Month: March 2004

A few useful links to sites that will help you decide on a Content Management System. I used these today at work.
· OSCOM – Open Source (free) content management information.
· CMS Review – “The mission of CMS REVIEW is to give you the resources you need to choose the best content management system for your organization.”
· CMS Matrix – Allows you to view the features of, and compare, several top Knowledge Management systems.
· Cylogy – Cylogy is a company that specializes in CMS consulting. These are the people to pay if you’re willing to pay big bucks for both a recommendation for a CMS and the CMS itself.
· CMSWire – CMS Wire provides commentary, news and product information on several content management systems.
· CMS Watch – CMS Watch is a site that provides analysis and reports about web content management solutions.

Most of these sites link to other, similar sites, so if you’re in the process of researching content management, better create a new folder in your bookmarks.

Content management systems are something that I am very interested in. By nature (or by lack of study, I can’t figure out which) I am not a programmer, but I am however, a web developer and I have a very real need to present my clients (and myself) with an easy way to manage and store content online. Using static HTML for everything is not an option.

I’ve written previously about the CMS WebGUI, which I currently use for several websites and I’m very impressed with so far. WebGUI is due for the new, version 6.0, release sometime this or next week which will add several features, including making it 100% template driven–by far the most important feature for me, as a designer.

At work (I’m a defense contractor) SCORM compliance is a big deal. Tonight I disovered (via Seb’s Open Research) Workforce Connections, a GPL ‘ed CMS that is made to be SCORM compliant. I’m going to have to give this a test install. If it’s easy to use, this could make life much better at work. It’s based on Zope and runs on Linux with Apache.

Recently I also discovered CMS Matrix which is a site that, though sponsored by WebGUI, attempts to give an objective comparision of the different major content management systems avaiilable. It’s a great resource.

Other good sites are OpenSourceCMS which lets you try the various content managment systems before you install them and CMS Info which keeps you up to date on the latest and greatest in CMS’s.

By John Lund and Pamela Pfiffner. Photoshop compositing starts off giving some interesting perspectives and ideas on how to build (including tips on taking the photos) maintain a library of photographs that could turn out invaluable in future compositing projects. The book talks about John Lund’s work style, technique and computer setup, and has some interesting insight on what works for him and even on what he could do better if he was so inclined.

Once the book gets into the actual details of retouching, the real fun (and work) begins. Lund’s attention to detail is spectacular. He notices everything, and in turn points out how to fix it. Don’t expect to jump in and have a great composited image in an hour or two, his techniques are very precise, professional and more often than not, time consuming.

The final chapter goes through several images he created in the past and gives some useful insight on how they were created and what inspired them.

Most of the book is written in 3rd person, I’m guessing Pamela Pfiffner sat down and had some detailed interviews with Lund and wrote it from what she gathered. While this doesn’t really detract from the content of the book, in my opinion, it doesn’t flow as well as it might if it had been written in first person.

This book is geared toward the professional Photoshop user who has a decent amount experience and would like to avoid some trial and error and get straight to results in the area of compositing.

By Scott Kelby. The Photoshop CS Book for digital photographers is a great book. As a long-time user of Photoshop, I wasn’t sure if there would be a whole lot of new material here, but I was happy to find the book is replete with techniques and tips that I would have never come up with on my own, as well as better ways of doing things that I had already been doing the “hard way.”

Among the chapters I found useful were the chapters on color correction; which go into great detail on how to use and understand curves, including providing default settings that will get you started on the right foot. Towards the end of the book there are some great techniques on helping your photographs have that “stock photography look” — depth of field effects, layer masking for collages and replicating photography filters.

The writing style is enjoyable, the steps are clearly laid out with screenshots and the full-color, intuitive layout of the book leaves little to be desired.

Not only will this book help you improve your Photoshop skills, it will help you have a better eye for what can be improved in your photographs. I often found that the techniques to correct photos were things I had never considered, not because they were difficult or obscure but, simply because I hadn?t noticed that my photos had the problems in the first place.

One thing to note is that if you own the previous version of this book, The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers, the majority of the content is the same. There is a new section on the improved file browser and a few other new pieces, but it’s not really worth it to get a new copy since a large portion of it is the same.

By Derek Franklin/Jobe Makar. I’ve spent the last month and a half developing the interface and structure for a new, fairly large CD based training piece that is to be done in Flash. Flash MX 2004 Actionscript training from the Source, though not necessarily intended to be a reference guide, has been a great resource.

Each time I came upon an obstacle in my project and consulted the book, I was pleased to find that there was example code and an explanation that helped me solve the problem I faced. I was repeatedly surprised at the scope of the book–for every problem I encountered there was at least some coverage or direction in the book. I should note that I consider myself to be an expert Flash user, but only a beginner to intermediate Actionscript programmer.

The book is set up in several lessons (21) that are supposed to take about an hour each to complete. While I did not progress through the book lesson by lesson, I found that using the source files on the CD as well as the text of the book, I was able to extract the information I needed fairly easily.

I recommend this book to anyone with a basic knowledge of Flash who would like to become proficient in ActionScript and is willing to take some time to progress through the lessons.