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CiviCRM is a web-based, open source CRM system, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations that integrates deeply with Drupal, including content, views and the permissioning system. Elected officials, professional/trade associations, political campaigns and parties, government agencies, and other similar organizations are among its growing number of enthusiastic users. Using CiviCRM shows you how to harness CiviCRM’s impressive array of possibilities as you develop and execute performance-critical CRM strategies.

This book will help you become familiar with the structure and main functions of CiviCRM. It will guide you in developing and successfully implementing a CRM strategy for your organization using detailed explanations and practical examples.

Using CiviCRM walks you through developing a CRM Implementation Plan that is suited to your organization's size, culture, and needs. Readers will take away many constituent relationship management best practices and the knowledge of how to implement them with CiviCRM. Benefits of Using CiviCRM will be felt across your organization, and help it better achieve its mission.

Just in time for the official release of Drupal 7.0, Packt has released a book concentrating on (what you may not know yet) about Drupal 7.

This article is more of a book-review -- an introspection of how the book might valuable to you (or us). Read on for my per-role chapter highlights.

What about the book?

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Drupal 6 Performance Tips, by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk, is a newly-published title from Packt Publishing aimed at Drupal beginners, developers, designers, and webmasters who utilize the Drupal content management system to create robust websites.

This week,
Packt Publishing has been announcing the winners of their 2009 open source CMS awards. Today they announced that Drupal was the first winner of a brand new category introduced this year: the Hall of Fame award. This new category featured a competition between Drupal and Joomla!, the previous winners of the Best CMS Award, an award neither is eligible for this year.

As a subset of this new award, Packt also announced the results of two new awards, recognizing specific contributions within the Drupal and Joomla! communities. Best Drupal Theme was won by a wide margin by Zen, and no real surprise there. Congratulations to Zen maintainer John Albin (JohnAlbin) and thanks for all your fantastic work. Best Drupal Module award was, again unsurprisingly, won by Views, with CCK a creditable second. Well done to Views maintainer Earl Miles (merlinofchaos) and thanks for the most incredible chunk of functionality I've ever used.

Earlier in the week Drupal also won the 2009 award for Best Open Source PHP CMS for the second year in a row. No surprise that Joomla! was in the mix and that the vote was close, but it is surprising that Drupal only narrowly beat out Wordpress. Of course there are a lot of really good reasons why Wordpress, excellent though it is, belongs in a different category to far more comprehensive CMSs like Drupal and Joomla!, and this is reflected in discussions on that thread. Both are excellent projects, but Wordpress is a great choice for simpler sites, but not for anything with even basic content/data complexity.

One final award that concerns Drupal is the Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems award, and no surprise that Drupal founder Dries Buytaert (Dries) was Drupal's MVP.

In other awards Best Other Open Source CMS (i.e. non-PHP) was, for the second year in a row, won by Plone, a really excellent Python-based CMS. Runners up were dotCMS and mojoPortal. My own feeling is that Wordpress is the best option for simple sites, kind of a fourth Musketeer, with the Three Musketeers being Drupal, Joomla! and Plone, the latter being the best of the bunch for more complex sites and sites that need to evolve. All four are outstanding open source projects and powerful tools in the web developer's arsenal.

Most Promising Open Source CMS was won by ImpressCMS, with Pixie and Pligg tied for second. This is kind of like a Best Rookie award.

Tomorrow Packt will announce the winner for Best Overall Open Source CMS, the award won in 2007 and 2008 by Drupal and for which we were no longer eligible this year. Nominees are DotNetNuke, MODx, SilverStripe, WordPress and XOOPS and I would be stunned if Wordpress does not win that and I wonder if any debate with result from this.

See the overview of this year's awards for more information, including prize money, award details, runners up, etc. You can also see their list of previous award winners (Drupal won Best Overall and Best PHP in 2008 and Best Overall in 2007).

Drupal is a powerful tool for building amazingly scalable websites quickly and simply. The use of multimedia in Drupal has posed challenges to many users and developers of all abilities. Drupal Multimedia addresses the main questions regarding how to implement video, image, and audio content in a way that is elegant for the developer, as well as the end user. The language of the book is straight to the point, and provides a framework to practice building an assortment of multimedia sites using a variety of modules in the context of test or example sites.

Hà hà

Cuộc bầu chọn CMS nguồn mở hàng năm của NXB Packt đã đạt đến đỉnh điểm khi có thông báo về CMS nguồn mở tốt nhất năm 2008. Drupal đã vượt qua Joomla! và DotNetNuke để bảo vệ thành công danh hiệu đã giành được trong năm 2007.

Kể từ khi Dries Buyaert công bố dự án dưới dạng mã mở vào năm 2001, Drupal đã có những bước lớn mạnh vượt bậc. 1,5 tỉ lượt tải xuống trong 12 tháng, 20.000 phiếu bầu chọn, Drupal hiện là CMS được sử dụng bởi Warner Brothers Music, MTV UK và New York Observer.

Buyaert cho biết: “Những giải thưởng này chứng minh cho những đóng góp to lớn của các thành viên cộng đồng Drupal trên toàn thế giới.” “Chung tay làm việc, cộng đồng Drupal đang xây dựng tương lai của Web động. Bất kì ai đều có thể nhanh chóng xây dựng các trang Web xã hội tuyệt vời,” anh kết luận.

My book review pasted from Amazon.com. I reviewed the book for the publisher but that never guarantees a good review, so read on.

I must say I was asked to review this book, and I was very excited to do so. I thought it'd be good to comment on areas for people who aren't familiar with Drupal on a daily basis yet, and to give you some background, I was very excited to read this book. I needed a book that had the words "Drupal 6" and "module development" in it and luckily this book was titled exactly that and delivered. So, to newbies and non-newbies I offer the following review.

If you're impatient and don't want to read this review all the way, then just know this book must be read by each programmer who will be tinkering with Drupal, so yes, I recommend it. This book is not for people learning how to use modules, this is for people who plan to code and build their own modules. This book is not large, has great learning material, and brings tons of info down from Drupal's web site documentation into stress-free chapters. One entire chapter (Ch. 2) covers how to do an entire module from scratch and following chapters show how expand that module and build, and build, and really get to know important APIs that come with Drupal core.

In all honestly, I'm jealous that most new users get to read something as collected as this to learn from. If you read this book you'll basically catch up with content I took months, if not over a year to explore and read online. I had also held off heavy Drupal 6 development for myself until a book like this came out, so we're in the same boat.

Selling Online with Drupal e-Commerce
by Michael Peacock
Pack Publishing, 2008, $39.99

Technology books are generally expected to be on the shelves shortly after major releases of a particular software and therefore do not receive the most thorough editing possible. They're also quite expensive considering they have a relatively short shelf life because they're only really in demand until the new version of the software is released. Given that this book delivers on both counts and exhaustively details the cheesy example of Doug's Dino store, it's still a worthy read.

Whether or not you need funding for your Drupal project(s), it would be good for all Drupal users to vote for Drupal. Your vote could, ultimately, help with any needed funding you and/or other developers require in order to complete a Drupal project. Voting is now open and ends on November 7! There is $5,000 up for grabs!

As mentioned in Packt's Open Source CMS finalists announced, it would be great if folks would
vote TODAY for Drupal as "the best CMS" and help Drupal claim the $5,000 first place prize. Did I mention $5,000? ; )