So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my …

After the morning and afternoon tutorials today by Andrew Eddie (Joomla dev lead), tomorrow is Joomla Day - Brisbane Joomla Users Group where I’ll be doing talk as well.

I’ve already noticed that Joomla users are a slightly different crowd. Joomla is a pretty powerful CMS with many modules/extensions, just like Drupal which runs the Open Query web site. I’m not sure the two even compete directly although there might be some overlap. It occurred to me that Joomla might be what I would call an “enabling technology” on the web, just like PHP and MySQL have been since 1995. It has a very easy entry, which of course is both good as well as bad. Again that’s quite similar to the M and the P…. love it or hate it.

I’m kinda agnostic on the subject of CMSses, there’s quite a few out there and I think that most of the …

Just to remind you that Packt Publishing is running their Open Source CMS Award again:

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for quality and the popularity of Open Source Content Management Systems.

You have two more weeks to submit your favourite CMS in the following categories:

• Overall Winner
• …

I would’ve written sooner about Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008, but I spent most of Sunday cringed in between the bed and the toilet. Here are a bunch of quick notes I took at the event, with some thoughts tacked on to it.

Overall impressions? It was good for a Joomla! beginner. While I would consider myself a Joomla! beginner, I’ve seen many a CMS and maybe am a tad bit jaded. There is a great amount of interest in Joomla! - about 200 people registered for a paid for event (not cheap either - RM70 for a Joomla! forum member, and RM150 for regular visitors). So there’s definitely money to be made in Joomla! and CMSes in general.

Location? This is the first time I’ve been to the rather infamous Cititel hotel, tacked to MidValley. Held at the 5th floor, I noticed that people were allowed to smoke within the corridors. I consider this a …

I just finished reading Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 (this title on Packt’s site). I’ve been working on a website powered by Drupal, and though it was obvious that Drupal is very flexible and capable, I was getting pretty lost in the website. So I wanted to read a book that would explain it to me.

Unfortunately, this book didn’t help …

This article describes how to install the Drupal 6.2 CMS on MySQL 6.0, using the Falcon Storage Engine. The operating system is a default Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" (x86) installation.

I will make a few assumptions here, in order to keep the instructions simple: a fresh OS install, no other MySQL databases or web services are running or have already been installed. Both MySQL and the web server are installed on the same host. You should be able to become root to install packages and to have access to the local file system and the system configuration.

This article will explain how to install and configure Apache/PHP, MySQL 6.0 and …

Yesterday, Drupal 6.0 was officially released - check out this screencast to get a 29-minute tour on the new features in this release.

We'd like to congratulate the Drupal Developer Team and Community for reaching this milestone and are happy that the MySQL Server continues to serve well as the database backend for this awesome content management platform!

I had the pleasure of evaluating and reviewing a previous release of Drupal for the Open Source Content Management System Award from Packt Publishing and it has been one of my favourites.

Keep up the good work!