Maria Winslow

Web site content management can be difficult, and commercial products can be expensive. Luckily, a few open source projects are highly recommended for the job. In fact, eWeek has claimed that Bricolage was one of the best content management systems it has ever seen, even among commercial offerings, and Mambo won best of show at LinuxWorld this February. In this article, I'll get you started with an overview of these examples of production-ready open source projects. Bricolage Bricolage (http://bricolage.cc) is a free open source content management and publishing system. Its full set of features includes intuitive and highly configurable administration, workflow, permissions, templates, server-neutral output, distribution, and document management. It was designed to manage dynamic online content with multiple contributors for a complex web site, but can be used to m... (more)

Linux Thin Clients Do the Job

When the North Carolina Cooperative Extension needed to overhaul the computer system for 1,200 users in multiple remote locations, systems programmer administrator Janyne Kizer found that Linux on thin clients was the best solution. The North Carolina Cooperative Extension is a joint effort between the state of North Carolina, most of the state's 100 counties, and NC State University. Each participating county has an office that accesses the system, which serves a network of agricultural support staff. 4-H agents, state agricultural agents, plant pathologists, etymologists, and ... (more)

Linux.SYS-CON.com Q&A with Lead Developer of Joomla!, Andrew Eddie

In September, core developers of Mambo, the popular open source content management system, announced a fork of the project, called Joomla!, with virtually all active participants following the fork. I caught up with Andrew Eddie, lead developer of the new Joomla!, to find out more about the decision to fork the Mambo project, and to find out how things are going so far. LWM: I'll start with the hard question first: What led you to the decision to fork Mambo? Andrew Eddie: Forking is a very serious decision to make and one that I and the team did not take lightly. In the words of... (more)

Evaluating the ROI of Open Source on the Desktop

When people hear that open source software is often free and overall cheaper than proprietary solutions, they're intrigued. But how much cheaper is another question. What other costs are involved? This article examines the budgetary impact of migrating corporate desktops to open source solutions. This is one of many areas where open source can positively impact IT budgets. Classifying Desktops The first step in evaluating the license savings on the desktop is to determine which desktops in your organization are candidates for migrating to Linux, OpenOffice, or both. Step One: Inv... (more)

MySQL for AP Hosted News

The Associated Press (AP), the world's oldest and largest news agency, offers a service that allows news providers to integrate AP online content directly into their Web sites. The service, AP Hosted News, is used by approximately 600 affiliate newspapers and broadcasters. The service handles between 150,000 and 500,000 pages of content per affiliate per day, supporting 11,000 concurrent users. MySQL, a free open source database, has been the backbone of AP Hosted News since 2002. From Informix to MySQLAP originally used Informix for the online news service, but the development t... (more)