When I recommend to someone that they should use Drupal for a project it is not uncommon for them to question my wisdom on the subject. Those new to Drupal are often shocked by Drupal's initial learning curve, no rich text editor in the core, and a user interface with a longer workflow than it really should be. As powerful and functional as Drupal can be it historically has had usability issues.
One of the more interesting concepts, I think, is the many ideas for how to incorporate microblogging (think Twitter) into your content management system. Drupal Voices via Lullabot interviews Rob Loach and briefly talks to him about his Distributed Micro-Blogging proposal which received a grant from the Knight Foundation. The audio recording is only two mintues long but there is enough there to get you started thinking how microblogging may eventually play a role in the larger world of content management.
Idealware is providing online a report on open source content management systems by comparing Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal, and Plone. This 60-page independent Idealware report in PDF format provides both an introduction to the topic and a very detailed comparison of the four systems. The report also includes their new directory of the consultants and firms who help nonprofit create websites and implement these Content Management Systems.
You know you're getting old when...
...younger people discover the benefits of paper.
The printed pages were better then just looking at the digital versions, since we could code on our laptops while looking at the printouts, compare different pages, sit around pages and discuss and have all this goodness at our fingertips.
My respects to Drupal developer Gábor Hojtsy for his good reminder on the benefits of non-technology in the things that we do.
Acquia used the first day of DrupalCon DC as well as their corporate site to announce the availability of their new service via a public beta program, Acquia Search. Acquia Search is "based on the powerful Lucene and Solr technologies from the Apache project" and "creates a rich index of your site content". While Apache Lucene and Apache Solr are "free" and open source, the implementation and maintenance of these products can be rather daunting. Acquia wishes to solve this complexity problem by offering Solr search as a service in their Acquia Network.
Before the beta was available to the public, CMSReport.com was invited by Jacob Singh to join the private beta program to test and review Acquia Search. I have only been using Acquia Search for a week so I still have some learning to do in order to take full advantage of the advanced configuration options in Apache Solr. Although I'm new to Apache Solr, I have to say that from a website owner's perspective the implementation of Apache Search was extremely easy. After I signed up for the service on the network, implementing Acquia Search within the Acquia Drupal CMS was just a matter of activating the appropriate modules and waiting for my content to be indexed by the server. Acquia Search works straight "out of the box" and I couldn't have asked for anything simpler.
Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that a set of Drupal modules are available for integrating Drupal with Alfresco.
Alfresco and Optaros, in conjunction with Acquia, have made available a set of Drupal modules that integrate Drupal with Alfresco using the CMIS APIs. See the CMIS module and the CMIS Alfresco module on drupal.org.
I have never had good luck hosting my Drupal sites on shared hosting plans. My last venture into budget hosting was a disaster with the hosting company locking me out of my own account due to too many requests to the remote database. The truth is that I've only been happy with running my personal Drupal sites on virtual private servers (VPS). However, I'm having a difficult time justifying my yearly costs of using a VPS to host my sites.
I seem to collect a number of books each year. A few of the books I receive from publishers with intent to review or as appreciation for my involvement with events related to content management systems. Other books just peak my interest so I can't help but buy them for my personal library. The following are five books I plan to read in 2009 and are available in CMS Report's Amazon Store.
Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Windborn
Last year I was one of the beta testers for Acquia's Drupal distribution and the Acquia Network. I was evaluating Acquia's products and services for a potential intranet project at work. For this particular project, unfortunately, it looks as if Acquia or Drupal wasn't the right solution. Our regional folks wanted a solution similar to Microsoft's Sharepoint that is more integrated with Microsoft Office and heavily featured in document management. That's alright though because there are a number of smaller intranet projects at work where Drupal is the perfect solution and a lot of
During the past couple years I've had some brief but rewarding content management discussions with Deane Barker from Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive. Dean has worked with quite a few Web content management systems over the years and appears to be most passionate to using eZ Publish. Naturally, our discussions almost always involve Dean talking about ez Publish and me talking about Drupal. Unfortunately, as I am more of a system administrator than a developer, the information I have been able to provide him about Drupal has always been limited.