The powerful Open Source CMS Drupal has released its latest version onto the world. Drupal 6 adds a host of new features, including an easier installation process, built-in OpenID support and updates to the theming structure.

As far as content management systems (CMS) go, Drupal is easily one of the most powerful, especially for scaling large sites with multiple authors. But that power has always come at a slight cost to usability - especially for new users. We’ve been playing with Drupal 6’s various release candidates (we haven’t installed the final release on our test set-up yet) and have been extremely impressed at the changes made in streamlining and simplifying the installation and overall management system. Is it as easy as WordPress, well no — that’s not really Drupal’s aim — but it is much more intuitive than Drupal 5, which in itself was a step-up from Drupal 4. New users should check out this 12 minute screencast on Drupal’s site, it walks you through the entire process.

If you are looking for a scalable, customizable CMS solution to host either a large site or lots of different sites, you owe it to yourself to give Drupal a look.

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Looking for an inexpensive (read: free) alternative to the CD/DVD burning utilities currently dominating the market? BurnAware Free looks to fill that space nicely.

BurnAware is a free utility that enables you to perform most common disc burning tasks:

• Burn data to most any type of disc, including DVD+R and DVD-R
• Create audio CD’s from WAV, mp3, or WMA files
• Create disk images (.ISO’s)
• Write DVD video files (e.g. VOB files) to a DVD

The interface is very clean and easy to use. BurnAware has a simple home screen where you can see the different burning options. Once an option is selected, the home screen minimizes to the taskbar (similar to Nero and Roxio’s functionality) and a new window is opened, allowing you to customize whatever function you selected.

An added bonus of BurnAware is support for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formats (provided that you have the appropriate drive, of course). Though BurnAware supports both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, we found it peculiar that it only advertises Blu-Ray support. A pointed jab at HD-DVD, or simply an oversight? Only time will tell…

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While mobile web browsers have come a long way in recent years, so has the web. Today’s mobile browsers like Opera Mini and Safari for the iPhone let you zoom in and out of web pages and let you scale text and images to fit on a small screen. You can even watch some web video. But mobile browsers still have a tough time handling pages that make heavy use of Ajax, Flash 9, JavaScript, and other modern technologies.

Skyfire is a new browser for Windows Mobile smartphones launching in private beta at this week’s DEMO 2008 conference. The Skyfire team claims that the mobile browser is the first to support Flash 9, and as you can see in the video above, the browser seems to handle YouTube and other multimedia content much the same way a desktop browser would. You don’t have to download and convert files to view them or open them in a separate video player.

According to Webware, the way Skyfire achieves this is by acting as a proxy browser. In other words, the Windows Mobile application isn’t really a full web browser. Instead, Skyfire hosts an application on its servers that does all of the hard work of rendering the web content and then delivers it to the client software on your phone. On the one hand, this makes it easy to deliver full web content to the underpowered device in the palm of your hand. On the other hand, we’re a bit concerned about what would happen if Skyfire actually becomes popular and the company’s servers start to get hammered by users making web requests from their mobile phones.

Skyfire currently supports Windows Mobile 5.0/6 phones with full QWERTY keyboards. A Symbian client is coming soon.

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If you’ve used Twitter, you’ve probably wondered what it would take to have Twitter-like functionality either 1) on your own blog or website or 2) inside your own company or organization. If so, your wait is over.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has released Prologue, a smart theme for WordPress weblogs that allows you to roll your own Twitter. As you can see on the screenshot above, Prologue is structures much like Twitter with a basic window to allow you to enter in some text, along with a submit button and an option to tag your submission.

Automattic has wisely included RSS feeds for many aspects of Prologue including RSS for specific authors, comments, tag, or the entire prologue itself.

To get going with Prologue, download the theme files and apply the theme in your WordPress instance. If your blog is hosted on WordPress.com, simply specify Prologue as your blog theme of choice in the “Presentation” section of your WordPress options.

Prologue is perfect for organizations who would like to have their own Twitter-like conversations or for individuals who want the same!

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Firefox 3 beta 3 is due out later today. And while there aren’t any major surprises, it’s nice to see the new features like improved OS-specific themes and a new bookmark/history manager. Mozilla Links has posted a great overview of the changes you’ll see in the latest beta.

First up Firefox 3 beta 3 looks more at home on Windows XP, Vista, OS X, and Linux (or at least Ubuntu). The new themes are still a work in progress, but users will notice redesigned icons and a slightly changed toolbar layout. For example, the backward and forward buttons in the Windows version have been combined into one button. At first we were a bit concerned, and then we realize how much more often we hit the back button than the forward button and we realized we were just scared of change. Plus, while this is the new default, users can easily separate the buttons.

The Mac and Linux versions now have native windows for file and text selection boxes and other menus. And the OS X version also includes Growl integration.

Another nice new feature is that when you try to close multiple tabs or close a browser session with multiple tabs open, Firefox will ask if you want to save your session. Right now, you can only save a session if Firefox crashes or if you install an add-on like Session Fix.

Firefox 3 beta 3 isn’t available for download just yet. But as soon as it is, you’ll be able to download it from the Firefox beta downloads page.

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