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My Blossom Sprinkler Controller has arrived! For home owners with a water sprinkler system, you no longer have to be stuck with the expensive but dumb irrigation controllers that was originally installed at your house. There is a new generation of "smart" sprinkler systems arriving on the scene, including those created by Rachio and Blossom. The Blossom controller self-programs based on real-time weather data and gives you control of your schedule right from your phone. Once the controller understands the vegetation, layout of your yard, and the weather it should do the thinking for you when deciding how much to water should be used. The company claims that because their controller is "smarter" than conventional controllers (and hopefully smarter than me), I can expect to save up to 30% on my water bill.

In times of war, you may be asked what you can do for your country. In modern times, your country may be asking you to do your part by updating your WordPress plugins.

The United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), through the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), issued a public service announcement last week recommending website administrators to update their Wordpress sites. More specifically, the bureau wants you to update your third-party WordPress plugins.

You've done it. With the help of developers and advisors you brought your website online and proved if you build it, they will come. But it's never that simple. You now face an unforeseen challenge after launching your new website. Once you customers visit your site, how do you keep them coming back for more? The answer to this question is exactly what the Now What? Conference 2015 is all about. The Now What? Conference is two days of smart talks and workshops from smart people, all focused on keeping your website up-to-date post-launch.

When I talk about Drupal, information technology and the weather all in the same breath, I get a little excited. I can't help myself. I'm biased toward Drupal as it is one of my favorite content management systems. I'm also a former meteorologist working in information technology for a very large organization that is heavily involved with the weather. Needless to say, a year or two ago when I heard that The Weather Channel started using Drupal to meet the needs of it's customers and meteorologists, it caught my attention. I think the use of Drupal is a win-win for everyone around and given my background, I wish my own employer had adopted a similar solution. I think organizations miss out on a lot when they don't utilize open source or even proprietary systems in favor of an in-house CMS.

Over the years, I've made it an unwritten policy not to sensationalize bug fixes and security vulnerabilities in content management systems. While there may be great interest in such stories, I believe such stories have a tendency to cause more harm than good. When sensationalized, such articles tend to cause customers to address security concerns with emotion instead of logic which is never a good thing. So, when the security vulnerability known as "Drupageddon" broke and Drupal developer Bevan Rudge posted "Your Drupal website has a backdoor", I knew this story was going to eventually reach mainstream media. In the meantime, I've been struggling on how best to write this article and what story need to be told.

Not long ago, my wife retired from the Air National Guard after having previously served in the U.S. Marine Corps. With 24 years of military experience, those that serve are almost always bound to walk away with a story or two to tell. This is one of those stories. In January 2006, Karen was given the opportunity to fly in the backseat of an F-16 (General Dynamics Fighting Falcon). Below, in her own words is what Karen experienced during that flight. She originally wrote this on our family blog that we're shutting down, but I felt compelled to make sure her story lived on within the contents of this blog.

Since retirement, Karen has become an accomplished photographer and is currently employed by a local capital investment group. 

So I'm halfway through my three month sabbatical from blogging and I get an email from my good friend, Shaun Walker. For those that don't know Shaun, he's the CTO and co-founder for DNN Corp. You know, the guy that started DotNetNuke. To make a long story short, Shaun wanted to remind me that the DNN community recently released 7.3 which focuses on platform performance. Shaun thought it would be a good idea to mention the release to readers here at CMS Report. Given that this was the man that identified wayback that the future of content management systems was in cloud, mobile and social media...it is difficult for me to ignore such requests.

WordPress 3.9 has been released with a number of refinements that WordPress hopes you'll "love". The changes and new features are solid but perhaps not as many as we've come to expect given past WordPress point releases. Some of the new features that can be found in WordPress 3.9 include improvements in the media editing experience, gallery previews, and live editing of widgets and headers.

Whenever a content management system first appears on my screen, I always look at whether the developers' initial claims are true. In this case, I'm looking at Microweber and its claim that their software offers a "new generation" CMS with "cool features and innovative concepts".  Given that most of the software development in Microweber CMS is recent, from 2012 to present, the goals and claims are ambitious. Impressively, the CMS has already been translated into seven languages so far by its contributors. As word about this CMS beings to spread globally, it's time to dig a little deeper into Microweber.

CodeEval recently released their list of Most Popular Programming Languages of 2014. Each year they release this list based on thousands of data points they've collected by processing over 100,000 coding tests and the input of over 2,000 employers. This list confirms what Python and Java developers already know. It is also list to disappoint Tcl developers and those nostalgic of the Visual Basic days.

According to CodeEval, the top five most popular programming languages for 2014 are:

1. Python (30.3%)
2. Java (22.2%)
3. C++ (13.0%)
4. Ruby (10.6%)
5. JavaScript (5.2%)

What about the other C variants and PHP? You can see how they ranked and the the remaining languages on the list at CodeEval's blog. Of special interest to Web developers is that when compared to 2013, the data shows that popularity for PHP, Perl, and Java have shrank. CodeEval also notes on their blog that there has been increased interest in Objective-C, C#, as well as Javascript.