Good news for sites that make a little money by allowing advertising on their pages. Though, personally I've seen a drop in online ad revenue despite not doing too bad with the number of visitors I'm getting.
Despite an economic turndown, online advertising--and search in particular--is managing to keep its market intact, according to reports on Tuesday by an industry trade group and Wall Street analyst.
There it was in front of my eyes. The headline in osCommerce's forum read, "Is OsC Dead?, Discussion of the Progress of OsC" [link removed by osCommerce folks?]. Despite how some may read the title, the thread isn't about bashing osCommerce. Instead, it is about users and community members concerned and even fearful of the slow pace of new development for osCommerce. Despite all the talk about osCommerce 3.0, it has been a year and a half since OsC 3 Alpha 4 was released with the roadmap showing that Alpha 5 and 6 are still under development. How can one not ask if the future of osCommerce is in jeopardy?
As mentioned at the osCommerce forum, Kerry Watson also has an article out about the new breed of open source shopping carts. The article starts off with a that was then, this is now statement regarding shopping carts.
While the Big Three of the old guard — osCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded — continue to duke it out among themselves, new-generation open source commerce projects have begun to spring up with new ideas and new ways of thinking. Most noteworthy of the new crop are France-based Prestashop and US-based programs Ubercart and Magento.
These fresh Web 2.0-style carts are mature and production-ready contenders, and all are at or beyond version 1.0 in their production cycle. These carts are equal or superior to many commercial e-commerce programs, and are available for free under the GNU or OSL 3.0 Public License. We've previously reviewed Magento, so this column will focus on the other two next-generation carts: PrestaShop and Ubercart.
Personally, I've been working on recommending a friend to upgrade his osCommerce site to either Magento or Drupal's Ubercart. Even when the 3.0 version of osCommerce is released, it will likely still not have many of the Web 2.0 features that the new breed of shopping carts currently have now. It's not that I think osCommerce is dead, but I do think that osCommerce has stopped evolving. Good open source projects never die, they just fade away.
The single reason enterprises with Windows networks prefer Internet Explorer over Firefox and other browsers: Group Policy.
For those of you who might be new to Group Policy, here is a quick background. Let’s first assume you use an Active Directory environment to administer the computers in your corporate network. If that is the case, Group Policy provides a wide set of policy settings to manage IE8 after you have deployed it to your users' computers. These settings are locked down and cannot be changed by users, as they are always written to a secure tree in the registry.
"Our prediction, though proved to be correct though in another sense, inasmuch as the push to sell SharePoint as a replacement to ECM systems has to a large degree stopped — a good thing for buyers, for in that direction lay serious disappointment.
The fact is that buyers typically do not replace systems, be they ECM or otherwise. The growth in the data mountain and the ever-changing demands to the business mean that IT adds to and attempts to enhance what is already there, rather than rip and replace."
Wow, Venkatesh G. Rao writes the article of the year, Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War. I'm going to have to reread this article and do some reflection before I have anything of value to add. Please do yourself a favor and read this article.
Note: Social Media, Social Publishing, Social Technology. I wish we could all settle on the same term.
Smashing Magazine has posted a couple articles to help web developers and designers with their Wordpress and Drupal sites. Some great suggestions and resources are listed in these articles.
The articles don't include everything, but it's a wonderful start for those just beginning to learn about Drupal or Wordpress. Link found via Nick Lewis' blog.
Tim Wilson, the site editor for Dark Reading, recently posted an article about recent at the AARP.org website. In the colorfully titled article, "Porn Operators Hijack Pages on AARP Website", Wilson interviews Jeremy Yoder of MX Logic about why AARP.org's site was vulnerable. In brief, the explanation given is that the site deployed a number of Web 2.0 features including user profile submissions which the site didn't properly filter out JavaScript redirected code. Yoder than
Tavis sent an email to CMSReport.com asking me to take a look at WebGUI. WebGUI is an open source content management system licensed under the GPL v2.
Hello, I wanted to send a quick note and see what it would take to setup a new CMS Focus category for WebGUI. The community is extremely active and there is definitely plenty of buzz about new releases, the community, and the organizations who decide to adopt it.
WebGUI also powers cmsmatrix.org...
Thanks!
Tavis