On the CommonPlaces blog today there's a new post from Harry looking at a "battle" that's looming on the horizon between two of the major PHP-based content driven applications - the battle of the new features between WordPress 3 and Drupal 7.

Two highly anticipated CMS releases, Drupal 7.x and WordPress 3.x, are both set to appear in the next month or two. Drupal 7 is currently in Alpha release, but is aiming for a Beta release later this month. WordPress is a little bit ahead, having published a Release Candidate on May 28th. In light of the coincidental (?) timing of these two major releases, let’s take a look at some of the new features in each release, and see which is more exciting for its respective community.

On the Drupal side of things, he mentions updates like usability improvements, a simpler backend for administration, performance and security improvements and a new interface to download and install modules directly from the interface.

The upcoming WordPress version will, by default, include the multi-user support previously available in a separate download, custom post types and a better system for creating and editing navigation menus.

As far as he's concerned, though, of the two applications (CMSes) the upcoming version of Drupal is going to come out on top. It wins in terms of security, power and flexibility.

Paul Reinheimer has posted about a contest in the making - a turn-based robot battle sort of game where PHP scripts compete against each other.

Just a quick announcement, in an effort to come up with a self scoring contest, I came up with the ridiculously simple concept of robots firing lasers at each other in a fictional arena. Each robot controlled by a different PHP script, and a central arena managing it all. It's basically a turn based game where your robots take turns for you.

You can check out more about the game and its rules over on the Web Bot Battle site. It defines how your bots should act and even has some examples for you to work from.

On the Paranoid Engineering blog, there's a recent post with a "CMS battle" of sorts between two of the more popular PHP-based content management systems out there - Drupal and Joomla.

It's hard to choose which one to use without trying them out. As usually, there are more options - home grown custom programming or even building your own CMS (which I was once stupid enough to do). Programming from scratch is always fun and beneficial for your skills, however, if you need things up and running in no time or you don't do (or don't want to do) any programming, using a CMS is the way to go.

His vote is for Drupal but he's included a long list of specs comparing the features of both so you can decide for yourself on which is the better fit.