Announcements and Press Releases

Packt Publishing announced today the release of my second title for them -- Drupal 6 Themes. The title will be published in early Q4 of this year.

Drupal 6 Themes takes what I learned during the writing of the Drupal 5 title and improves on the previous book with more resources, more information and more practical knowledge.

Another factor that shows in this book is that Drupal 6 is a joy to work with. Enormous strides were made with innovations that make theming much more accessible -- without compromising the power and flexibility of the system.

(This book also provides another cheap thrill for me -- the cover photo was taken in my garden in Bali!)

The title is available for pre-order now from the Packt Publishing website. Buy early, buy often!

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.

At 50 pages, there is a significant amount of data that should be of use to developers or to anyone who is looking to commit to a web publishing system.

Visit the water&stone site to download a free copy: http://www.waterandstone.com/resources.html

~ making twitter a useful communications channel ~

I started a little experiment last week and it seems to be getting traction. The idea was to see if there was some way to extract more value from Twitter. Like a lot of my friends, I found Twitter to be less than useful -- jammed up with announcements about mundane habits and trivia which really was just a waste of time. Micro-blogging wasn't living up to its potential. The question became: How to get some quality content out of this medium?