Bryan Ruby

Mary Jander of Internet Evolution takes a hard look at at what IT must do to survive the next few years of economic woes.  She has some sobering things to say, and while we might not like it, she is probably right.  For example, in her first step to IT surviving she says:

I have never had good luck hosting my Drupal sites on shared hosting plans.  My last venture into budget hosting was a disaster with the hosting company locking me out of my own account due to too many requests to the remote database.  The truth is that I've only been happy with running my personal Drupal sites on virtual private servers (VPS).  However, I'm having a difficult time justifying my yearly costs of using a VPS to host my sites.

This is a really cool story on how local governments can improve their presence on the Internet and save money using open source software.  The City of Albert Lea needed to improve their website but the small Minnesota city was facing project costs of $10,000 to $30,000.  In walks Wordpress being utilized as a full content management system.  As reported by the Albert Lea Tribune:

Some cities pay a consultant $10,000, $20,000, even $50,000 for a Web-based content-management site that looks professional and is consistent through and through. Fairbault is one instance.

Albert Lea, however, paid $720 to local resident Jeshua Erickson last December, she said. Kauffmann was in charge of the site’s revision, and last October she put together a committee of city
officials to advise her.

She said the committee decided to shoot for a site using a content management system — or CMS — but it was outside of her Internet skills. The city began seeking estimates from Web design companies. When the estimates returned, they realized the city couldn’t afford it.

“We just didn’t feel we could justify spending $20,000-plus on a Web site,” Kauffmann said. “I happened to run into Jeshua Erickson on the Pelican Breeze one day, and we talked about Web sites and how he was developing them using WordPress.”

I'll have to say that even though Wordpress is open source and "free", this city got a steal with getting a website for under $1000.  While Albert Lea is a small city, developing government sites can become big projects with lots of complications.  Either the city was kind to the developer and his hours or he felt some civil duty to give the city's taxpayers a good deal.  An example of this developer doing such a good job, Albert Lea's website is currently running Wordpress 2.7 which is the latest available version of Wordpress.  Very well done Mr. Erickson.

MiaCMS 4.8 was released this past week.  New features and improvements in this release include:

• OpenID support (versions 1&2)
• Content versioning
• A brand new and improved JavaScript architecture
• A Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) upgrade (from 2.5.2 to 2.6.0)
• An Enhancement to the Related Articles module
• New versions of the Byte & MOStlyCE editors
• Bug fixes and other general enhancements

Details can be found at MiaCMS.

Royal Pingdom completed a survey looking at the top blog platforms of the top 100 blogs.  This survey mirrors other studies that I've read showing that Wordpress is king of the blog platform.

We found that Wordpress is the most-used platform among self-hosted blogs, which perhaps isn’t a huge surprise. It has more than twice as many blogs in the top 100 as Movable Type, the blog platform that came in second place.

• Wordpress is used by 27 blogs in the top 100.

• Movable Type is used by 12 blogs in the top 100.

Not long ago, I expressed doubts whether osCommerce has a future.  While osCommerce is widely used by thousands of sites, and incidentally the only shopping cart I've ever put into production, its development cycle has been painfully slow for many of its open source contributors and users.  As I've said before, when the 3.0 version of osCommerce is released I find it unlikely that the new osCommerce will have many of the Web 2.0 features that the new breed of
shopping carts currently have now.  I have personal doubts that osCommerce's future is as bright as its past has been.

There are so many great websites out there, but so little time to discover them.  I came across a great site that discusses eCommerce and shopping platforms called Practical eCommerce.

Real folks are behind this company. We are a small business ourselves, and we take seriously the notion of helping other businesses decipher the complexities of migrating online or improving their online operations.

I seem to collect a number of books each year.  A few of the books I receive from publishers with intent to review or as appreciation for my involvement with events related to content management systems.  Other books just peak my interest so I can't help but buy them for my personal library.  The following are five books I plan to read in 2009 and are available in CMS Report's Amazon Store.

Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Windborn

Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network.  I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work.  For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution.  Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management.  That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of

During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive.  Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish.  Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal.  Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.