PostNuke

“We’ll always be grateful to Francisco Burzi and the others who worked on PHPNuke,” Ralph Roberts, CEO said, “but it was time to move on.”




Security problems was one of the items Roberts stated that forced the company into deciding on the change. After hackers used security holes in PHPNuke to deface the site several times, the webmaster was growing tired of having to restore the site and plug the holes.




Increased efficiency in operation, closer compliance to HTML standards, and added features were also considerations.




“We realize,” Roberts said, “that PostNuke is still in an alpha state of development, but it’s still the best out there. It does what we need and we are willing to commit to it as a long term solution and offer our support.”




Complicating the change over to PostNuke for abooks.com was the legacy of hundreds of articles plus, at the same time, the move of the entire site to a new, dedicated server.




“All that certainly gave us an interesting weekend chasing down and fixing a multitude of little problems,” Roberts said with a grin.




aBOOKS is part of Creativity, Inc., the largest locally owned book publisher in Western North Carolina, warehousing and distributing books nationally for itself and dozens of other publishers through its aBOOKS operation.




In 1978, Ralph Roberts founded the company, incorporating it as Creativity, Inc. in January 1990. The book publishing side of the endeavor grew into Alexander Books and now aBOOKS Distributing (abooks.com). The various Creativity book imprints—there are six—share space in a modern warehouse, which like the two-story office building and rambling two-story farmhouse, is situated on the family property. All buildings are connected with underground phone and computer network lines, and have a T1 connection to the Internet.




"We raise books now instead of cows and tobacco," Roberts said, "it’s a lot easier and does not entail ploughing out in the hot sun."


Ralph brings an author’s perspective to publishing and is on the cutting edge of home computers and the Internet—about which he has written scores of books including the first U.S. book on computer viruses. He has now authored over 90 books total.




Recently, Ralph was joined by James M. (Jim) Walsh who heads up the aBOOKS Distributing sales force. Mr. Walsh has been active in the sale of books and sidelines for over thirty years, most recently as the co-founder and managing director of Print & Sound—an independent publisher’s representative group covering the southeast.




Publishers with an ongoing program who could benefit from being associated with a rapidly expanding full-service distributor are invited to submit catalog and samples to Ralph at 65 Macedonia Road, Alexander NC 28701 or email ralph@abooks.com.