Drupal

When I talk about Drupal, information technology and the weather all in the same breath, I'm known to be very enthusiastic and opinionated in such discussions. I can't help myself. I'm biased toward Drupal as it is one of my favorite content management systems. I'm also a former meteorologist working in information technology for a very large organization that is heavily involved with the weather. Needless to say, a year or two ago when I heard that The Weather Channel started using Drupal to meet the needs of it's customers and meteorologists, it caught my attention.

Over the years, I've made it an unwritten policy not to sensationalize bug fixes and security vulnerabilities in content management systems. While there may be great interest in such stories, I believe such stories have a tendency to cause more harm than good. When sensationalized, such articles tend to cause customers to address security concerns with emotion instead of logic which is never a good thing. So, when the security vulnerability known as "Drupageddon" broke and Drupal developer Bevan Rudge posted "Your Drupal website has a backdoor", I knew this story was going to eventually reach mainstream media.

Digital Business Optimization Drives Growth for America’s Fastest Growing Private Software Company

This week, CMS Report celebrates our eight year anniversary. No one is more surprised than me.

Jimmy Atkinson from The Web Hosting Database recently sent us a note about WHdb.com updating their Top 50 Drupal Reference & Tutorial Sites. Jimmy asked us to help spread the word about the page (see his email attached below).

A constant worry of mine as CMS Report's editor is that we won't have enough articles to publish and give you reason to visit this little site of ours. Luckily, authors and contributors with interest in content management systems constantly prove that such my worries are unnecessary. This year almost 900 articles were submitted to CMS Report. I can't tell you how grateful I am for every article that was submitted to our site. Of those 900 submissions, we deemed only 300 of those articles worthy to publish based on quality of the writing and whether we felt the story was of interest to our readers.

Years ago, I quickly discovered there was great public interest in comparisons of open source content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. When you throw WordPress into the mix and you can attract an even greater audience. Despite how much traffic such headlines draw people in, CMS Report has been pretty selective when we provide or point to such articles. There is some uncertainty whether there is genuine value being provided in feature comparison articles which is why I've shied away from them in recent years.

Well, this certainly wasn't on my radar. Gábor Hojtsy, Drupal 6 lead maintainer, announced that starting March 1, 2014 support for PHP 4 in Drupal 6 will end. I wasn't surprise to hear about Drupal developers dropping support for PHP 4. Instead, I was in shock to hear that Drupal didn't drop support for this ancient version of PHP sooner.

"There's no right way to do it, but there are wrong ways, trust me, I know, I've done them all. Doing it wrong can harm people and it can really hurt the community. What you all have built together is remarkable and it's worth considering how you extend it further and find ways to continue to collaborate, both as Drupal, and maybe even more importantly as a broader PHP community."

- Amy Stephen, Molajo Developer and Consultant, Comment to "Backdrop: Forking Drupal" by Laura Scott, Pingv.com, September 11, 2013

While Drupal 8 has been been under development for two and a half years, I haven't talked much about it. I learned long ago that it doesn't do much good to talk about an upcoming release of a CMS until the software crosses over from what most of us would consider "vaporware."