test the beta, the more stable our release candidates and our final release will be.

As always, if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

We’re looking forward to your feedback. If you find a bug, please report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. We’ve already had more than 150 contributors to version 3.6 — it’s not too late to join in!

Qumu, a leading business video platform provider, today announced the results of its April 2013 Enterprise Portals Usage Survey, which looked at the topic of employee video collaboration – how they use it today, how they want to use it, and barriers to action.

Scott Reynen has done some fun things in the Drupal community. Some notable examples:

• Coordinated many meetups in Denver ensuring they happen, with interesting topics, and tasty pizza options
• Helped to organize several Drupalcamps in Colorado (which will be June 29th/30 in 2013)
• Presents on various topics at Drupalcamps
• Helps as one of the 3 site maintainers for groups.drupal.org
• Is an active Project Application queue reviewer heavily interested in new-contributor-onboarding and project quality
• Takes care of abandoned projects and ownership requests in the Webmasters queue
• And does a pretty darn good job as the maintainer for modules like @font-your-face.

How did you get involved with Drupal?

About 4 years ago, I took a job as a developer with Aten Design Group, where we do mostly Drupal projects. At the time, I was pretty skeptical of content management systems, after frustrating experiences with both WordPress and Joomla. But I quickly grew to appreciate Drupal’s modular architecture.

What do you do with Drupal these days?

Most of my Drupal time is spent building websites for clients. I’m fortunate to be able to work on projects I really care about, like the International Center for Transitional Justice, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and the United Nations Development Programme. Apart from client work, I use Drupal as a platform to explore new ideas. With a wide variety of code and a huge active community, Drupal serves as a great incubator.

You’re involved with the Drupal community locally and internationally - can you describe some of the things you do and why you like them?

I co-maintain Drupal Groups (groups.drupal.org), deal with abandoned projects on Drupal.org, do some work on project review applications, help organize the local Denver Drupal meetup, actively mentor a few people, and contribute some modules. I think I like all of this because I feel like I’m actively building the future, either through directly improving the web, or by enabling other people to improve the web.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I didn’t go through the application review process to get my own Git (previously CVS) access, and didn’t realize the process existed for a long time. So I think some feeling of debt played a part in my getting involved. But I also believe the future of Drupal depends on people who aren’t yet involved, and the application process, if not handled well, can very easily be a point where we turn away this next generation of contributors.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

It’s always nice to get thanks from new contributors for my feedback, or to discover a cool new module before it even has a release. But I think my favorite moment was when klausi arrived. Before that, I felt like I had to stay actively involved or the whole process might fall apart. When klausi started doing a superhuman number of reviews, I could comfortably step away from the queue for a short (or even long) period of time and avoid both catastrophe and burnout.

Read a previous Community Spotlight about Klaus Purer (klausi).

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Commerce Registration is, I think, a great example of why the review process is important to the wider community. After some quick minor bug fixes in the review process, that project was approved and is now part of the Conference Organizing Distribution, used in every DrupalCon site. And the maintainer has gone on to contribute several other modules, a few to Drupal Commons that will be part of the next version of the Drupal Groups site. A more frustrating project review could have easily meant the Drupal community losing all of this.

What changes do you hope will come in the project review process?

Mostly I think we just need more people with the right mindset. Right now, the “needs review” backlog is gradually disappearing, largely thanks to a lot of new reviewers. I think we just need to keep more of these reviewers involved and make sure they know, as jthorson recently wrote, “the role of reviewers in this process is that of a 'mentor', not 'traffic cop'”.

What is your favorite part about the Drupal community?

It’s rare to hear someone say “I don’t care” in the Drupal community. There’s plenty of work that goes off the rails on passionate debate over what color to paint the bike shed, and that can grow tedious. But our bike sheds are the best-painted on the web (12 coats!), because people really care. I like that.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

When I was young, I hit myself in the forehead with a boomerang. I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concept, but I’d never had one actually come back. This one did, just as I was turning to see where it had landed. Stitches weren't great back then, so I still have a scar. I still have problems with tools doing what I say rather than what I expect.

A few days ago, the Joomla Project introduced a new version of their content management system, Joomla! 3.1. As usual with these updates, Joomla 3.1 introduces a number of changes and bug fixes. While better late than never, the most significant new feature in this release is dynamic tagging across content-types.

The Vulnerable Extensions List team is looking for new members.

Those interested do not need to know how to code or be a developer but they must be able to:

converse confidently in english be able to test POC where applicable have a proven record of assisting the Joomla community

This volunteer role requires only a little commitmentment but does require a lot of discretion as you may be dealing with exploits that will affect the joomla community as a whole.

For those interested please complete the expression of interest  form  by the 15th May 
 

Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...

As an open source, free software project, WordPress depends on the contributions of hundreds of people from around the globe — contributions in areas like core code, documentation, answering questions in the support forums, translation, and all the other things it takes to make WordPress the best publishing platform it can be, with the most supportive community. This year, we’re happy to be participating as a mentoring organization with two respected summer internship programs: Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Gnome Outreach Program for Women.

Google Summer of Code

GSoC is a summer internship program funded by Google specifically for college/university student developers to work on open source coding projects. We have participated in the Google Summer of Code program in the past, and have enjoyed the opportunity to work with students in this way. Some of our best core developers were GSoC students once upon a time!

Our mentors, almost 30 talented developers with experience developing WordPress, will provide students with guidance and feedback over the course of the summer, culminating in the release of finished projects at the end of the program if all goes well.

Students who successfully complete the program earn $5,000 for their summer efforts. Interested, or know a college student (newly accepted to college counts, too) who should be? All the information you need about our participation in the program, projects, mentors, and the application process is available on the GSoC 2013 page in the Codex.

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

It’s not news that women form a low percentage of contributors in most open source projects, and WordPress is no different. We have great women in the contributor community, including some in fairly visible roles, but we still have a lot of work to do to get a representative gender balance on par with our user base.

The Gnome Outreach Program for Women aims to provide opportunities for women to participate in open source projects, and offers a similar stipend, but there are three key differences between GSoC and Gnome aside from the gender requirement for Gnome.

1. The Gnome program allows intern projects in many areas of contribution, not just code. In other words, interns can propose projects like documentation, community management, design, translation, or pretty much any area in which we have people contributing (including code).
2. The Gnome Outreach Program for Women doesn’t require interns to be college students, though students are definitely welcome to participate. This means that women in all stages of life and career can take the opportunity to try working with open source communities for the summer.
3. We have to help raise the money to pay the interns. Google funds GSoC on its own, and we only have to provide our mentors’ time. Gnome doesn’t have the same funding, so we need to pitch in to raise the money to cover our interns. If your company is interested in helping with this, please check out the program’s sponsorship information and follow the contact instructions to get involved. You can earmark donations to support WordPress interns, or to support the program in general. (Pick us, pick us! )

The summer installment of the Gnome Outreach Program for Women follows the same schedule and general application format as GSoC, though there are more potential projects since it covers more areas of contribution. Women college students interested in doing a coding project are encouraged to apply for both programs to increase the odds of acceptance. All the information you need about our participation in the program, projects, mentors, and the application process is available on the Gnome Outreach Program for Women page in the Codex.

The application period just started, and it lasts another week (May 1 for Gnome, May 3 for GSoC), so if you think you qualify and are interested in getting involved, check out the information pages, get in touch, and apply… Good luck!

Google Summer of Code 2013 Information
Gnome Summer Outreach Program for Women 2013 Information