They say that great things come in threes. We’ll today I received three excellent pieces of news that I want to share.
Drupal 6 has been released. This is big news for publishers. The Drupal community has added some major features to this release. Setup is easier. You can now drag and drop menus and blocks. There are new localization features that allow for page translations “on the fly.”
There’s more. OpenID support is included. An update status module has been added. This lets you know when Drupal core or contributed modules have been updated. The theming system has been updated. The forum functionality is improved and a lot more. I haven’t tried this release yet but hope to get a test site going this weekend. I’ll share my experiences.
My Netvibes account was updated today to their much anticipated Ginger release. Netvibes is what many call a start page application. You can gather content and applications from around the web and can have it all in one place. I use Netvibes to keep track of news, rss feeds, email and even Twitter.
My favorite Netvibes feature is the ability to keep track of multiple Gmail accounts on the same page. This is a real time saver. You can see a video screencast of an earlier release of Netvibes here.
Ginger is an upgrade to the service that adds more functionality including sharing features and social networking. This video shows some of the new features in action. The Ginger release also allows you to publish content and create a “universe” that you can share with the world. I’m just trying out some of the new features but so far the experience is enjoyable.
Finally, the most interesting new thing I found out about today was Riffly. This service allows a site owner to offer audio or video comments directly on their site. Users don’t need to login to the Riffly service. If a user has rights to post a comment to your site they can record right from their computer and the comment will show up inline with the other comments.
This functionality is a very big deal as far as I’m concerned. This really opens up the ‘conversation’ that so many people are talking about. The main Riffly site has the download for a WordPress plugin. There is also a brand new Drupal module that I downloaded this evening. I’ve installed it on one of my sites. You can see the first test comments here.
I like this service a lot so far. There’s not much info on who’s behind it so I hope to find out more in the coming days. I think this is a feature worth paying for if you run a high traffic blog or social network.
Whew! So that’s it. A busy day but I’m happy to share.
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© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.