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.
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.
So Earl Miles, tell us what you really think about Drupal's administrative menus:
Drupal’s actual administrative pages suck ass. It’s not just the organization that’s wrong, as I had actually thought going into this. Unfortunately, no, it’s worse than that. While there are some pages that are (by dint of their brevity) relatively good, there are other pages that are nearly unworkable. block administration, menu administration, module administration, access control administration are all headache-inducing pages.
The Google Adsense module for Drupal has been updated by 2bits. Since we use it here at CMS Report, we thought we would also talk about it here. Some of the new features include:
For our Wordpress 2.0 sites, we have been using the Akismet plugin to fight off the spam thrown at us through our comment pages. We've been impressed with the results with over 550 spam filled comments blocked since early 2006 and only two spam comments slipping by Akismet's filters. With these impressive results, we have been hoping to see an Akismet Drupal module also developed. Now both Drupal and phpBB users have access to an Akismet module for their CMS.
Markus Petrux from phpmix.org announced at Drupal.org:
I have to admit something. Before today I had never visited Nick Lewis' blog. However, I'm extremely impressed with the how-to content on his site. I'm sort of known to be theme development "challenged", so I look forward to articles such as the one I'm reading now.
The following is an excerpt of his latest article with regards to theming in Drupal using the PHPtemplate engine:
Early this Monday morning Drupal 4.7 was released. Since then, about every Drupal blog from Belgium (where Drupal founder Dries is from) to South Dakota in the United States (where CMS Report is based) has talked about the release. Here at CMSReport.com we've been testing Drupal 4.7 since Beta 1 and have been very pleased to see it through a mature released. The following "press release" was posted at Drupal.org :
The following was submitted on our sister site, Like that Idea on December 21, 2005.
For awhile now, I've wanted to build a Website focused on reporting today's news in the world of content management systems (CMS). In simple terms, a CMS is a system used for storing, managing, organizing, and displaying content. There are all kinds of CMS out there, with one that you're most likely familiar with, the Web CMS (we use one here at Like that Idea). While a CMS is more than just software, among the computer techies it is usually the software that is talked about most.