WordPress 1.5.2 is out, featuring security fixes, improvements to plugin API as well number of bugfixes.
An easy upgrade guide can always be found at the WordPress Codex.

WordPress Development Blog – WordPress 1.5.2

Pretty neat stuff, I haven’t spent much time on portlets, but I’m quite sure this is the first open source portlet runner I have come across, I am looking forward to evaluate this product.

Open source Portlet-compliant Liferay 3.5 has been released, this new version adding hot deployable themes, portlet instancing (portlets appearing more than once on a page), built in support for Sun JSF and MyFaces, friendly URLs, and more.

Liferay is designed to deploy portlets that adhere to the Portlet API (JSR 168). Many portlets are bundled with the portal (Mail, Document Library, Calendar, Message Boards, to name a few). Liferay is appserver and database agnostic, and was originally designed to support ASP’s by having one server/db instance serve multiple independent domains. Liferay integrates with Spring, and has been around for a while and has a number of notable real customer deployments.

Jing Xue also blogged posted his first impressions.

* Liferay open source portal 3.5 released

/. Ryan MacCarthy writes “When Google and Yahoo
released their map API’s last week they unleashed a horde of hungry developers eager to integrate their data with the user-friendly maps. Brilliant hacks like Chicago Crime and Craigslist Real Estate are in the midst of switching over to the new API, while sites like MetroFreeFi use the new API to make it easier to find free wi-fi locations in US cities (San Francisco, for example). Imaginative developers, like Alan Taylor (Transparency concept), are digging deep into experimentation to dream up new uses for the maps. It’s great to see the innovation when hacks turn to apps.” I want to see Los Angeles maps of the action in James Ellroy’s novels, and a national map of the worst, funniest tourist traps across the U.S.

* Slashdot | Maps on Path to Mass Innovation