"While Drupal's growth is impressive, it won't be reaching its potential if it resists incorporating learnings from other systems (e.g. 'this is Drupal, not Wordpress')."

- theneemies, "Chris Messina's Drupal 6 review", Open Source Community, November 14, 2007

A couple months ago, I experienced a number of errors at my Drupal site that all pointed to a corrupted database. I believe the problem likely was the caused by a sloppy export/import I performed with the MySQL database while moving the site to a new server.

While my particular database problem was an easy fix, if you really don't know much about databases you may find that you really need some guidance on how to solve problems like these. This article is the process I went through to correct this particular MySQL database problem in Drupal 5 and some general database rules that show why this problem occurred in the first place.

I came across another one of those "top ten" lists, this time, "Ten Reasons to choose Wordpress". Among the ten reasons to choose Wordpress were:

• Wordpress is used the world over
• Famous bloggers use Wordpress
• Wordpress is free

I've used Wordpress before and I have to say I chose it for its functionality and not whether a million zillion people used it. I know there are people who use, join, and buy something because it is popular. However, I have thankfully never been one of those people.

Coach Wei, Java developer, asks the following question on his blog.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do "cool kids" choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java?

At work we're actually moving many of our in-house desktop applications from Python to Java. I wouldn't be too surprised to see us migrate more PHP Web applications over to Java too for some of the reasons Wei gives in his blog post. But I have a theory as to why PHP and Ruby could be considered "cool" and it has less to do with Java's features and more to do with the culture of open source.

Thanks to a post at OpenSourceCommunity.org, I came across a conversion tool to allow you to import the SMF 1.1 database into a phpBB 3 site. Information about the conversion tool can be found in a forum post at phpbb.com. By the way, the script is still in beta, meaning that it works but you might find some bugs since it is not fully tested.

The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.

I was looking for variety in the CMS headlines to excerpt/post at my site, but everything is coming up Drupal this morning. Not such a bad thing if you like Drupal, is it?

What I hadn't expected was a discussion of Larry Garfield's benchmarking of PHP magic over at Jeff Moore's Professional PHP Blog. Garfield has been collecting some benchmarks in preparation for Drupal 7 development. Drupal 7 "will open up developers to PHP 5 functionality when it is released next year" and likely break Drupal's compatibility with PHP 4.

Baseline reports that demand continues to increase for qualified people in the information technology field.  This demand is in part due to the number of the baby boomer generation retiring within the next 10 years.  Also, the decrease in students choosing a major in computer science, engineering, or mathematics isn't helping either.

In the article, Demand for IT Admins Hits Five Year High, a survey found strong needs and increasing salaries for IT professionals for the following computer administration work: