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.
Amazon's search startup, A9.com, has launched a new service called Open Search and it may shake things up a bit. Read on to see how this new open standards search offering works and how it might impact the industry.
Authors Calishain and Dornfest are back with even more tips, tricks, and hacks aimed at the Google search engine and its family of related services. Like the first edition, the second edition relies heavily on programming techniques that make use of the Google API. Unlike, the first edition, the second strives to be more egalitarian in its approach, giving much more for the non-programmers in the crowd.
ABC News calls them the People of the Year and, according to the statistics, a new one appears every seven and a half seconds. Who are they? They are The Bloggers. 2004 was the year blogging went mainstream. You mean you don't have a blog? How is that possible...?
I will be the first to admit that I find the blogging phenomenon a bit hard to fathom. Face it: This is diary writing with a spin. It is electronic journal keeping with marketing hype.
In last week's Web@Work column I took on a bit of an apples and oranges comparison:
One of the challenges of working with open source software is dealing with the variations that exist from product to product. osCommerce and Mambo, two of my favourite open source products, provide a classic example of variations in standards and fundamental approaches to software development.
More than half of the large firms in North America are employing Open Source software in some fashion, and another 19% are planning to use it by years' end, according to Forrester Research. In a new report, entitled "How Firms Should Work With the Open Source Ecosystem", Forrester Research outlines the history and drivers behind the trend and looks forward to the development of what they label the "Open Source Ecosystem."
