OStatic

Though I'm not as guilty of chronically changing content management/blogging software as I am of switching up Linux distributions, I've used more than a few in my day. I began using WordPress in its 1.x days, and moved through Drupal, Mambo, and Joomla in a quest to see what really worked best for my situation.

A year and a half ago, I ended up returning to -- and staying with -- WordPress. The software was nicely polished, simple to modify and configure on a superficial level (and slightly more complex but not frustratingly so for deeper changes), and third party plugins were available that were useful and worked flawlessly (or at least, without show stopping errors).

The WordPress 2.5 release introduced a very different layout and new features, and the 2.7 beta shows the team shaking it up again. In this release, WordPress is lending a hand to (lazy? Overbooked?) bloggers everywhere.

The Moonlight team has announced that the first beta release of Moonlight 1.0 is nearly ready for testing. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight product.

The project hopes to get new contributors to come aboard as it finalizes the 1.0 release and pushes forward to Moonlight 2.0. Developer Chris Toshok points to some of the upcoming development tasks, and says that because the 2.0 release will be larger and features numerous self-contained subsystems, developers have more opportunity to make a solid impact on the project.

In October, Mozilla witnessed a surge in Firefox 3's market share as it continued its plan to decommission Firefox 2 -- and the Gecko engine that powered it -- before the end of December.

For two weeks in October, Firefox 3 claimed 20% market share, something that web metrics company Net Applications predicted might happen within a month of the new version's June release. Stalled growth, and Chrome's appearance caused some backslide, but Firefox 3's pulse is getting stronger.