Bryan Ruby

Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.

Just wanted to write a quick note that the first actual beta for Firefox 2 has been released. I'm proud to say that I'm currently using the beta Internet browser as I'm writing this post. The built-in spell checker for text boxes (found in on-line forms and Web content management systems) works great! I'm also pleased to say, that the spell checker works with TinyMCE.

A couple months ago, I posted some of the features that were likely to be included in Firefox 2.0 once it reaches final release. My original list of features wasn't too far off the mark. According to the release notes, the following are new features that have been included since Firefox 1.5 was released:

Mozilla's Mitchell Baker wrote an interesting post about product development. As you develop a product and customer loyalty there is a risk to making too many changes to a product. However, the success of your product likely came about because of innovation. If you kill off introducing new ideas and concepts for your product you are also likely to kill off the reason your product became successful in the first place.

So far I've mostly posted here at CMS Report about PHP-based content management systems. However, PHP isn't the only language being used on the Web. Other Web friendly languages include Perl, Java, Ruby, ASP, Python, etc.

So for one of our first non-PHP based CMS we're going to take a look at Radiant. The Radiant CMS is a Ruby on Rails CMS that has yet to reach version 1.0. Like a lot of CMS in early development it is considered a "no fluff" CMS for small teams. In other words, Radiant is not quite ready for enterprise level work. Radiant however may work well for those personal sites and small companies that have an invested interest to promote Ruby on Rails based applications.

Something old is new again. The Blue_mark theme for Drupal 4.7 is available at CMS Report. The Blue_mark theme uses Drupal 4.7's default theming engine, PHPTemplate. This theme is released under the GPL.

The Blue_mark theme was originally offered by Charles Lowe and available for download at his site, cyberdash.com. The original theme was written for Drupal 4.4's Xtemplate theme engine. I maintained the theme through Drupal 4.6 for a personal site of mine. With the switchover to the PHPTemplate theme engine as the Drupal 4.7 defualt, significant work was needed to keep old Blue_mark alive. The Blue Marine theme was used as a starting point. Minor tweaks were made to Blue Marine's PHP files and significant changes were made in the CSS.

A post by Nick Lewis, Drupal and XML: Looking Forward, caught my attention. In his post he discusses work on developing the CAP XML format (Common Alerting Protocol).

In preparation for my /Nick Lewis/ trip to Washington D.C. next month, I’ve begun to develop a module that integrates the CAP XML format (Common Alerting Protocol) with drupal’s node, location, google map, category, and CCK modules.

Put plainly, the CAP format seeks:

A very common question among users of Drupal is, "How do I upgrade to the latest version of Drupal?" Drupal releases often contain instructions for how to upgrade your site from a previous release of Drupal (for example, 4.6 to 4.7), but quite a bit of confusion remains for updrading from much older releases (such as 4.3 to 4.7). The folks at 2bits offer some advice on how best to update your Drupal site in their post, Upgrading From Old pre-4.6 Drupal Releases To 4.7. The post is short yet helpful in getting you started on a Drupal update.

Information Week has an interesting article about those involved in such online ventures as digg, del.icio.us, Zoot, and Six Apart's Movable Type. Basically, the article discusses how people have made their money off of blogging or providing the blog-like software and services.

Most people who pull down a paycheck dream of making a living at their hobby. For IT managers, the dream is more within reach than it is for most professionals, as their technical skills can give them a head start in building businesses on the Web. A supertalented few have even made fortunes.

Work continues for the release of Wordpress 2.0.4 and eventually Wordpress 2.1. The developers are planning a Wordpress bug hunt on Independence Day (in the United States). The following information was posted on the Wordpress Development blog:

"But unlike the emergence of the minicomputer and the server, the rise of the PC had special meaning for IT managers: It meant they were no longer in control. That Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet user was programming, whether the IT shop liked it or not."

- Computerworld, Editor Mitch Betts, 10 IT Developments of the Past 20 Years, May 22, 2006.