ApostropheNow: P’unk Avenue launches hosted version of its open source content management system

Passyunk Square-based web development shop P’unk Avenue is angling for broader adoption of its open source web platform Apostrophe with last week’s launch of a hosted version.

Launched in 2009, Apostrophe, the company’s open source content management system, is built on Symfony and has, until the new launch, been for larger builds hosted elsewhere. With ApostropheNow.com, users can grab free and cheaply hosted options, meant to make the framework more flexible, said P’unk Avenue Geoff Di Masi.

“Think Apostrophe and WordPress,” said Di Masi, referring to the blog framework turned online publishing giant. “Apostrophe and WordPress are both open source projects. With both projects, you can still build a site using the code that we have open sourced on our .org websites. Similarly, we now both offer hosted versions on our .com sites.”

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Code for America will be in Philadelphia in 2012; current fellows launch Change by Us

Code for America, the startup nonprofit aiming to offer city governments small teams of top tier technologists in year-long fellowships, will again work with the City of Philadelphia in 2012, the city announced last week.

Philadelphia was short-listed back in June for being the only city in the country to have fellows in each of the first two years of the group’s existence. In 2012, Code for America will also deploy fellows in Macon, Georgia, Detroit and Chicago.

Well-timed with the news of next year comes an update on the work being done by the current set of Philadelphia fellows, who first landed in Center City in February.

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Azavea releases source code for PhillyTreeMap.org, collaborative forest inventory tool

Every municipality is a little bit closer now to having a broader inventory of trees in its boundaries.

Less than two months after going open source with city data catalog OpenDataPhilly.org, Callowhill-based GIS shop Azavea has now released the source code for PhillyTreeMap.org, the collaborative urban forest inventory tool first unveiled during Philly Tech Week in April.

The project is asking people like you to, using the site, help categorize what types of trees, where and in what shape they all are, to get a more accurate sense of what is here, should be here and could be here in the future. Partnering agencies also hope to raise awareness for a campaign to increase the city’s overall tree canopy average.

Dubbed OpenTreeMap, Azavea has shared the framework of its project with the City of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation Department, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. That allows other cities and towns to save time and money on development and head straight to awareness: trying to get volunteers to help identify and label trees.

Find the code on Github here.

The official press release is here [PDF].

Drupaldelphia offers low cost conference for open source CMS this Friday

Updated, July 27, 8:06 a.m.: Co-organizer Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg informs us that though it was rebranded, the conference has been rebranded as Drupadelphia as of last year, the event has been taking place for four years.

As is often the case with software releases, outside of the immediate community of users, there was little fanfare about the latest release of Drupal, which came out in January.

But last year at Drupaldelphia, Philly’s first conference dedicated to the increasingly popular open source content management system, it was making its way into the conversation among the 140 attendees.

Presenters — plucked from local Drupal web development shops like Rock River Star and Zivtech, who together organized the event — were gearing up for the release. After all, it promised improved usability in its user interface and more. And for content management systems, ease of use has become paramount.

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Newspaper chain Journal Register Company announces move to open source

The open source movement isn’t exactly won, but, in a surprise, a newspaper giant from the region just went that way.

The Journal Register Company, based in Yardley, Bucks County and once called among the 10 worst managed companies in the country, announced on July 4th that its 18 daily websites and newspapers were published that weekend using free tools and “crowdsourced journalism.”

“Does this mean that [moving forward] all newsrooms will publish using Scribus or will tone all photos using Gimp? No, but if an operation — part Journal Register or an outside company — wanted to, they could,” the press release read. “The tools we discovered, trained on and used as part of the Ben Franklin Project could allow a news organization to throw away their old methods and start anew.”

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