RicShreves.Net

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!

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.

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.

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

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 new open source CMS project is called MiaCMS and is based on the recent Mambo 4.6.3 codeset. The project team is an all star list from recent Mambo history: Chad Auld, who was the Mambo Dev Team leader for nearly 3 years; Ozgur Cem Sen, who lead the team after Chad's departure about 6 months ago; Richard Ong, who has worked on Mambo docs and development for years; and finally Al Warren, who was with the Mambo project on and off for years and just recently lead the Mambo dev efforts. All-in-all, MiaCMS is comprised of the core of the Mambo Dev Team for the last 3 years.