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.

If you like the Mac/Windows commercials we have seen over the past year then you are going to like the Hi, I'm Ruby on Rails videos making their way on YouTube.  The parodies are great for late night video watching and lets hope the PHP and Java folks have a sense of humor. 

And the PHP beat goes on...

Nick Lewis, Larry Garfield, and Dries Buytaert are discussing the slow rate of PHP 5 adoption and how projects such as Drupal and WordPress should help encourage PHP 5 uptake by phasing out support for PHP 4. WordPress currently supports PHP 4.2 or greater. We don’t even use functionality that was introduced in PHP 4.3. Whenever we accidentally use a PHP function present only in 4.3 or greater during our development cycles, we get a fair number of complaints from testers who don’t have 4.3. PHP 4 is thoroughly entrenched. If we were to change WordPress to require PHP 5 right now, we would abandon the majority of our users. Given the current state of affairs, requiring PHP 5 in the near future would seriously marginalize WordPress.

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What seems like a very long time since I first heard about and ordered the new Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development, it finally arrived at my doorstep. So far, I have only read Chapter 1, "How Drupal Works", and glanced at the remaining pages of the book but I'm very impressed. The book is written in a very easy, well organized, and informative writing style.

This book is perfect for people like me and most of you, the Drupal Developer Wannabe. I'm no dummy and have written Web pages since the mid 1990s during the days of pre-HTML 2.0, Perl, and CGI. But for some but for some reason (perhaps lack of time) I've had a hard time transitioning from a user of Drupal to a developer/contributer for Drupal. While the information in the Drupal Handbooks is very good, I find at times that the information there is either too little or too much to help me over the Drupal learning curve. I think this book will be very helpful in dealing with my wannabe problems.

Dries Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, invited students on his blog to participate in Google's Summer of Code and at the same time help improve the Drupal core.  This is Google's third year for the program which hopes to encourage college students to work on open source projects.  Chris Dibona, Open Source Program Manager at Google, wrote:

Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over 6,000 applications, provided students with invaluable real-world programming experience.

For the Summer of Code 2007, Google is hoping to accept an additional 200 students and add additional open source projects to its program.   I should also add that not only does the participating student collect money from Google, but participating open source projects mentoring the student will also collect $500 at the end of summer.

John Newton, Alfresco, has written an interesting posts regarding "Web 2.0".  I find the article interesting because I think Newton does bring up some new ideas or at least something that hasn't been talked about in some time.  Newton has observed that the main audience for those of Web 2.0 appear to be users that tend to think on the right side of your brain.  Newton also takes it one step further by saying perhaps it is time we start taking into account the personality types of users when it comes to CMS development.

This was a real revelation for me. However, I don’t think that John and Caterina shared my excitement. Maybe it’s already bleeding obvious. The next day I did a Google search on “Web 2.0” and right brain and didn’t find a lot. However, for me it is profound and it is something I think that we can apply immediately to the development of Alfresco. I am going to explore the concept more and I believe that there are implications from Myers-Briggs personality types in how they interact with the Internet.

Taking this further, this might also mean why those who are "left brainers" are kind of annoyed with this whole Web 2.0 terminology.  It has been my experience that while the general public still craves Web 2.0 those involved in the project are exhausted of hearing the phrase be used so much these days.  If you know anything about Myers-Briggs personality types you know there may be some truth to why some of the strongest groups that dislike the Web 2.0 concept appear to be the hard core developers.

It seems lately, I've been promoting a number of blog postings from owners of various design companies.  At the risk of looking as if I'm promoting another local business, I'm going to do it  again.  If you're a CMS nut, I think you'll be glad I did.

Gadgetopia's Deane Barker recently compiled a listing of the various online content management articles he's done over the years.  These greatest hits, Thoughts on Content Management and Information Architecture, are available though his development company's site, Blend Interactive.  His has also gruped the articles under three groups:  for Users, Planners, and Managers; for Developers; and Related Technical Topics.   You'll likely need some time to read all the articles as Barker has been talking about CMS for a lot longer than my own site has been around.