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.
Drupal has released two new security updates. Drupal 6.10 is out now and is a recommended upgrade. The Drupal 5 family has also been patched with the release of 5.16.
The Drupal Team states: "Drupal 6.10 and 5.16, maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as a critical security vulnerability, are now available for download."
There are no new features in the release, nonetheless, upgrading your existing Drupal 5 and 6 sites is strongly recommended.
Wiley has informed of the release date for my Ubuntu Desktop book -- looks like it will be on the shelves April 19. It's now available from Amazon.
I'm still running the 8.10 release on several machines in the office and we're quite happy with it. Could this be the release that breaks things open for the Linux Desktop? Might well be the case. It's certainly the first Linux desktop distro I am willing to recommend to friends and clients. If you haven't looked at it yet you should.
I've just committed to my next writing project -- a how-to for the new Ubuntu Desktop. The book will be part of Wiley's Visual Blueprint series (the same series I worked on for the Mambo book a couple of years ago.)
The working title is Ubuntu Linux : Your Visual Blueprint to the Linux Operating System. The text targets the new 8.10 series desktop (aka "Intrepid Ibex"), which is now in beta and is slated for final release at the end of October. The publication date of the book has yet to be finalized, but it should be out early '09.
I'm looking forward to this one -- we run Ubuntu servers in our office and we have a couple of desktops running the Hardy Heron release (8.04). This will be a good chance to become more fluent in what looks set to be the dominant flavor of the linux desktop.
Today is the official release of my newest book - Drupal 6 Themes. Here is the press release from my publisher, Packt Publishing:
Packt is pleased to announce a new book that teaches users to create and modify themes for Drupal websites. Written by prominent Open Source and Content Management expert Ric Shreves, Drupal 6 Themes helps users create a striking new look for their Drupal websites with clean layout and powerful CSS styling.
According to IDC's latest study, the Content Management market in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan region is expected to grow steadily at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 14.8%, reaching US$ 362.0 million by 2012. In comparison, the market value in 2007 was US$ 181.8 million.
