Packt is pleased to announce the release of WordPress Themes Design, which is a complete guide to creating professional WordPress themes. Written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, this book will be invaluable to WordPress users or visual designers who want to develop a WordPress theme.

WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

InfoWorld: Linux users worry that Sun's purchase of MySQL will mean a de-emphasis of Linux and the LAMP stack in favor of Sun's Solaris ecosystem

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Reg Developer: "It's emerged Sun may release extra data back-up features in the Enterprise Edition of the next version of MySQL, due in Q4, to paying enterprise subscribers only."

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ComputerWorld: Sun will use the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., to release MySQL 5.1, an upgrade that includes several new features designed to make the database more suitable for mission-critical applications at large enterprises.

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"With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of whatever database backup, clustering, and replication setup you have to protect your MySQLfs filesystem."

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Alfresco Software released a press release on the results of a survey by them intended to help determine "how companies evaluate and deploy open source and proprietary software stacks in the enterprise". There is some very interesting numbers summarized in the press release that should be of interest to not only using those Alfresco products, but to almost anyone using enterprise software. Some of the more interesting numbers and statistics pulled from the study:

• Operating system: “Users evaluate on a Windows laptop and deploy on Linux” – 41% of evaluations were on Windows, dropping to 26% for deployments, whereas 51% of deployments were on Linux.
• Linux: “Ubuntu and Red Hat pull away, SUSE remains flat by comparison in the US” – Ubuntu 24%, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 21%.
• Windows: “Users stick with XP and 2003, Vista lags at 2%” – XP 63%, Windows 2003 28%.
• Databases: “Sun still shines on MySQL” – MySQL 60%, Oracle 14%, MS SQL Server 13%.

I especially find it interesting that while open source MySQL is the dominate database used on the enterprise, two propriety database systems (Oracle and MS SQL) follow. I wonder where PostGresSQL falls on the list? But wait, there are two points I want to make about this study.

A new book that teaches users how to create themes for Drupal websites has been announced today by Packt Publishing. Written by prominent open source and Content Management expert Ric Shreves, ‘Drupal 5 Themes’ helps readers create striking new looks for their Drupal websites.

Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System, finishing as the overall winner in the 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with exceptional design, means it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.

Joomla! Cash is a new book from Packt, which has all the ingredients to make money making Joomla! websites. Written by Brandon Dawson and Tom Canavan, this book is a fast and easy read, taking the reader from the inception of an idea, to a fully working cash-generating website built on Joomla!

Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that helps users build websites and other powerful online applications. It is an open-source solution that is freely available to everybody. Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications. Out of the box, Joomla! does a great job of managing the content needed to make your website sing.

Joomla! Accessibility is a new book from Packt that helps readers create accessible websites with Joomla! Written by Joshue O Connor, Senior Accessibility Consultant with CFIT, this book is designed to help readers gain a deeper understanding of Joomla! and accessibility.