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Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.

Birmingham, UK (PRWEB) November 3, 2008 — Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.

Released as an Open Source project by founder Dries Buytaert in 2001, Drupal has grown substantially and has been downloaded almost 1.5 million times in the last 12 months. It is currently being applied by companies such as Warner Brothers Music, MTV UK, and the New York Observer amongst others.

“These awards are a testament to the valuable contributions from dedicated Drupal community members around the globe” said Buytaert in response to the news. “Working together, the Drupal community is building the future of the dynamic web so that anyone can quickly build great social publishing websites” he concluded.

With votes coming from a panel of industry experts and visitors to Packt’s website, this year’s Awards proved to be the most popular and also the highest quality. The task of selecting a top three from the finalists was a difficult one for the judges due to their high standards and myriad features.

Finishing in second place and receiving $3,000 was Joomla!, the youngest of the three finalists and a previous winner of the Overall Award. Judges were impressed with Joomla’s ease of installation and ability to get a website up-and-running in a short space of time. Particular praise was reserved for its sizeable and enthusiastic community, which has allowed the project to grow so quickly in such a short space of time.

In third place and receiving $2,000 was DotNetNuke, the only CMS in the final that is written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. DotNetNuke received positive feedback from judges who were impressed with its ease of development and security implementation features.

Alongside the Overall Award, Packt ran categories for best Open Source PHP Content Management System and best Open Source CMS that isn’t written in PHP. The final category was the Most Promising Open Source CMS, which was won by SilverStripe. Packt handed out a total of $20,000 in prize money to the winning Content Management Systems.

Winners in the other final categories include:
-   Most Promising: SilverStripe
-   Best Open Source PHP: Drupal
-   Best non PHP Open Source CMS: Plone

The Awards were designed to recognize and reward Open Source CMS’s for their consistently high standards in what is an extremely competitive field. The result of this year’s Award confirms this quality and also suggests that there isn’t necessarily one CMS that is the best, more that there is the best one to fit an individual user’s needs and requirements.

Full results of the 2008 Open Source CMS Award can be found at PacktPub.com/Award

About Packt
Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike.

Packt’s books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today’s systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they’re using to get the job done.

For more information, please visit www.PacktPub.com.

Global warming has become a major concern of many environmentalists. Will mankind’s efforts to protect our planet be successful?

By Sean Yarbrough

Twenty years ago, a U.S. Senate committee heard testimony on climate change from NASA climatologist James Hansen. He told the committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

Hansen’s landmark testimony triggered an avalanche of research, political debate and environmental activism that continues to this day. However, there are concerns about where all of this is taking us. Some believe there is a dark side to environmentalism that is beginning to overshadow the good work of those who simply wish to take care of our natural resources.

The two extremes
As in every aspect of life, there are extremes in the way people view the environment. Some greedy businesspeople couldn’t care less about the damage they do to the earth. At the other extreme, ecoterrorists seem not to care about people and destruction of property.

Groups such as the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) have claimed responsibility for multiple acts of ecoterrorism during the past decade, including the recent destruction of three luxury homes near Seattle, Washington, with damages totaling $7 million. Ironically, these homes and the surrounding housing developments were designed to be environmentally friendly.
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5. You get a lot of fingers pointed at you
When error messages pop up and system outages occur, employees and managers quickly start pointing fingers at IT and the pressure is intense to get things fixed quickly to keep users from losing productivity. That’s part of the job and you have to always be prepared for it. In fact, some IT pros even get an adrenaline rush from this type of high-pressure stakes.

The problem is that IT pros hear loud and clear when things aren’t working, but they rarely get much appreciation during the other 99% of the time when systems are running smoothly.

4. People assume you’re an expert in all things tech
When you’re an IT worker, non-techies tend to assume that you know everything about all tech subjects. For example, if you’re a help desk technician you get questions about how the company’s Web site is built. And if you’re a Java developer you can expect to field questions about how to deal with spam and spyware on an employee’s machine.

There are obviously tactful ways to handle this, but many IT pros can’t help but get a little frustrated by this, or even feeling a little inadequate. Worse, because you’re a techie, a lot of your co-workers will come to you for advice on buying PCs, digital cameras, and TVs. Some will even ask you to fix their PC for free or help troubleshoot a problem with their cable modem.

3. You have to continually re-train, on your own dime
I think it’s fair to say that no profession on earth is changing faster than the IT field right now and that’s not likely to change any time soon. The pace of development and innovation in hardware and software products is staggering. As a result, the knowledge that it takes just to keep your current job is always growing and morphing, and IT pros have to take responsibility for their continuing education or risk having their skills and knowledge become obsolete within a few short years.

This is a constant struggle. The big challenge is that many companies don’t officially recognize this problem, and so IT pros have to use free resources like TechRepublic to stay current, or pay for training out of their own pockets. In the past, TechRepublic surveys have shown that over 50% of IT pros pay for their own training.

2. The hours are long and irregular
Lots of jobs in the knowledge economy require long hours, so it’s not unique that many IT professionals — from developers to administrators to systems integrators — have to work overtime on a regular basis. However, what does set IT apart is the scattered irregularity of those hours. Most IT workers are always on call, or are at least part of an on-call rotation, in case critical systems go down during off-hours.

In addition, many IT pros have tasks that they need to do when there aren’t as many users on the system. That means coming in early to run backup routines or staying late to update an application or patch a server after most of the users have logged off at the end of the day.

1. The job market is tumultuous and in transition
During the late 1990s, people flooded into IT, chasing the promise of $65K/year jobs that were going unfilled because of the lack of qualified candidates. IT professionals who were already in the field could hop jobs and get significant pay raises. IT pros were in demand. But, it didn’t last. The dot com implosion and the wrap up of the Y2K fixes meant that a lot of tech jobs disappeared.

Since then, the off-shore outsourcing phenomenon and the H1B visa issue have put further strain on the IT job market in the U.S. and abroad. Many IT professionals run the risk of building their skills, experiences, and their careers, only to have their jobs shipped overseas to save costs. That means IT professionals have to be particularly adept at managing their own careers in order to avoid being unemployed or underemployed.

Have you ever received a request to visit a link http://www.fanebook.com from your friend or unknown persons or through group messaging? If you visited that link and entered your facebook username and password in that website then change your facebook password immediately. This website fanebook.com is a exact replica of our very popular social networking website facebook.com. This type of phishing attack is increasing day by day in the world of web. Before also there were such several websites with fake facebook login screen. People use this technique to find out your password and get into your account. Most dangerous thing is that many people use same password for different accounts like bank account, paypal, etc. Therefore, these types of attacks can become extremely malicious. So beware of such kind of links.

A Young Christian’s Guide to Using Social Network Sites.

What do hundreds of thousands—even millions—of people check daily?
Maybe even several times a day? Their blood sugar? Their bank account? Their attitude? No! They log on to the Internet and check their social network site! Whether it be on Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, hi5, Cyworld, Bebo or any number of other sites, experiencing a part of life through a social network site is a daily routine for millions.

Social network sites have quickly become one of the primary ways young people communicate with each other. Through our personal pages on these sites we share our current mood or our latest digital pictures. We use the sites to exchange thoughts, jokes, blogs, songs and videos.

We let the world know who we are through our personal online profile. We proclaim to the Internet world what we like and dislike, what makes us happy or sad and certainly what makes us unique. These sites can be a great way to communicate with our best friends, reconnect with long lost friends and even meet new people.
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