When you look for a WordPress theme design books, there isn’t much choice. I looked at the country’s best book store and found nine books when I search for “WordPress themes”. Five of them are published by Packt Publishing. Some of these books only feature a chapter about WordPress theme design or studies, only some are actually interesting.

Packt Publishing offered me  the chance to review “WordPress 2.8 Themes Cookbook”. And that’s what you’re reading right now!

The WordPress 2.8 themes design cookbook is one of Packt Publishings cookbook series meaning it contains loads of recipes. Each recipe is a small articles/paragraphs with an idea and how to work it out. Just like a regular cookbook. I haven’t got compression material to compare the book with others of the same topic.

The book is called “WordPress 2.8 themes design cookbook”, which means it’s all about WordPress 2.9 theme designing. After reading the book you should be able to create and modify WordPress themes.

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Packt is pleased to announce a new book on Moodle that is aimed at helping users create a Moodle Theme right from the graphic design stage to the finished Moodle Theme. Written by Paul James Gadsdon, this book will offer design examples to administrators, designers or teachers and help them create appropriate themes for different student age groups and styles.

Moodle is a highly extensible virtual learning environment and is used to deliver online teaching and training materials. Theming is one of the main features of Moodle that can be used to customize your online courses and make them look exactly how you want them to.

Users will first learn the concept of Moodle themes and how they work. They will then learn how to create themes for Moodle, the tools that are required for the job, and how to download new themes from various resources on the Internet. Along with the creation of themes, they will also be shown how to choose and change an existing Moodle theme, and test the changes they have made.

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CMS Made Simple 1.6: Beginner’s Guide, a new book from Packt, is a tutorial for readers intending to equip them to build a fully functional website with a professional touch and advanced features. The book is written by Sofia Hauschildt, a tutor for web mastering and web development. This book provides vast knowledge about how webmasters can design and implement their high quality websites using CMS Made Simple.

CMS Made Simple is an Open Source Content Management System that permits designing and development of websites at a faster rate without investing in hours of coding procedures. By being an easy and powerful application CMS Made Simple also enables its users to obtain practical solutions in their daily work.

This guide is a hands-on book based on a step by step case study to build a complete professional website right from CMS installation to the finished website. The book takes the readers through clear instructions and detailed screenshots in a chapter by chapter manner, thereby helping to build a website with rich functionality.

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Packt is pleased to announce Joomla! 1.5 Beginner’s Guide, a new book that will help newbies to get started with Joomla! and quickly go beyond the basics. Written by Eric Tiggeler, an experienced Joomla! tutorial writer as well as the author of a Dutch Joomla! Manual, this beginner’s guide will help readers build and maintain impressive user-friendly websites with Joomla! 1.5.

Joomla! is an award-winning open-source Content Management System, actively developed and supported by a world-wide user community. It is written in PHP that uses the MySQL database system to store information. It enables developers to build professional websites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! one of the most popular CMSes available.

Joomla! 1.5 Beginner’s Guide is a practical book that gives readers a head start in using Joomla! 1.5. Readers will learn to build dynamic, interactive websites that are easy to expand, customize, and maintain without having to learn web languages such as HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It also explains how attractive home pages can be designed with clear and easy navigation using menus, submenus, and text hyperlinks.

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“The core of the book is about writing a web site to sell things. Early on the author introduces the handful of patterns that will be used (MVC, Registry, Singleton) then immediately provides a runnable skeleton MVC framework that handles only Products and Categories. After that, it’s an incremental build chapter by chapter as the author adds features to the web site.”

Review can be found here.

Packt is pleased to announce Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide, a new book that helps PHP developers build applications that interface with the customer, product, and order data using Magento’s Core API. Written by Jamie Huskisson, this book is packed with examples for effective Magento development.

Magento is an Open Source, e-commerce web application that was created by Varien, and built on components of the Zend Framework. Magento is the hottest and most powerful e-commerce software and has gained popularity in a short period of time. Users can control the look, content and functionality of their e-commerce web site with the help of Magento’s powerful theming engine.

Magento 1.3: PHP Developer’s Guide will help developers extend and customize the Magento e-commerce system using PHP code. They will get familiar with the architecture and internal structure of Magento and learn about the best modules available. Developers can then build a shipping module for their Magento store to give users options for receiving their items once they have paid for them.

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Packt is pleased to announce Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia, a new book that will help developers build media-rich Joomla! websites by learning to embed and display multimedia content. Written by Allan Walker, an experienced Joomla developer and a member of the Joomla! Marketing Team, this book is a step-by-step tutorial to create a feature-packed media-rich Joomla! site. It will also help to build a livelier Joomla! website with videos, audios, images by using popular multimedia extensions.

Joomla! is the world’s hottest open source, award-winning content management system written in PHP that uses the MySQL database system to store information. It enables developers to build professional websites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! one of the most popular CMSes available.

Joomla! 1.5 Multimedia is a practical guide that shows how to include popular media elements into a website and collaborate with external web resources such as YouTube, Flickr and Google. It will teach readers to create regular podcasts and utilize RSS to help publicize and deliver their website content. Additionally, it also highlights the benefits of multimedia features and warns of the accessibility issues that can arise when they are misused.

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The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that’s the subject matter that our readers want to read.

Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I’ll respect the numbers behind their ranking.

1. Mollom: A solution for comment spam
2. 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS: Drupal wins, Wordpress and Joomla! not far behind
3. Serving a home for my Drupal site
4. WordPress leads the Packt as 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS
5. Allen Ellis: Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It
6. Google PageRank
7. Alfresco Module Obtains U.S. DoD 5015.02 Records Management Certification
8. Using Wordpress city saves $19,000
9. Cheryl McKinnon, Nuxeo, and Open Source
10. Drupal Gardens preview video by Acquia

The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I’ll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I’ve said before, I’m not sure we would be doing this if it wasn’t for the interest shown by others visiting the site.

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Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching is a new book from Packt that is aimed at creating enjoyable, useful language learning activities. Written by Jeff Stanford, this book is a recipe for creating Moodle activities based on a communicative language teaching approach.

Moodle is a free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. It is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design ensure that people can develop additional functionality.

With this book, educators would get different approaches with fully working examples for adapting classroom activities to the Virtual Learning Environment. It will help them to set up an online language learning center that includes reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, and grammar activities. Users will learn how to improve their learning activities and make them visually attractive by installing flash audio players and You Tube video on their Moodle site.

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Packt is pleased to announce Linux Email, a new book that covers everything that users need to know in order to set up their own Linux server. Written by professional Linux administrators, this book is a simple step-by-step guide to setting up a Linux email server using the most popular free Open Source tools such as PostFix, ProcMail, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and others

Linux is a free and open source software collaboration whereby typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed, both commercially and non-commercially, by anyone under the terms of the GNU GPL. Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers, although can be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware ranging from embedded devices, mobile phones and even some watches as well as supercomputers.

Linux Email helps users overcome the complexities involved in getting started with Linux. They can create mail filters, sort their incoming mail into separate folders, pre-process their mail, start any programs upon mail arrival and selectively forward certain incoming mail automatically to someone using Procmail.

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