Today Open Atrium 1.0-beta1 was released. In short Open Atrium is an open source intranet platform based on the popular CMS Drupal. Even though I’m not a Drupal fan myself, I’ve been seen forward to try Open Atrium out as it is the only open source intranet platform that I’ve heard of worth mentioning. Check out the features.

So today I downloaded the beta and started installing it on my two-year-old-or-so laptop running a WAMP server. The Drupal installation guide is really straightforward and installation went like a charm. Almost. I had to set “max_execution_time” to 240 in php.ini and reload a couple of pages to make it work. Some of the installation steps took so long time to pass that I thought the web server had crashed, but that was not the case.

My first impression of Open Atrium is that it feels like a solid and flexible application (it should be, based on Drupal). It allows for an intranet to grow quite large. The GUI is also very nicely done. I like the fact that you can specify colors for your groups which helps to easily differentiate between them. There are some issues with the GUI though:

• When navigating between groups and sub modules/pages it’s not always easy to recognize where you are in the hierarchy. I think some kind of breadcrumbs would help a lot.
• Some buttons and links are placed in strange places and/or order which to me felt like breaking web conventions.

I also experienced the application as very slow performance wise. I did expect the performance to be quite bad as my laptop is getting old, but I did not expect every page load to take 2-5 seconds. I hope a faster machine addresses that problem.

Over all I was quite impressed with Open Atrium. There are some bugs here and there, but that is expected from a beta, and I am looking forward to future releases. There are more features coming according to the road map and I expect the community to contribute and add even more functionality. I would really like to see time tracking and time estimation added to the “Case Tracker” module for example.

Some of the new features I look forward to use:

• Support for namespaces
• Late static bindings
• The DateTime class has more (very useful) methods in 5.3.0
• Anonymous functions/closures

Now I’ll just have to wait for my hosting providers to upgrade to 5.3.0…

Read the official announcement

Google App Engine now supports Java. The environment contains:

…a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.

There is also a Google Plugin for Eclipse available.

Check out the Getting Started: Java guide for a simple tutorial on how to develop and deploy a Java project on Google App Engine or read more on the Google App Engine blog.

Today it was announced that Magento 1.3.0 was released. Most interesting in this major release is the claimed performance improvement – early tests and benchmarks shows up to 40% performance increase in page loads and memory usage. I haven’t confirmed these numbers, but I’m glad to see that the Magento team still is concerned about performance and is trying to do something about it.

Check out the official blog post @ http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/magento-version-130-is-now-available/

Textpattern releases usually occur once every 6-12 months or so. This is obviously an exception – I cite the official blog post:

Textpattern 4.0.8 is a maintenance release fixing some bugs and ironing out a few glitches which sneaked in during the introduction of new features in our previous release.

Read more about the fixes @ http://textpattern.com/weblog/332/textpattern-cms-408-released.

Yep, a new version (4.0.7) of my favourite blog/CMS software, Textpattern, has been released to the public. I’ve been running a lot of sites on Textpattern for the last 3-4 years and I still think it is the best CMS software to use for small to medium sized web sites (jonathanhedren.com is running on it aswell).

I think the most interesting new features in version 4.0.7 are unlimited nesting of template tags and that many list tags can take forms and/or contained markup.

Read more at the official announcement

Today I stumbled upon a great freeware VST-plugin: Preamp Emulator. It is basically a tube preamp emulator that creates that warm and rich sound that you expect from a tube amplifier. I was very impressed with what this little plugin accomplished and will probably use it a lot in my projects.

Go to the developers web site to download and try it out.

Yep, two weeks ago (September 27, 2008) my son was born. His name will be Julian.

I’m glad he’s finally here :)