ThemesWiki.org - Wiki #2 and counting....

A new theme or a new template for a website is always welcome. There are plenty of resources that will give you a ready-made design, both free and commercial. But there are very few that will teach you how to create one. And even fewer that will teach you how to create one for more than one system under one roof.

Packt has launched a new website, www.ThemesWiki.org, that houses free tutorials about creating themes and templates for more than 20 systems including Joomla!, Drupal, Wordpress, Plone and many others.

“ThemesWiki.org promises to fill a much needed gap in the theming and templating community” said Ric Shreves, author of the Packt book, Drupal 5 Themes. “It is a source of information that cuts across systems and provides designers and developers a place to share ideas and approaches outside of the walled gardens of individual project sites.” Shreves, a partner in Water & Stone, an open source web development company, went on to say that “Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Plone, Modx — whatever — none of the clients really care and frankly it matters less and less as time goes by. What we should be concerned with is the end result, and that is where this site comes in."

Recently a milestone was reached when Packt crossed the $100,000 mark in donations made to various open source projects through royalties.

ThemesWiki.org, just like its predecessor InstallationWiki.org that concentrates on providing free installation guides and tutorials, is a part of the same process.

This website is for everyone who wants to be creative in his own way and is not afraid of getting his hands dirty. What's more...If you already know how to create themes for some different platforms, you are more than welcome to share that knowledge with others. That's what the wikis are for. ThemesWiki.org has a provision where you can just submit the tutorial in Word document if you think using wiki mark-up is too time-consuming. The administrators will upload it for you.

For more information please visit www.PacktPub.com/article/learn-to-design-web-themes-and-templates-with-new-wiki

Packt Joins Safari Books Online

Packt is pleased to announce that we have today partnered with Safari Books Online, making our eBooks available online through its digital library service.

Safari Books Online will upload 20 Packt eBooks initially and plans to eventually include all Packt titles within its digital libraries. Subscribers will be able to search and read Packt books, download chapters, and view the full-text of other types of content within Safari Books Online exclusive content collection comprised of thousands of videos, books, pre-published manuscripts, certification guides, and more.

This is great news for Packt and for users who prefer to read books online. Safari has grown in size and popularity since it was first launched as a joint venture between O'Reilly and Pearson back in 2001. It has helped popularize books as an electronic format and with its immediate access to content, has revolutionized the way that IT developers consume technical content.

For more information, please visit: www.PacktPub.com/article/safari-adds-packt-ebooks-to-digital-library

Packt's Open Source Donations reaches the $100,000 Milestone

At Packt, we are passionate about open source and for the last four years we have been regularly contributing donations to open source projects. Earlier this month, we announced that Packt donations have reached the $100,000 mark.

Initiatives such as the Open Source Project Royalty Scheme and Open Source CMS Award have allowed us to provide sustained donations to projects. A nice quote from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert highlights how useful the donations have been:

"The Drupal project and its community have grown sharply over the last couple of years. The support that Packt has shown, through its book royalties and awards, has contributed to that success and helped the project handle its growth. The Drupal Association uses the money that Packt donates on a number of things including, server infrastructure and the organization of events."

Full story: www.packtpub.com/article/packt-donates-over-$100000-to-open-source-projects

Microsoft bid for Yahoo - The Events so far

In the latest turn of events, Yahoo! - as many anticipated - turned down Microsoft's offer of acquisition. The reason they have given for it is that this offer "massively undervalues" the company. Microsoft has stated that this is unfortunate but they "reserve the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo's shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value".

By March 14, Yahoo's annual process of nominations for the board of directors, which starts this Wednesday, should conclude. Many believe that Microsoft will take this opportunity to create a friendlier board of directors to their proposal.

Another news story states that Yahoo is seeking to restart its merger talks with AOL though no official comment has been given.

What does Google have to say about this?

David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer has said in his blog that this "hostile bid" raises troubling questions.


Google has a massive lead in online search services. This survey taken at the end of December 2007, shows that Google was the most used search engine. Google's share is a whooping 65.98%. Next is Yahoo with 20.88% of it's online search share. MSN comes third with 5.33%.

In November 2007, Google's share in video services was 31.3%, thanks to YouTube.

But the real battle is for the online advertising market, where Google holds number 1 position. According to the Yankee group report, the online advertising market in the US alone will reach to $50 billion by 2011. That money is something that is up for grabs. How much of a threat will Microsoft-Yahoo pose to Google's monopoly in this sector remains to be answered but together they will have much higher share than they can get separately. And it will provide choices for the advertisers which is always a positive thing.

It's very difficult to say anything about this merger at this point. Whether this merger will take place or not? Or if it does, what will be MSN's share in online media and search services?

We, as web users, won't see any major differences in our day to day lives on the net. Mobile advertising which is an upcoming thing in online marketing will see the impact of this merger. More and new ads on your cell phones. Gives more choices to us too, doesn't it?

Drupal Wins Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award

So the votes have been counted, the judge's have made their final decisions and Drupal can be announced as the winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, winning $5,000.

Joomla! and Drupal occupied first and second places in 2006, and these two took the top two places this year, except this time Drupal edged ahead of Joomla!, who receive $3,000 for coming second. In third place and winning $2,000, is newcomer to the finals, CMS Made Simple.

