On releases older than 9.10, you have add the following lines to your sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-rails/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-rails/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Replace jaunty with your Ubuntu release name

You will have to import the repository key as well

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 81C0BE11

On 9.10 and newer, adding the repository is as simple as:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-on-rails/ppa

At this point, you can install/update rubygems like before

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude install rubygems

The number of Indian PHP developers has been growing at a large pace in the last few years, when compared to other countries. A few years ago, India was just one of the top ten countries with more PHP developers. Now India is number 2 and is almost surpassing United States, which is still number 1.

While it is difficult to take such broad conclusions seriously based on member statistics of a single community, PHPClasses does have a large user base and can arguably be considered representative. Any article tagged India and software these days attract the usual crap about how Indian developers are the worst and how everybody who outsources to India never does it again. So I was surprised when some of the usually ’silent’ majority of the client base who continue outsourcing development to India came out to defend their decision.

I did come away with a very interesting statistic; Indian developers have won most awards this year for their contribution against sizable competition. Most Indian developers I meet have difficulty understanding the concept of giving back to the community, so it’s always refreshing to see a number of people doing exactly that.

PHP is different now from the time when I started working with it. It was almost impossible to sell PHP to the so called ‘enterprise’. In sharp contrast, recently I was in a meeting with a major software services company who has big teams for Java and .Net but was desperate for a partner who would help them build PHP capabilities.

Companies like Zend deserve major credit for this shift. Over the last few years they have been trying to be more acceptable to the enterprise market. The results are apparent; Windows/IIS is trying to play nice with PHP, IBM/Oracle has made significant contributions to improve PHP’s integration with their products. No wonder, Zend increasingly looks like another prime candidate for acquisition by one of the big boys.

Perhaps this move was necessary to ensure the long term survival of PHP. The ‘P’ of LAMP no longer means only PHP; it has grown to encompass technologies like Python and Ruby. Frameworks like Rails have a low enough entry barrier for the bulk of PHP developers to consider them as alternatives. PHP benefited a lot from its early adoption by shared hosting providers. Now, hosts offer other technologies as well and VPS hosting has become affordable enough to be an alternative.

What about MySQL and Sun? For MySQL this deal is hard to top, they finally got the global sales, support and delivery potential to compete with the likes of Oracle and SQL Server. For Sun, this is great for multiple reasons. It has been steadily losing new developers and mindshare to LAMP technologies. This acquisition, among other developments allows them to fuzzy the distinction a bit … sounds similar to what Microsoft is trying to do with Linux, isn’t it? It does not hurt that they finally have a strong database offering. I suspect Sun will shortly develop an alternative to InnoDB as well.

Perhaps technologies like JRuby and Groovy point towards the future, where scripting languages and frameworks exist inside the Java ecosystem rather than with an alternative stack. How much these developments would affect an internet increasingly accessed via devices and rich internet applications, remains to be seen.

The login box has some standard features like storage folder for user records, etc. However the redirection options allow much more control than other plug-ins. You can have a global redirection page just like you are used to. However, using Typoscript blocks you can have a different configuration for every individual user if you want. But I suppose the group level controls would be much more used in practice. You only have to add blocks when you want something different since the other settings act as fallbacks if there is nothing set for the current user or group, in that order.

Unlike many other contributions to the TER, this extension is not derived from some commercial work. We wanted to contribute something we wanted for ourselves when we were working with TYPO3. The current release as of the time of writing contains only the login box since we have also tried to create a robust framework for future developments (Chetan was responsible for all the framework related work). In the coming weeks, we have plans to add some very interesting features and plug-ins to the suite.

Extension download and documentation
FE User Suite

Until a few months ago, I had to maintain a multi user blogging system based on Serendipity. I actually wrote a one click installer for this purpose, but that’s another story. Though I was never a user of the software, I was impressed with the code quality and did not look much beyond Serendipity at the beginning. However, I decided to install Wordpress as well for a comparison. Though there are comparisons available, I found that all of them were written from very different perspectives and did not address my needs from the software.

Installation

Though not difficult to install, the Serendipity installer does have a lot of options. The installer also checks the environment for dependencies and might ask you to install required components. While I find these very useful, I can understand if it can be overload for somebody without a background in similar applications. On the other hand, Wordpress asks you almost nothing and can be installed with only a couple of clicks. Right from this level, Wordpress gives you the impression that it is targeting a completely different user base than Serendipity.

Features

I did not miss any desired feature in the two. However, Serendipity does seem to have superior plugin and media management systems. Wordpress has a sidebar mechanism where you can drag and drop widgets, but at the time of writing this feature is very new and not supported by many available themes. All Serendipity templates I have seen support this feature. Serendipity usually contains a myriad of options in every page whereas Wordpress tries to break the forms into different tabbed areas whenever possible. Wordpress is also characterized by big buttons and form fields which are supposedly more usable.
Though I am not sure how much that relates to features, the Serendipity codebase does seem to be very well thought out. Wordpress has improved since I last tried it out a year ago, but parts of the code can still be difficult to follow. Clean design and code does help in avoiding bugs and security holes to some extent.

Theme availability and quality

Wordpress is way ahead of Serendipity here. It has a large theme developer community which produces all manner of free and commercial themes. Serendipity does offer more built in templates. However, I could not find anything that I liked enough. I tried mashing a couple of designs for use with Serendipity and despite the sparse documentation, I managed to create a theme. However, I am aesthetically impaired and the result looked mismatched enough that I threw it away. The decision was also helped by the fact that I could download for free (or purchase) some excellent Wordpress themes for a fraction of the effort.

In the end, I chose Wordpress simply for the last reason. But this is not a criticism of Serendipity. If I have to install or manage a blogging system, I will choose Serendipity in a heartbeat. And maybe one day, I will be able to put together a decent template myself and use Serendipity for my own blog as well.

Free Serendipity themes

Dave’s Serendipity themes – One of the few template resources for Serendipity

Free Wordpress themes

Theme Viewer – Large number of templates (maybe too large)

83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen – More of a list of templates from different sites, but you can preview them in one place

ndesign-studio.com – Only two themes, but both very unique

wpthemespot.com

wpthemesfree.com

Free templates

Six Shooter Media – A small collection, but all of them very good

Free Website Templates – Large collection of excellent templates

Free Web Templates – Primarily hosts templates from other sites, a great way to view them in a single place

Edit: Recently, I found that not only there is another blog (seemingly inactive) with the same title, it has a 2 year old entry on a similar subject as well that still turns up in Google searches. Talk about coincidences .