Blog word cloud

Playing around with Wordle, a cool tool for creating Word art.

Packt launches fifth annual Open Source Awards

Birmingham, UK. 9^th August 2010

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched today by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favourite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software.  CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.

These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

Contacts

Julian Copes

PR Executive, Packt Publishing

julianc@packtpub.com | www.PacktPub.com

About Packt

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Packt’s books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today’s systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they’re using to get the job done.

For more information, please visit www.PacktPub.com

Joomla 1.5 Extension Development

I’ve posted information on my site about how you can win a copy of Mastering Joomla 1.5 Extension Development from Packt Publishing. Be sure to enter by July 31st.

Joomla 1.5! Beginnger’s Guide (Tiggeler)

If you’re new to Joomla!, this is one of the best titles out there in terms of helping you get started with your first Joomla! site. Tiggeler does a nice job covering all of the basics: everything from downloading and installing Joomla on a server, configuring it, and confirming the installation to working with and then removing the sample data that Joomla provides.

Tiggeler does a nice job carefully moving back and forth between creating content, and giving it structure in the middle chapters of the book. In doing so, it’s important to note that this book isn’t about theory, it’s about doing. Every section includes a “Time for action” that walks site owners through doing what was explained on their own Joomla site. For more adventerous site owners, there’s also a “Have a go hero” activity that is less directed, and provides additional challenges.

In any Joomla! book, there are a couple of must-haves for me, and Tiggeler does a nice job discussing them. They include: search engine optimization, Web metrics and site security. He also walks users through installing and tweaking template design. For those who don’t know code, it’s easy enough to just work through the process of installing the template.

What sums this title up best for me is Chapter 4: Web Building Basics: Creating a Site in an Hour. I was suspicious at first, but am confident that with Tiggeler’s guidance, it’s quite possible to build your first basic Joomla! Web site in about an hour. That’s an excellent premise, and the book delivers on it well.

Joomla 1.5 Multimedia

Walker, Allan. (2010). Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing. 

Preview Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia: Chapter 4 is available for free download.

While I’m waiting for a review copy to arrive, I’ve been reviewing the Chapter 4 preview available from Packt. If this chapter is any indication, Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia promises to be valuable to folks with a wide range of experience.

If you’re a relatively new Web designer, Walker does a nice job providing a quick overview of image editing, how to select the correct file size for an image, and other basic concepts.

Walker quickly moves on to cover the flexibility that Joomla! offers designers in incorporating images into articles, including working with the WYSIWYG editor and with custom HTML.

The book also does an excellent job covering the variety of components and modules that are available to create slideshows and image galleries on one’s side. Based on my own experiences teaching WCMS courses, and managing numerous client projects, I believe that he does an excellent job in covering the most popular, feature-rich galleries, like Phoca Gallery, and Joomgallery, as well as a variety of well-done, aesthetically pleasing flash-enabled lightbox slideshow modules.

The chapter also briefly discusses modules for incorporating images stored on third party services like Flickr–a great consideration for photographers and others who use these services.

This chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of writing alt and title attributes when incorporating images into one site. While this is important, I would have liked to have seen a little bit more depth here:

• alt tags shouldn’t be written, for example, for images that exist for purely aesthetic reasons; text readers should not be reading things like: “spacer gif”;
• alt tags need to be meaningful and descriptive of content; they should, however, be concise; a couple of examples would have been useful;
• point out online resources like the validation service offered by W3C that help designers and developers ensure that their code is well-formed and valid, including a review of one’s alt tags.

On balance, however, this is a solid chapter and a good indicator that the book’s coverage of other multimedia should prove to be useful to novices and more experienced developers alike.

Update on viral marketing campaign

Wow, Mollie has rocketed from last place on the site to just four visits short of second place.

I’m not sure what to make of this, exactly.

I produce some nice content for this site: www.timkrause.info on web content management. But yet I claim that my dog’s heart looks like a kitten, and it surpasses everything in 24 hours. Wow.

Evaluating viral marketing

Today I created a quick chart to track how the viral marketing campaign is going. After initial promotion, we received a pretty solid response, with slow steady growth as I continued to get the initial word out. At the moment, you’ll see a hockey-stick shaped spike at the end that occurred at some point after I finished my work and went to bed. The trick to taking this to the next level is whether or not anyone out there thinks this is funny or cute enough (or stupid enough, for that matter) to share it with others. Primarily, they need to share it with individuals who are outside my network and sphere of influence. I know of two instances of that so far. We’ll see what happens.

Okay, so I write and share a lot of content on my Web site–mostly about Joomla and Web Content Management systems. So how does traffic to this content compare? Well, it’s been on the site less than 24 hours, and it’s already the fourth most popular content on the site. Getting to third will be easy. I would consider this a fairly significant successful experiment if it surpasses the number one spot, which really won’t require more than about 500 page views!

As I continue to work on this project, I’ll continue to offer updates and reflections here.

The power of social networking

Although I’m mostly blogging about content management systems here, I thought I would take a brief break to talk about social networking.

I’m going to be teaching a course on online marketing and ecommerce this spring.We always talk about social networking and viral marketing as part of the course. I have some great material from a project we did for a local business, but also wanted an example that students could relate to, accomplish, and do well with.

So my St. Bernard had some irregular blood values and needed an echocardiogram. My wife is a vet, so these things get done (as they should).

Mollie went to the University of Wisconsin last week and had her echocardiogram. You can see the results here. Although I play around with the image about because it was funny, you’ll see that the first image looks freakishly like a sleeping kitten. Way cool, right?

Here’s a sneak peak: (hint: this is the artist rendition, not the real unaltered version. click the link above for the real deal)

So my project is promoting this photo. I’m studying what strategies and process gets this image to a point where it goes viral. It’s important to note that my goal wasn’t that I needed something viral. But when I looked at this photo, it was one of those rare experiences where Kim and I said, “Wow, I bet people will get a laugh out of this.”

But I’m also a geek AND an academic so I want to track how this photo spreads. Please share if you think it’s cool. You’ll be helping my students learn about how messages spread in an organic/viral fashion. Tres cool.

And for the record: I’m a dog person and regret that my dog has  a cat-shaped heart. Truly regret it.

Web Content Management Course

Today was the first of ten intense days of WDMD 346 – Web Content Management Systems – here at UWSP. The best I can tell through earlier research, what we’re doing as a group of sixteen is unique: there are no undergraduate courses that cover this type of content.

I’m hoping that providing course material as open source that we can share our experiment, and that others will not only pick it up and replicate it, but make it better in the process.

The approach we’re taking is largely a non-technical one. Although I teach in a department called Computing and New Media Technologies, and I personally teach development and programming courses, I also understand the raw power of placing technology in the hands of non-programmers. We’re going to learn how to configure and design, not to program.

Please check out the blogroll in the right hand column. Students will be chronicling their experiences. Already you’ll see an interesting mix of apprehension and insight. I expect more to unfold as the next nine days roll by. We especially encourage you to participate with us: tell us what you think is working, where you challenge our preconceptions and our work.

Do you need a content management system?

Determining whether or not you need a web content management system can be a tricky affair. This quick 10 question survey helps you evaluate the complexity of your content, your publishing environment as well as more complex issues like content personalization, and the drive to update your site’s design on a regular basis. The survey ends with questions regarding institutional readiness.

Results provide a quick benchmark for your organization’s readiness and offers some suggestions for how you can get started on a project depending upon where your organization is in its CMS journey.