developer

Earlier this year, SilverStripe core developer Ingo Schommer and German tech-writer Steven Broschart wrote a magnificent book for SilverStripe CMS developers.  When the book was released, SilverStripe's Sigurd Magnusson stated that this book "provides a more structured and comprehensive set of SilverStripe technical documentation than what is currently available at doc.silverstripe.com".  But there is one tiny problem with the book.  If your only language is English then you likely will have difficulty reading the 450 pages in SilverStripe – Das umfassende Handbuch because the book is written in German!

English reading SilverStripe developers will be glad to note that an English version of the book is expected to arrive in August of this year.  How do I know? Just minutes before this post was released, Sigurd posted the details on his blog:

One of the world's largest book publishers, Wiley, has agreed to license our 450-page German SilverStripe book (pictured) from the German publisher and translate it into English. The effort of updating and translating the book is being done by our core developers, including Ingo Schommer who co-authored the initial book.

The book is targeted at professional developers with existing knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and object-oriented PHP5. It provides insight into our web development philosophy and explains the theory underpinning our Sapphire framework and our CMS. It balances this with frequent practical code examples, all of which will be offered for download to make learning quicker.

The aim of the book is to teach the reader how to create websites with rich, slick, and sophisticated features, customise the CMS administration interface heavily, and create extension modules.

The book will sell for £29.95 (a little over USD40.00) online and in major bookstores worldwide.

Amazon has already reserved a place for the English version of the SilverStripe book on its United States site as well as the UK site.

With the release of the new book in English, SilverStripe fans and developers should have something to celebrate in the coming months.  Let's also not forget that the SilverStripe staff are planning some great SilverStripe meetups in both the United States and United Kingdom. The SilverStripe staff wants to meet face-to-face with developers and organizations interested in SilverStripe's software and business. Sounds like a good opportunity if you're a developer wanting to learn more about SilverStripe.

Jeff Robbins from Lullabot recently interviewed Drupal developer Earl "MerlinofChaos" Miles for an audio podcast. Earl Miles is the lead developer for some of the more popular contributed modules found at Drupal.org. The podcast focuses on his Drupal module work which includes Views, Panels, and Node Queue. Jeff Robbins also managed to ask some non-Drupal questions in the 88 minute recording that I found just as fascinating. Personally, I always enjoy opportunities to get to know more about the developers behind the software I'm using.

For the record, I'm not much of a podcast listener but I found myself listening to the entire recording this afternoon. Both Jeff and Earl have a good sense of humor that keeps you wanting for more. It also helps that both speakers have a genuine interest in Drupal and software development. So while you're reading some very fine articles here at CMS Report, I'd encourage you to also encourage you to start up the Lullabot podcast.

The Google Highly Open Participation Contest ended after a hive of stunning work over two months. SilverStripe begun with 60 tasks, and because students get paid for each successfully completed task, SilverStripe had to seek numerous times for Google to increase the funding to enlarge the contest based on unanticipated student demand. In the end, about 180 tasks were completed, three times the initial expectation.

Coach Wei, Java developer, asks the following question on his blog.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do "cool kids" choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java?

At work we're actually moving many of our in-house desktop applications from Python to Java. I wouldn't be too surprised to see us migrate more PHP Web applications over to Java too for some of the reasons Wei gives in his blog post. But I have a theory as to why PHP and Ruby could be considered "cool" and it has less to do with Java's features and more to do with the culture of open source.

I was looking for variety in the CMS headlines to excerpt/post at my site, but everything is coming up Drupal this morning. Not such a bad thing if you like Drupal, is it?

What I hadn't expected was a discussion of Larry Garfield's benchmarking of PHP magic over at Jeff Moore's Professional PHP Blog. Garfield has been collecting some benchmarks in preparation for Drupal 7 development. Drupal 7 "will open up developers to PHP 5 functionality when it is released next year" and likely break Drupal's compatibility with PHP 4.