Last week, someone that goes by the name of Anti sent me an e-mail stating that she finally got a copy of the John K. Vandyk's and Matt Westgate's Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development. To my surprise she also congratulated me for being quoted on the inside front cover. Having a quote by me included in the book was a welcome surprise.
During the past couple years I have recommended to people that they host their Drupal sites on a virtual private server (VPS) instead of a shared hosting plan. While a large number of people do not have problems running Drupal under shared hosting plans, I have always felt that there are less headaches with using a VPS to host your sites. For example, with a VPS I don't have to worry whether the shared hosting plan gives me the necessary MySQL privileges needed by Drupal (especially CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES and LOCK TABLES). From time to time, you also hear from people with "Drupal friendly" shared hosting plans eventually find that their hosting company isn't so friendly toward their Drupal site. Planet Drupal contributor, Clancy Ratliff, is one of the most recent examples for having a host provider not really happy she is using Drupal. So I often ask myself, is shared hosting for Drupal really worth the trouble?
I don't know if shared hosting is worth the trouble but a chain of events have brought me to giving shared hosting another chance for my Drupal sites. Last month, I pushed my VPS so close to the bleeding edge that it became unstable. While I was able to get my sites back online, the downtime clearly told me it was time to move my sites to a new server. While most visitors observed a performance improvement for my Drupal sites since the server migration, it's only now that I'm letting the cat out of the bag. For the past week, CMSReport.com has been under a shared hosting plan and not a VPS. I'm currently running my site using a budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy.
I don't know how long I'll keep my site on a shared hosting plan but I am currently enjoying a break from the work, worry, and experimentation that comes with administration of a VPS. While I may go back to a VPS, I thought it would benefit some newbies and other Drupal users my experiences and thoughts on migrating my sites from a VPS back to a shared hosting plan.
Until this post by Nick Lewis, I've been in the camp with the folks that say PHP-based content management systems such as Drupal should be compatible with both PHP 4 and PHP 5. After reading his post, I'm convinced he's correct that new development should be geared toward PHP 5. It's hard to fight for the future when you continue to hold on to the past...
Should Drupal move to PHP 5?
In one word: absolutely.
In one sentence: if we don't, the drupal project will die along with PHP.
CiviCRM 1.7 has been released. The CiviCRM is the "first open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution". CiviCRM is web-based (integrating with Joomla! or Drupal), internationalised, and designed to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.
The following are highlights for CivicCRM 1.7:
What seems like a very long time since I first heard about and ordered the new Drupal book, Pro Drupal Development, it finally arrived at my doorstep. So far, I have only read Chapter 1, "How Drupal Works", and glanced at the remaining pages of the book but I'm very impressed. The book is written in a very easy, well organized, and informative writing style.
For some time I have wanted to promote and write about a new Drupal site that went online recently. The site carries a similar mission I've tried to have with my own sites where those from competing projects, products, and organizations can come together for discussion. In this case, a site with the desire to build a "place for those of us interested in open source solutions and community issues". The site is OpenSourceCommunity.org.
Dries Buytaert had mentioned that when the Drupal developers came together at the Open Source CMS Summit he hoped they could make a video using Jeff Robbin's catchy Drupal Song. I'm not sure the status of that video by the developers, but as a fan of Drupal I decided to beat them to the punch.
My son and I have become addicted to The Drupal Song. In fact, when the song is playing in my house we quickly become The Drupal Boys.
"Less and less, we're competing based on terms of functionality (open source CMS or not). Not features but ease of use, aesthetics, support, security, community, and documentation...will be critical differentiators."
- Dries Buytaert, "State of Drupal", 2007 Open Source CMS Summit and DrupalCon, Yahoo! Campus
Last week, Linux.com posted an article titled, Drupal vs. WordPress - Which is better for blogging?
As most of you probably know by now, Jeff Robbins from Lullabot and Drupal genre recently released "The Drupal Song". What you may not know is that Wordpress and Joomla! also have their own songs. Well this fact hasn't gone unnoticed by Amy Stephen in her own blog in which she says it's time to vote for the top song of the week.
OK. Normally, I am adverse to pitting one open source content management system against the other, but it appears we have no choice. As of today, we have three songs and only one can be the #1 Open Source CMS Song of the Week. It is time to pick the winner. Sorry, it’s how it works. I didn’t make the rules. If you object, you need to contact Casey Casem.
WordPress community member Devin Reams released his song and video back in January. Joomla! community member Anand Omka released his Joomla! song back in November and the video was released last week. Today, Jeff Robins released his Drupal song and Dries Buytaert announced the video will be shot on location during the OSCMS conference at Yahoo later this week.
Any has invited the open source communities to vote for their "favorite song" and as far as I can tell, the vote will take place through comments at her blog. What? Wordpress and and Joomla don't have their own poll module built into their core? But alas, we're not voting for the best CMS here but instead the best song.