Drupal

Drupal 6.0 Beta 3 was released just before the Thanksgiving holiday. As in the past, I wanted to use CMSReport.com as a "live" test site for the beta/release candidates of Drupal as I did with Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5. However, as this site has matured, so has my reliance on too many contributed modules currently not supporting Drupal 6. So for now, I've decided to place Drupal 6 in a subdomain, drupal6.cmsreport.com.

I am excited with what I have already seen in Drupal 6. I consider version 6 to be Drupal on steroids. Drupal 6 has a lot of performance and power improvements that are already apparent even in the Beta. Put it this way, the day the Views module is ready for Drupal 6, is the day I go live with running CMS Report on Drupal 6.

"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 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.

Packt Publishing announced that Drupal has won their Overall 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award.

After three intense months of voting, Packt Publishing can today announce that Drupal has won the Overall 2007 Open Source CMS Award. With 18,000 votes on Packt’s website, coupled with the expert opinions from a panel of judges, Drupal succeeds Joomla! as the overall winner and receives a cheque for $5,000.

By golly, Joomla has been awarded as the Best PHP Open Soure CMS in Packt Publishing's 2007 awards.

Joomla! is today revealed as the Award's third category winner, claiming Best Open Source PHP Content Management System. Last year's overall winner came out on top ahead of Drupal in second and e107 in third place and receives $2,000.

Joomla! was selected as the winner in the Best PHP category due to "its good front-end for administrators and end-users, which gives users a simple and traditional company website straight out of the box".

Packt Publishing is starting to announce the various winners in its Open Source CMS Awards.  The first category announced was the Best Open Source Social Networking CMS.

Packt is pleased to reveal that WordPress is the first winner of the 2007 Open Source CMS Award, picking up the best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System. In a very close category, WordPress came out in front of Elgg and Drupal, who finished joint second.

Judges comments for their decisions included:

I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.

I'm still in need to read this InfoWorld article in its entirety, but thought it was worth mentioning now.  InfoWorld's Mike Heck has written an article, Open source CMSes prove well worth the price, which reviews and compares five content management systems.  The five CMS under review are Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone.

The good news is that all five CMS ranked Very Good or higher. However, Alfresco was the only CMS that ranked Excellent with a score of 9.2.  Plone 3.0 received the second highest ranking with a score of 8.6.  DotNetNuke and Joomla tied for third and fourth place with a score of 8.4 which put Drupal a fraction lower with a score of 8.3.  While none of these CMS ranked poorly, I'm sure the open source communities are bound to scrutinize over how the individual criteria were scored and ranked.

Steven Peck, associated with the Drupal project, wrote about an article he came across regarding a comparison of the vBulletin forum and Drupal's forum. The article is titled, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. The author of the article writes:

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice. In places the article compares vBulletin to Drupal, this is the platform The Webmaster Forums will be switching to and represents many of the things vBulletin should—in our humble opinion—aspire to.

Mr. Peck's reaction to the article (and my emphasis in bold):

Now this was a interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

In other words, Peck and many of us that pay attention to how the forum applications stack up against CMS native forums don't see too many articles like this. It is rare to see someone using a standard forum application such as vBulletin, SMF, or phpBB switch over to Drupal primarily for its forum functionality.