Packt News & Articles

Attention PacktPub.com account holders! In December 2008 the company decided to enable the copy and paste feature on their eBooks. That announcement spawned loads of requests for the removal of password protection as well, and in this case, the little guy’s voice was actually heard. After considering the increasing popularity of reading books on portable services, PacktPub took the advice of their customers and announced the immediate removal of all password protection from their eBooks earlier this week.

The bad annoying news: If you own a Packt eBook, you’ll have to download it again from your account to get rid of the password protection.

With a ton of aim to please, PacktPub is not only listening to their customers, but giving them cool stuff as well. Their site is currently offering 30% off of all their eBooks for the duration of March, and has also released a free download called Building Websites with Plone by Cameron Cooper. Originally published in 2004, Cooper's book quickly became a definitive book on the Zope-based content management system. 

For more details regarding Cooper's book, other free books and discounts or if you have any additional suggestions you'd like to offer up, just visit Packt's site. 

TYPO3 Extension Development by Dmitry Dulepov, a TYPO3 core developer, is a recent book from Packt Publishing. It is aimed towards those looking to get their hands dirty with — unsurprisingly — TYPO3 extension development.

The book takes its readers from the beginning process of planning a TYPO3 extension to writing the documentation that will allow others to better understand the developer’s hard work. The book won’t make anyone an award-winning TYPO3 extension developer overnight, but it can help provide a solid foundation to build upon.

Drupal is undoubtedly one of the best web content management systems for creating complex community websites. But it is certainly not the easiest to customize — that is, unless there are code ninjas in the house.

Drupal customization requires time, patience and programming knowledge to create something impressive. There’s a learning curve.

Drupal 6 Themes, a new Drupal book from our friends at Packt Publishing, aims to help steer would be Drupal jockeys in the right direction.

Drupal 6 was released in February, which means there’s a lot more learning to do for users adopting this latest CMS platform. Luckily, the folks at Packt Publishing are on it with their update to David Mercer’s best selling Drupal 4.7 book: “Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6”.

Speaking of Packt Publishing, Safari Books Online, provider of digital libraries, announced an agreement with the publishing company to make Packt’s books and other technical publications available online to corporate and individual library subscribers.

As Packt Publishing’s first online channel distribution partner, Safari Books Online hopes to enable its subscribers to benefit from access to one of the most comprehensive lists of copyrighted works on open source technologies.

Packt (pronounced Packed), published its first book in April 2004. From then on, they began to publish books on specific technologies and solutions, allowing developers and administrators to adapt and customize today’s systems, applications and frameworks.

Their dedication to open source has been apparent through their awards for “The Best Open Source CMS”, and their numerous books covering the ins and outs of a number of open source technologies and content management systems like eZ Publish and osCommerce.

And now their dedication to Open Source goes even further.

Packt Publishing, your friendly provider of books for IT professionals, by IT professionals, has just released a book on marketing and optimizing osCommerce projects.

The book is particularly aimed at those who already run an osCommerce-driven online business, but there is also plenty in here for those who are sounding out options for putting together an eCommerce solution.

Packt Publishing, whose Open Source CMS awards we covered in considerable depth recently (here, here and here), is a book publishing company who specialize in producing books by and for IT professionals.

Their latest title deals with the eZ Publish Web CMS product, and provides a comprehensive guide to deployment and management of eZ Publish based projects, as well as general information and tips on Web CMS project-management.

SilverStripe, the mama-friendly open source CMS that was nominated “Most Promising” by Packt, has just released v2.1.0 of its primary offering.

The updates are extensive. In short, this PHP 5.2-modded version provides support for unit testing, themes and widgets, as well as comment moderation and stronger API documentation, and features for running SilverStripe in safe mode and under open_basedir restrictions. It also addresses bugs that were found in v1 and above.

Check out screenshots and such at the SilverStripe site.

Ready to download? Pick your poison: PHP or Windows Installer.

Our friends at Packt Publishing are at it again, this time with a book devoted to Joomla! Template Design.

Aimed at getting the reader up to speed on creating professional quality templates, Joomla! Template Design covers nearly all aspects of designing website templates on the award winning Joomla! PHP CMS.

Riding the wave of 72 nominations and 15,000 votes, Joomla! was declared winner of Packt’s 2006 Open Source CMS Awards. With much fanfare, the Awards are back, and nominations are now open.

Who will win open source gold?