Geeklog

The version checker is the page that comes up when you click on the "GL Version Test" link from the Admin menu of your Geeklog site. It'll tell you whether your Geeklog install is still up to date - hence the name.

This page has always been a bit bland but then again, there wasn't really much it had to do or display. Still, there was this nagging feeling that it could be made to look nicer. And so we put this up as one of several tasks on OpenHatch. Rouslan Placella picked it up and delivered a shiny new version that has now gone live.

In addition to the all-important information whether or not you need to update your site, the new version also displays a nice visual timeline of the recent Geeklog release history, complete with a helpful "you are here" pointer. And all this is wrapped in a new and much nicer design.

Thanks, Rouslan! Nice work.

Starting with Geeklog 1.8.0, Geeklog will require PHP 5.2.0 or later to run. The last version of Geeklog to run on older PHP versions will be 1.7.2, to be released in early 2011.

To put things into perspective: Support for PHP 4 by the PHP development team offically ended on December 31, 2007. A last official release, PHP 4.4.9, was made on August 8, 2008. Since then, no security or other bugfixes have been released for PHP 4.

Some Linux distributions with long-term support, most notably Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4) and CentOS 4, shipped with PHP 4 at the time they were released and have therefore committed to continue PHP 4 support until the end of their support period. Therefore, unfortunately, there are still "supported" PHP 4 installations out there.

As a compromise and service to those of our users being "stuck" on such a setup, the Geeklog Team will continue to provide security fixes for the Geeklog 1.7 branch in a timely manner until February 29, 2012 (which coincides with the "End of Production 3 phase" for RHEL 4). Where by "timely", we mean "as soon as possible, but not necessarily on the same day as the then-current release". The further versions drift apart, the more work will it be for us to backport fixes.

Overall, however, we would really suggest that you switch to a host running PHP 5.2 or later, if at all possible and as soon as possible.

IKS (Interactive Knowledge Stack) is an initiative to help Content Management Systems enrich their content with semantic information (think Semantic Web). The initiative, which is in part funded by the European Union, has now reached a point where a first usable version is available. The IKS Project is running an early adopters program and a series of workshops to help get CMS vendors become familiar with the system and so that they can provide early feedback.

One such workshop was held on December 9 + 10 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I (Dirk) attended this workshop, representing Geeklog, to try and get a better idea of what this project is all about.