planet drupal

If you've visited CMS Report lately, you likely noticed that we're sporting a new look and feel. Over the years, I've used various Drupal themes and many of those themes were made available for free at Drupal.org. For the past couple years, I used RoopleTheme's LiteJazz. LiteJazz spoiled me. The theme was so well designed that I don't recall having to do the usual hacks to the templates or CSS styles to make it a good fit for CMSReport.com. Thanks RoopleTheme!

Today, I'm using the Extreme Updates. The free theme is designed by Template World and ported to Drupal by 3rdWorld. In my opinion, the Extreme Updates theme has a few flaws in its design that I'm needing to fix. You'll have to be patient with me because I'm not much of a designer. Luckily, the theme utilizes the impressive Genesis package, a start theme for Drupal 6. This is the very first time I've used a Genesis theme but I'm just as impressed with Genesis as I was when I first used Zen, another starter theme for Drupal.

This time around when considering a new theme, I also did something I've never done before. I considered spending money for a theme. In the past, CMSReport.com has never generated the revenue I needed to justify hiring a Drupal service company to design a theme for my site. However, something interesting has happened in the Drupal community, a number of design companies have started to design and sell themes geared toward the smaller Drupal sites like mine.

The availability of quality themes by such companies as community favorite TopNotchThemes shows just how much the Drupal ecosystem has matured over the years. Doesn't it seem just like yesterday when the biggest complaint about Drupal was that there were no good themes available? The future for Drupal theme development looks very bright. My understanding is that there are a number of changes in Drupal 7 that will make the web designers very happy. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see in 2010 the quantity of available Drupal themes reach toward the same numbers that we've seen for Wordpress and Joomla!.

Changing to a new theme also marks the beginning of my desire to move CMSReport.com into some new directions. I want this site to have a more professional and community feel to it. I'm personally tired of reading mostly my own posts here and I think it's time to get a lot more author's involved. These changes will be progressive over the coming months, but won't be settled until the arrival of Drupal 7. As has been since Drupal 4.6, I've always geared the features in my sites to allow for a quick upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. Similar to the past, you just might see this site running a beta or release candiate of Drupal 7 by the end of the year.

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.

Luckily, Drupal's developers have recognized these usability issues and over the past couple years have made great effort to group together and improve Drupal's user interface. In fact, last year I was able to meet a few of the developers in one of Drupal's first usability exercises. The Drupal community is serious about improving Drupal for Drupal's non-tech users. In the past year, Drupal developers have focused improving the Drupal user experience and roll those improvements into Drupal 7.

There is a lot of information out there regarding the user interface and workflow improvements that are being pushed into Drupal 7. One of the best summaries I've read on the Drupal 7 improvements can be found on this page at Rufzeichen Webdesign: Cinderella unfolds her beauty - Drupal UI Report. So if you've tried Drupal before but preferred another CMS with better eye candy, you might want to come back and give Drupal 7 a try when it is finally ready for release. Drupal 7 will be ready when it's ready and I don't think you'll regret waiting for it.

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.

I've been using the contributed Drupal module WYSIWYG API since last Fall. Although the module is open source and free (offered under the GPL), I feel like I got it for a steal at $30 USD.

One of the most frequent criticisms by new users of Drupal has been that the content management system doesn't include a rich text editor (WYSIWYG) in its core. Historically, the core developers have opted to include an RTE option through contributed modules.  While the use of non-core Drupal modules for implementing WYSIWYG in Drupal is fine, the development pace, availability, and implementation of a particular RTE module (FCKEditor, TinyMCE, etc) has often varied when major versions of Drupal are released.

The Wysiwyg API attempts to improve the implementation and consistency of RTE's in Drupal. The module is capable of supporting any kind of client-side editor as long as there are support files available to integrate the external library with Wysiwyg API. Editors currently supported by the module include FCKeditor 2.6, jWYSIWYG 0.5, markItUp 1.1.5, NicEdit 0.9.0, TinyMCE 3, TinyMCE 2, and Whizzywig 55 (download).

Up to this point much of the work has been done by Daniel F. Kudwien (known as "sun" in the Drupal community). Since Daniel has invested a huge number of hours on this project he has asked users of the module to voluntarily contribute to the project financially. For someone like me who is not a developer, nor has a lot of free time, giving financially is way of showing appreciation for the open source products you use.  Even the smallest financial support can help the community and future development of the software.

If you're not comfortable with donating to an indivudual developer in your open source project, if available, you should consider taking membership in the project's association or foundation.  For instance, this week I'll be renewing my membership in the Drupal Association.  Many of these open source groups such as the Drupal Association use the membership revenue to support the maintenance and growth of the infrastructure that Drupal.org runs on, as well as to produce various conferences and workshops around the planet.

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.

The problem is that I'm finally realizing one of the goals I set for 2007, a resolution to reduce my workload outside of work.  Specifically, I've spent the last year getting rid of most of my freelance work not related to my day job or CMS Report.  So now that I have less sites to host it has become less cost effective to run my remaining Drupal sites on the VPS.  With my yearly VPS contract up this month, I decided to give cheaper shared hosting another chance.

A couple weeks ago, I moved CMSReport.com over to AN Hosting.  My choice of using AN Hosting for CMS Report is solely based on John Forsythe's recommendation that AN Hosting provides a reliable Drupal hosting service.  CMS Report has only been on AN Hosting's plan for a couple weeks and so far the site seems to be running fine.  I am a little concerned during peak traffic hours my Drupal site may be to much for this shared hosting plan, but I'm hopeful that everything will be fine.  One of my posts last week attracted quite a bit of attention and yet everything appears to be running smoothly.

If I do run into problems with AN Hosting, I promise you this...John Forsythe will likely be the first person I talk to after I've recovered my site.

For my remaining Drupal sites, they have been moved over to shared hosting at Go Daddy, the Deluxe Plan.  I've also moved a few Wordpress sites over to this same plan.  My experience with Go Daddy's shared hosting plans for running non-Drupal sites such as Wordpress, Joomla!, osCommerce, and SMF have been positive.  I'm hoping for low traffic sites that Go Daddy is now ready for Drupal.  Go Daddy's shared hosting plans have improved greatly over the past couple years in terms of database privileges.  Even better yet, Go Daddy now offers secure shell in their higher shared hosting plans.

So in a nutshell, besides using a VPS for your Drupal sites you might want to take another look at cheaper shared hosting plans.  Or then again, you may want to just watch CMS Report and see if we crash and burn once more.  I hope not...

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 progress is being made in that direction.

Over the weekend, I decided to move CMS Report from Drupal 6 to Acquia Drupal.  In December, I received a message that beta testers would be rolled over into "a Community subscription entitlement that extends through December 31st, 2009".  Placing the Acquia subscription onto CMSReport.com not only will allow the site to receive the benefits of being on Acquia's network, but will also allow me to monitor the evolution of Acquia.  Acquia is still a young company and likely will continue to expand on the products and services it offers.