After 8 months of development Drupal 5.0 has been released.

Fittingly, the release date coincided with Drupal’s sixth birthday.

New features added

• Status page and requirement checking: added a status report page with detailed PHP/MySQL/Drupal information and requirement checking.
• Web-based installer: added web-based installer that checks run-time requirements and that supports pre-made install profiles or distributions with better support for database table prefixes. It is also localizable.
• Core theme: introduced a new default core theme, called Garland (and a fixed width version Minnelli). Garland uses the new color module to change the theme’s entire color scheme on the fly.
• Custom content types: core now includes part of the Content Construction Kit and allows you to set up arbitrary types out of the box. For more fields, install the full CCK package from the contributions repository.
• URL filter: integrated the URL filter module into the filter module. This will cause web and e-mail addressed to be automatically hyperlinked.
• Blocks per role: extended the block visibility settings with a role specific setting and retained the option to control blocks by PHP snippets..
• Edit block titles: Drupal 5 makes it possible to customize or overwrite all block titles, even set block titles to empty.
• User management improvements: Added support for auto-complete forms to user profiles. The ability to filter users by role, permission and status to help better manage users. Made email verification of user accounts optional.
• Improved module administration: Modules are listed by category and origin, their versions are displayed, and their dependencies are listed in the module descriptions as required or optional.
• More logging reports: Drupal now provides detailed reports on search terms, ‘page not found’ and ‘access denied’ errors to help improve your site.
• CSS preprocessor: All (cacheable) stylesheets are now aggregated into one compressed file, which makes your site faster, especially for first time visitors.
• Performance tuning: Key parts such as Drupal’s session and access mechanism have been optimized for faster page loading across the board.

There have also been numerous usability improvements and developer features.

Click here for full details

OK … no “bring on the clones” references (oooops … to late)

New Joomla Component to simplify the process of moving a Joomla installation to a new host. I haven’t tried it but features and reviews look pretty darn good. Anything that simplifies adminstration is fine by me.

 Backend Features:

- Create full or partial backups based on your input
- Create ZIP or TAR backups based on your configuration input
- Possibility to create incremental backups, so you avoid the time limit problems on php script executions
- Possibility to exclude components, modules, mambots from your generated clone
- Possibility to exclude directory and files from the backup, manually or through cron settings(AJAX powered)
- Create backups based on a cron task, created backups can be stored on the local server, remotely through ftp or emailed to a custom email account
- Ability to manage existing backups, rename/delete/move, publish to user frontend for sharing
- Posibility to clone any backup to another location, it can be done automatically by using the server ftp function or manually
- Configuration area lets you choose on how to generate backups based on your server possibilities
- You can choose to create backups by using only PHP, or by also using some server utilities to speed things up

Restore Features:

- The generated clone of JoomlaCloner can be restored on a totally different server, with new server and mysql details
- Restore both ZIP or TAR archives
- Restore script is independent from the main component and Joomla and can be run on any host
- Full restore of a clone made with JoomlaCloner
- Ability to restore the original files and directories permissions
- Automatic re-write of the new host settings to the configuration file
- Ability to import the clone using either a ftp simulated sessions, or direct restore through php
- Possibility to exclude database from importing
- Ability to restore multiple clones to different locations

Overview and Reviews: Joomla.org
Free trial or buy at: Joomlaplug.com  

Cost:49.95 Commercial License 1 year support and upgrades; 69.95 for 2 years; 99.95 for unlimited support and upgrades

SEO basics from Google that can/should be consulted to help you be smart about your SEO work.

Google IS the 800 lb gorilla of search engines so you might as well learn how it likes it’s bananas served.

• Webmaster Help Center
  Sections include: My site and Google, Using Google webmaster tools to monitor my site, and Managing my Google Sitemaps files

If your interested in, struggling with, clueless about, or just looking for good Google tidbits to drop at cocktail parties, check out Matt Cutts’ blog — specifically the Google SEO category is as close as you can get to a Google insider. You can also subcribe to the Google SEO RSS Feed.

His short bio:

I joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. I’m currently the head of the Google’s Webspam team.

I recommend you peruse this info every week or so.

For Christmas this year I got my first-ever hard disk crash … this after 25 years of working pretty much full time with computers (I guess it was my turn).

It was more of fender bender than a full-blown wreck but it still had the effect of requiring that I restore my computer using my distributed backup system – which, though less elegant than sounds, actually worked out fairly well but, like my old Auntie, had a few warts on it. More about that in a future post.

For now, I like to share an excerpt from an email sent to me by my good friend at Alta-Publishing.com in which he shares some good backup solutions he’s identified.

I would have to say this software works pretty well . . . saved my bacon on the last crash, although it was still an issue recovering the backup files (because I was using a network drive instead something like a USB drive). The only thing I don’t like is that it uses a proprietary format.

These are the same folks that make the Plesk and Virtuozzo server software. Acronis True Image backs up just data, or data / sys / apps.

If you ONLY want to back up data, SyncBack also works well and keeps files in their native format.

Much more to follow about how best to de-catastrophize your small business data assets.

I’m perusing an article at nytimes.com and see a note at the bottom of the article that says “To find reference information about the words used in this article, hold down the ALT key and click on any word, phrase or name.”  I do so … and voila, it works! The how to of it?  It’s powered by Answers.com. Check it out. Very cool, indeed!. A side note: oddly enough, what took an ALT click on NYtimes.com, takes and ALT double-click at answers.com. Go figure.  

You can add this “answer tips” feature on your brower so it will work on any web site.

Online Shopping surges 25%
(International Business Times) - Holiday shoppers are buying more gifts over the internet this year. A new study estimates that online retail spending shot up 25 percent. 

YouTube Video on 2006 holiday season

Top 10 Wordpress Plugins:
First post of what is intended to develop into be a definitive list of Wordpress plugins. It would be nice if user rankings/feedback were incorporated into Wordpress codex. This list goes back to March 06 so is already a bit dated.
The Top Ten WordPress Plugins.