OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta

The new version of the office suite is available. I’ve installed the beta version and have been using it for a couple of weeks without any problem. I’ve followed the instructions described by Clemmitt M. Sigler in this e-mail.

There’s an interesting comparison with MS Office 2003 in Anthony Barker’s Weblog. Linux Magazine has a preview of the new version.

There are also screenshots available, including several self-descriptive Database screenshots.

Gnome 2.10 is out!

I forgot to mention that six months after the previous release, as it was planned, Gnome 2.10 was released. This version includes new features (improvements in the performance of Nautilus, better drag&drop support, and other small changes), hundreds of bug fixes and full integration with a video player (Totem) and CD-ripping application (Sound Juicer).

A LiveCD is also available for those wanting to try the new version of Gnome, without having to build from sources or wait for the packages of the distributions.

Free Software Projects web pages: Wiki or other kind of CMS?

The website of the Hula project, recently announced by Novell (Ximian), is powered by MediaWiki (the Wiki software developed for the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation). The Mono project website, also hosted by Novell, has just been migrated to MediaWiki. Is this creating a new tendency (the use of Wiki-like sites instead of more classical, centrally administrated, CMS software), or is just a concrete decision for a couple of related projects.

What’s the real difference between wiki software (MediaWiki, Twiki), and more “classical” CMS software (Drupal, eZ Publish). Couldn’t we configure the Twiki in order to imitate a standard Drupal configuration? Wouldn’t we be able to configure eZ Publish with a template such that any published story has an Edit button immediately connected to the form where we can modify that story? In the end both approaches are developing content management software, and the key differences are: the ease of installation, configuration (how far away is the standard configuration from what we need) and use; the support for a lot of concurrent users (performance), and the features provided by the available modules (potential functionality).

And the fact is that probably all kinds of CMS software are moving towards some mix of functionality that is a closure of the features of all of them in their origin.