open source cms

:: Note: This article originally appeared on RicShreves.net and is reproduced here with permission. (Ric is one of the partners here at water&stone.)::

This post is one of my favorite kinds of articles: That is, those that arise from real world experiences. A good friend of mine recently moved his personal site over to WordPress. At about the same time I had reason to build a couple of promotional microsites on WordPress. As a result of these two projects I had time to refresh my knowledge of WordPress plugins - and in the process I found some really useful items I’d like to share with you all.

In addition to must-have classics like Akismet or the All-in-One SEO Pack, I discovered a number of newer extensions that address common real world problems. I took the best of the bunch, added it into the list of plugins that make up our standard WordPress deployment, and put together this short article.

With more than 4,000 Extensions in the Joomla! Extensions Directory, one of the most daunting aspects of selecting a Joomla! Extension is finding the right tool for the job. With thousands of Extensions to choose from, you are sometimes faced with multiple options that appear to achieve your goals. While there really is no subsitute for downloading things and trying them out yourself, in this article I provide a list of fifty Joomla! Extensions as a starting point for addressing common needs.

This article is excerpted from Ric Shreves' upcoming title, the Joomla! Bible, from Wiley & Sons. That book is due for publication in early November and can be pre-ordered directly from the publisher at www.wiley.com. Watch this site across the coming months as we preview more from this new title. This article orignally appeared on the author's site, RicShreves.net.

Note that this is not an endorsement of one particular Extension over another, but rather simply a list of resources to help you get started. The list includes both commercial and non-commercial Extensions. The Extensions are numbered for convenience only -- not as an indicator or preference or popularity.

My fave tech industry insider, The Reg, today reports on an IDC study that indicates the recession is speeding adoption of Linux. The conclusion mirrors what we've been seeing at water&stone as well, that is, while the downturn has lead to a few people deferring projects, many have not, choosing instead to consider lower cost alternatives.

We received a request the other day from someone interested in finding social networking-type resources focused on open source content management systems. We did a bit of looking around at the larger social networks and found a number of different groups and resources focused on the open source CMS.

Large networks, like Facebook, actually host a fairly large number of special interest groups. Some are broadly concerned with software or web design, but there are also quite a few that are focused on specific CMS platforms. While the majority of the groups are concerned with major systems like Joomla! or Drupal, you can also find a surprising number of other systems represented. Channels like Twitter, offer even more variety.

We've put together a list of what we found -- at least for the larger networks and the larger groups. This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but you should give you a good idea of what it out there and how to contact them.