SitePoint: "Instead, we wanted to clarify the issues surrounding site valuations, and give site owners a clear picture of the factors that were affecting their sites' values. We wanted also to provide starting points from which you could work to translate those factors into dollar values."

Complete Story

Wow, so much is happening in the Drupal community that I am having a hard time keeping up. Isn't that great news!

I finally got around to upgrading one of my Drupal 4.7 sites to Drupal 5 RC 1. As expected, I didn't have too many problems upgrading. However, those using previous versions of Drupal might be initially thrown off to where contributed (non-core) themes and modules should be placed on their server.

In the past you usually placed these third-party contributions into either your ../themes or ../modules directory. With Drupal 5 you're now encouraged to place these themes and modules in the ../sites/all directory. The idea is to help you better identify which themes/modules are part of the core (baseline) and which are contributed (third-party).

Making the directory changes isn't difficult, but the documentation included in D5 RC1 may have been a little vague for some. Luckily, someone already spotted the need to clarify and improve a future release the Readme file. The Readme.txt found in the ../sites/all directory on Drupal's development code repository currently reads:

This directory should be used to place downloaded and custom modules
and themes which are common to all sites. This will allow you to
more easily update Drupal core files. These modules and themes should
be placed in subdirectories called modules and themes as follows:

sites/all/modules
sites/all/themes

My original gotcha was that I was placing the modules and themes in the sites/all directory without the respective subdirectories. Now don't call me slow...you know you almost made the same mistake too!

"Review: Microsoft's Office Live helps small businesses get up and online quickly and easily; with the official launch, Microsoft has stepped up storage, integration with Office 2007 and site design tools."

Complete Story

Hmmm...very interesting. All of a sudden, you may not need to worry about going with the more expensive hosting packages. What's the catch?

"Free beta of Google Apps for Your Domain launches Monday and will let organizations offer Web-based e-mail, chat and more."

Complete Story at CNET

We've decided to use Drupal for our content management system (CMS). An important question for newbies remains, how do we get Drupal onto a real Internet Website? You are probably aware that you need more than the "free server space" the Internet Service Provider is providing, but where do you start? Believe it or not, these basic questions have been asked by even some of the best people I know in information technology (IT). Many IT people may help run or manage the company Website, but someone else in the company left them in the dark to how the company got their Domain Name in the first place. If you're a small business, you may have computer people but what you don't have are thousands of dollars to throw at a Web server. How do people get their site on the Internet at a reasonable price, you ask? It's time to shine some light on these unanswered questions.

The simple answer is you just need to purchase an Internet name (actually called a Domain Name) and "rent" some space on an Internet Server through a shared hosting plan. So are companies providing theses Web services difficult to find? No, not at all and that is the problem. Typing in "domain name" or "web hosting" on your favorite search engine will give you so many companies to choose from that the task can be too overwhelming. Although we're interested in finding the right hosting company to run our CMS, Drupal, for any Website this is the minimum I would look for when deciding where to host your Internet Site: