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.
Google informs me that one of the Open Source CMS Search Engines I built a while back now indexes over 18 million pages. Though it's a drop in the bucket next to broad category search engines, it's not too bad for a specialty search tool.
We released today the first extensive report on market share in the open source CMS market. The report covers 19 of the most popular systems and measures them on a variety of traditional and Web 2.0 metrics.
We found some interesting things, but the key conclusion (for most people) is our determination that the market is dominated by just three names: WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. The report also indentifies projects that may be in trouble and new names to watch.
The Mambo project has just undergone another fork -- with the core developers deciding to step away from the Mambo Foundation and start an independent project.
The Drupal Association today announced the release of version 6.2 of the popular open source content management system. As explained on the Drupal site:
"Drupal 6.2, a maintenance release that fixes problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities is now available for download. The security issues identified were in code new to Drupal 6, and are therefore not applicable to sites running on Drupal 5.
Upgrading your existing Drupal 6 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in this release, but we fixed some notable performance issues too. For more information about the Drupal 6.x release series, consult the Drupal 6.0 release announcement."
Learn more here: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.2
Google, a favorite poster child for simple and easy to use site design, is not without its own issues. My biggest pet peeve with Google is the way the system handles erroneous logins. I'm not talking about not talking about simple username/password mismatch, but something a tad more complex. Let me explain:
