Yes, it's been strangely quiet, however, work on AptitudeCMS has gone forward. With the first few alphas out the door the issue of quality has been huge and to address this we've setup a phpUnderControl server that will be responsible for monitoring our codebase for changes, testing them, generating documentation and notifying developers of any mishaps along the way. The build server can be monitored by anybody here.

The other big development is we've chosen to employ Review Board for peer code reviews. It sort of seems pointless with the the AptitutdeCMS developer community in it's infancy but there's no doubt that will be a welcomed addition in the future.

I'm pleased to be writing you from the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Day 1 was great and perhaps the highlight of the day was having a chance to sit down in person with Dirk, the maintainer of our sister project Geeklog. Our focus, other than the GSoC sessions, is to begin leveraging our experiences on our respective projects and use them to advance both projects. Here's a quick highlight of day 1:

1. Security Discussion - Dirk and I compared notes on things like input filtering, escaping output, clickjacking, cross site request forgeries and how AptitudeCMS might best implement security on content leveraging our experience with Geeklog's *nix-like permissioning system.
2. Project Improvement - we are both very interested in how we can continue to grow our respective communities, draw in new talent and I had the pleasure of attending a GSoC session on attracting women and other "minorities" (which takes on a new meaning on a global, open source project).
3. Interesting Code Improvements - Discussion of things like caching, session handling, plugin development and more.

You can get a full run down of the details after the hop.

I'm happy to report that we've just committed code to our Subversion repository that implements searching. It should be noted this isn't just your run of the mill search support. We're looking to use the search feature as the basis for all content syndication and with a little planning this, too is working!

The trick is we defined very generic models for both the search response (denoting a collection of results) and the search result. By having this generic model, we are able to very quickly switch between HTML, RSS and ATOM (thanks in part to our liberal use of Zend_Feed). What to try it out?

First go to the Search Page or use the now functional search bar in the header of each page. By default the system will return the HTML results, however, you can quickly convert this to atom or rss by adding those terms to the search string. Here's a clear example:

HTML output: http://www.aptitudecms.org/system/search/?q=Releases
RSS output: http://www.aptitudecms.org/system/search/?q=Releases&rss
Atom output: http://www.aptitudecms.org/system/search/?q=Releases&atom

One other note is that each search you do that has results will give you the familiar RSS icon in the address bar of the browser (at least for the browsers I tested). I see us using this feature to make it easy to embed new feeds in the plugins and even extend this so that you can customize the name, etc of the feed for anybody that might consume it. Additionally, we'll likely add additional output formats (e.g. AMF).

The third alpha installment of AptitudeCMS is now available as version 0.2.0.  This version adds the following features:

1. Theme Management.  You can now edit theme files including theme assets (e.g. CSS, JavaScript, etc).  You can also create a new theme from the stock templates.
2. Updated email handling.  Now HTML emails can be sent.
3. Related to the above, the Registration process now sends HTML emails.
4. We've updated our Support plugin to send out notifications to the original author as well as anybody specified in the "notifiers" configuration section.

Clearly theme management was the big addition to this release and the main reasoning is to get Theme authors started as soon as possible. This should go a long way towards sprucing up AptitudeCMS (particularly this crappy default theme).

The AptitudeCMS Development Team is proud to announce the release of AptitudeCMS Alpha 1. AptitudeCMS, formerly known as Geeklog 2, is meant to be the next generation of Geeklog. To be clear, Geeklog is not going anywhere, rather it will remain as a sister project with AptitudeCMS for the foreseeable future. The system requirements of AptitudeCMS reflects its new generation status: Apache 2.x with mod_rewrite support, PHP 5.3 and MySQL 5.x.

To be 100% clear, this is alpha software and is not intended to be run on any production websites. With that being clear you may download AptitudeCMS and then read our growing documentation. Those interested in a full rundown of the features of AptitudeCMS should read on.

Ahead of our first alpha release we have launched a support plugin which will allow early adopters a good place to ask questions and get responses from the AptitudeCMS development team. We've launched this plugin both as an example of how easy it is to build plugins for AptitudeCMS (the support plugin took less than a business day) and we hope it might motivate someone to begin writing a proper forum plugin that can replace it.

Lots of exciting things are in the works with AptitudeCMS! As you can see we've finally launched the project website and we are working quickly toward getting the community up and running! It should be a fun ride.  Stay tuned as we try to turn out the first Alpha due anytime now.