"This is a great honor for the Drupal community and the thousands of individual developers who've contributed to the project" says Drupal developer and core contributor Jeff Eaton. "We've worked hard to make Drupal as flexible, as scalable, and as accessible as possible. It's a great week for all of Open Source; the winners in every category have shown that OSS can produce powerful solutions for a wide range of needs" he concludes.

The Awards were designed to recognize and reward Open Source CMS’s for their consistently high standards in what is an extremely competitive field. The result of this year’s Award confirms this quality and also suggests that there isn’t necessarily one CMS that is the best, more that there is the best one to fit an individual user’s needs and requirements.

Full results of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award.

The Open Source CMS Award From a Judge's Perspective

Stoyan Stefanov is not just a nice guy and one of our authors, he's also a judge on this year's Open Source CMS Awards, in the Best PHP Category.

Stoyan has been writing about his experiences as a judge and talking through the process he went through evaluating the finalists.

"I want to... actually experience the pain and the pleasure of building a web site with each CMS. Installing, customizing, add/edit/publishing content, upgrading … the whole thing."

It's an interesting read and gives good insight into the work that the judges put into the Award.

Read Stoyan Stefanov's full post

MODx Wins Most Promising Open Source CMS

MODx was announced earlier today as the winner of the Most Promising Open Source Content Management System category in this year's Awards. As the fourth category winner, MODx came out on top ahead of TYPOlight and dotCMS, who came equal second.

MODx's co-founder Ryan Thrash is justifiably pleased with the Award: “Winning the Award for the Most Promising Open Source CMS is a tremendous honor for MODx. For the team, it validates the past two years of hard work. The people that really deserve the credit though is our community, the heart and soul of MODx. We're lucky to have such a wonderful and growing base of users of all experience levels.”

The Award presents MODx with the opportunity to develop further and compete for the Overall Award next year. So what does 2008 have in store for MODx? Thrash reveals that they “plan to live up to the Award title, and look forward to an incredible year for MODx complete with major releases, increased scalability and functionality, and even a few interesting surprises.”

With an equal number of votes, TYPOlight and dotCMS finished joint second, holding off strong competition from both SilverStripe and Nuke Evolution.

“It is a great honor to be amongst the winners of an Award, which has that many competitors. It somehow shows that having a lot of features is not the only thing that matters when it comes to designing a CMS” says lead developer of the TYPOlight project, Leo Feyer. “This Award confirms the concept of TYPOlight and is a great motivation to continue development” Feyer concludes.

In joint second place was dotCMS, an open source enterprise Content Management System that incorporates web content management with CRM, eCommunication tools and ecommerce. The team at dotCMS is rightly proud of their achievement, as Will Ezell, their CTO explains: “At dotCMS, we've been proud to be a part of Packt's Open Source CMS Award competition. Packt's Award has brought real open source visibility to the dotCMS project. Our strong finish in a crowded field is direct feedback by the open source community that we are moving in the right direction.”

The most promising category was designed to give further recognition to the variety of new open source Content Management Systems currently available. In an extremely competitive and high quality field, this category should provide a boost in both monetary and publicity terms, to Content Management Systems that are seeking much needed recognition. As Ryan Thrash, Leo Feyer, and Will Ezell have stated, we hope that this has been achieved.

Congratulations to all five finalists.

Full details of the 2008 Awards

Another day, another winner!

Joomla! has just been announced as the latest winner in the Awards, winning the Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Joomla! won the overall Award last year and in a repeat of last year's result, held off strong competition from Drupal (2nd) and e107 (3rd).

Joomla! Project Manager Johan Janssens said adding this latest award to Joomla's steadily growing collection of prizes was recognition of the project as a whole.

"While I can't pretend to read judges minds, I'm sure Joomla's wealth of community and focus on creating the foundations of a next generation framework, demonstrated the true strengths of the project," he said.

Johan is right actually. The judges were particularly impressed with the size of Joomla!'s community, commenting on its ability to quickly identify and fix problems - especially security bugs.

Read more about the Award here.

mojoPortal Wins Best Other Open Source CMS

The Award results continued today with the announcement that mojoPortal has won the Best Other Open Source Content Management System. 'Best Other' sounds a bit ambiguous, however it was designed to recognise non PHP/MySQL Content Management Systems. mojoPortal is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or Mono on Linux or Mac OS X.

Coming in second and third were the always consistent Plone and relative newcomer Silva, who impressed many of the judges.

This is taken from the blurb on our website:

The judges agreed that mojoPortal's ease of use, set of relevant tools and plugins and also the fact that it is cross platform, made it stand out above the rest. On hearing the news, Joe Audette, the founder, leader and primary developer of mojoPortal was predictably pleased. "The mojoPortal team is very happy to be honored with this award. We are working very hard to continuously improve mojoPortal and will use the award money to fund the completion of our e-commerce feature" he explained. "We'd like to thank our community members and the judges for helping us achieve this recognition and we'd like to thank Packt Publishing for the additional attention to our project which has resulted from this contest and award" Audette concludes.

Well done to mojoPortal.

WordPress Wins Best Open Source Social Networking CMS

We've just announced that WordPress has won the Open Source Social Networking Content Management System in the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards. Drupal and Elgg came joint second with an equal number of votes. WordPress receives $2,000 as its prize.

We had just over 18,000 votes in total, across the five categories. What has really impressed us, and the judges, this year is the quality of the new CMS's that have made it through to the final stages. A number of judges commented on how difficult it was to choose a top three because of the quality of the finalists and that each CMS excelled in a different area.

Full details of WordPress winning can be viewed here.