Ric Shreves is a web applications consultant and author. He's been building CMS websites since 1999 and is currently a partner at water&stone, a web design agency focused on open source content management systems. Ric has published two books on the Drupal CMS and one book on the Mambo CMS. His newest book, the Joomla! Bible was released in January of 2010. He is currently working on another title for Wiley & Co: The Drupal 7 Bible.
I just finished up the Joomla! Bible for Wiley & Sons and am now working on the Drupal Bible. After that? What's next? I have several choices, so I thought I'd put it out there for everyone to have a voice. Let me know -- what are you interested in? What would you like to see a book about?
>>Submit your ideas and vote on the ones received to date.
Over 40% of the Facebook Fan Pages created by the Asian travel industry show signs of abandonment, according to the 2010 Asian Travel Engagement Report from water&stone.
This post is one of my favorite kinds of articles: That is, those that arise from real world experiences. A good friend of mine recently moved his personal site over to WordPress. At about the same time I had reason to build a couple of promotional microsites on WordPress. As a result of these two projects I had time to refresh my knowledge of WordPress plugins - and in the process I found some really useful items I’d like to share with you all.
In addition to must-have classics like Akismet or the All in One SEO Pack, I discovered a number of newer extensions that address common real world problems. I took the best of the bunch, added it into the list of plugins that make up our standard WordPress deployment, and put together this short article.
If you have incredibly useful favorites that are not on this list, please use the comment form at the bottom of this post to share your experiences.
Without further adieu, I present to you, my dear readers, a list of incredibly useful WordPress plugins:
While it is widely agreed that social media presents great opportunities for brands, it is also clear that it presents significant challenges -- and even a few landmines.
Hong Kong Disneyland seems to be learning the lesson the hard way. The Flickr Group bearing their brand name includes links to pornographic content. The Flickr Group, named Hong Kong Disneyland (see, http://www.flickr.com/groups/hongkongdisneyland/), boosts more than 300 members, well over 2,000 images and a moderately active discussions section. For a Flickr Group, this is a relatively high level of activity. Moreover, the content and branding create a clear impression that this is an official -- or at least officially sanctioned -- Flickr Group for the park.
My newest title, the Joomla! Bible, is out today -- here's the press release:
Global publisher John Wiley & Sons has released the newest title in their Bible series -- The Joomla! Bible. The title, authored by Ric Shreves, provides the most comprehensive documentation yet released for the award-winning Joomla! Content Management System (CMS).
The Joomla! CMS is one of the world’s most successful Open Source projects with more than 200,000 community members and users. Shreves adds, “Joomla is an advanced content management system and a complicated software package. While the system is easy enough for most people to attain a basic proficiency without extensive coaching, it is hard to reach the full potential of the system without additional guidance.”
The 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report showed clearly the ongoing dominance of PHP-based content management systems. While the LAMP stack may be the leader in the arena of web content management, it is certainly not the only game in town. For the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report we looked at not only the PHP-based systems, but also the Java and .NET-based systems.
