Blog Tycoon

I am looking forward to get new software in 2010. A quick top 5 of these software solutions is:

1. Firefox 3.6

It’s been in beta state way too long and it’s time to have it live.

2. WordPress 2.9.1 (maybe 2.9.2)

With a lot of bug fixes from a minor release, 2.9.1 should be ready by January 2010.

3. Server2Go 1.8.0

Again, a long time since a release, Server2Go should upgrade PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, and provide speed optimizations.

4. Open Realty 2.6.0 (maybe 3.0)

A lot of bugs in the current releases, but Open Realty is the number one script for Realtors. I use it for 2 clients, and write 3 more from scratch based on Open Realty features.

5. jQuery 1.3.3 (maybe 1.4.0)

I don’t really hope for a 1.4.0 leap, but the current version needs more optimizations and simplification.

To be fair with myself, I’ll release in January fresh versions of Whiskey Air WordPress theme with 2.9 optimizations, Portable phpMyAdmin, Butterfly Query Admin, Butterfly Organizer and (em)phasis.

I also have several other undisclosed projects to be released sometimes in 2010.

I’m working on 2 custom CMSs, and doing some research and development for a 3rd one. The first two are online shops with more custom pages for details, information, products and other static data. I’m using an older online shop script I’ve written 4 years ago, and I’m discovering some major bugs and other things that need fixing. One the online shop script is ready, I intend to make it open source and place it on the home page.

The third web site is for a friend’s band and is currently in a development loop, it’s based on Joomla and it looks really ugly. The designer may be bored. So, I thought I might use WordPress, as the client wishes a theme switcher script, and WordPress has plenty of them as plugins. And, moreover, for the client’s needs, Joomla is way too complex than WordPress. And I have no experience with Joomla.

As a personal project, I will turn Blog Tycoon into a themes repository (open source of course). I have many WordPress themes I’ve worked on, and I will move them from the blog and the main corporate page. It will be split into 3 parts: framework themes, regular themes and premium themes (also free). The domain was lying around without a decent idea for it, and I started to doubt if I should renew it. But the themes idea seems very appealing.

You can follow me on Twitter, though updates are rare.

What? You thought this was gonna be that easy? Open-source MySQL software is facing a new uprising within its customer base over plans disclosed this week to reserve some key upcoming features, and their source code, for paying users of its namesake database.

Officials at Sun Microsystems Inc., which acquired MySQL in February, confirmed that new online backup capabilities now under development will be offered only to MySQL Enterprise customers — not to the much larger number of users of the free MySQL Community edition.

The plan was detailed during meetings at MySQL’s annual user conference in Santa Clara, Calif., during which Sun also delayed until late June the release of a MySQL 5.1 upgrade in order to iron out some remaining bugs.

Source: Computer World

Sun acquired MySQL for a billion dollars. Nothing more to say about this, except that MySQL is going to see some improvements. One of the greatest news is that MySQl will remain open source:

So why is this important for the internet? Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet. No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. With this acquisition, we will have done just that – positioned Sun at the center of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy. For startups and web 2.0 companies, to government agencies and traditional enterprises. This creates enormous potential for Sun, for the global free software community, and for our partners and customers across the globe. There’s opportunity everywhere.

Read more on the new beginning on Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog.

Here is the official press release on mysql.com.

Owning a website for your business is pretty much a requirement in this day and age. What good is a website that only shows customers what your company sells? Why not actually sell to them while they are there?

Use any of these 20 open source shopping carts to maximize your sales potential. Some of these aren’t open source, but they are all free. Create an online store and increase your revenue.

I am playing with Magento right now, to see what it offers, but I am still waiting for version 3 of osCommerce (it’s been 3 or 4 years since their 2.2 release), announced here:

Optimizing osCommerce Online Merchant v3.0 for PHP 5 now allows us to further improve and strengthen the framework and to pass the high quality level of coding to community developers to base their add-ons on. The performance of the framework will improve by removing the PHP 4 compatibility layer and by taking advantage of the new features PHP 5 provides such as SimpleXML, DateTime, Iterators, and new core functions. The design and security of the Object Oriented framework will also improve by utilizing the new features of the PHP 5 Object Model.

Another interesting cart is Instinct’s WP e-Commerce. What’s interesting here is that it’s based on WordPress platform. This reminds me of an older post about the ascension of WordPress on corporate sites:

Is WordPress suited for corporate sites? Will it handle the amount of different information and structure required for such a site? When web sites all over the world require more and more user interactivity, and WordPress is highly configurable using plug-ins, it might be suited for a large corporate site, an, moreover, easily updateable by a non-technical person.