Last October, Packt Publishing sent me one of their latest books on the Plone CMS, Professional Plone Development. This is a book I had been saving for review until I had a chance to install and use Plone myself. Plone is one of those CMS that I've really wanted to learn more about by installing it on the server myself. Unfortunately, too many things on my "I want" list have had to compete with my "I need" list and I never got around to installing Plone. With no Plone on the server, I unfortunately never got around to reviewing the Plone book written by Martin Aspeli either.

This book is aimed at "developers who want to build content-centric web applications leveraging Plone’s proven user interface and flexible infrastructure". Given the fact that I haven't installed Plone myself, I can't honestly give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the book. However, what I can do is talk a little about the book and let you decide for yourself if this book is worthy of your hard earned money.

This has been a very cold week in the Dakotas. Sunday morning the temperature dropped to around -14 degrees Fahrenheit (that's around -26 degrees Celsius). These are real temperatures and not wind chill.

Needless to say, I am not spending a whole lot of time outside this month. However, these cold temperatures are very geek friendly. I am spending my time at the computer and getting some very needed things done.

Some of the items I have been working on that may be of interest to you:

1. I am starting to make some decisions on where I want to take CMS Report from here. I'm considering to go more "professional" with the site. The changes I would like to make may involve some willingness on my part to partner with someone who has similar interests and more experience in these matters.

The following are some links for installing the Drupal content managmenet system on a virtual private server (VPS) hosted by Linode.com. Please feel free to comment or add links about your own experience of installing and maintaning a CMS (doesn't have to be about Drupal) on a VPS or even a dedicated server. If the reference is good, I'll add it to the list.

• Victor Kane's aWebFactory: VPS! Getting Drupal up and running on a linode
• Jeff Beeman: Just got rolling with a VPS on Linode (Part 1)
• Jeff Beeman: Just got rolling with a VPS on Linode (Part 2)

By the way, CMS Report is hosted on a VPS at Dakota Hosting (a reseller account I own). I've had very good luck with the virtual server at Dakota Hosting and would recommend them any day over shared hosting.

Yes, another challenge for those of us that work in the IT department! Just what we wanted, right? We're spending all this time reworking the corporate Intranet so everyone can collaborate better. What happens when we're done and no one shows up?

It could be tempting to conclude that because your employees enjoy
keeping a personal blog or spending time with contacts on social
networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, that they would want to participate in an internal corporate version of those sites.
But don't be so sure.

A new study has found that the phenomenon of social networking and
collaboration does not yet have a natural extension behind the
enterprise firewall.

Can't we just get a break?

Seriously though, I'm curious how your office Intranet is doing? Have you recently added collaboration and social networking tools to your server? If so, how well is the improved server working for you? What recommendations do you have for others to follow? Inquiring minds want to know!

Recently posted at XOOPS.org was a how-to for optimizing XOOPS on your server.

Optimizing Xoops, its modules and your server - Sometimes, people are telling that Xoops is rather slow and it can be true but there are ways to improve things.

Instant Zero is in charge to maintain some websites using Xoops, so we decided to share with you our knowledge in this domain and we hope that you will find it useful.

In this article, and in 5 points, you are going to see what you can do for your site.

The tips given discuss how to make tweaks to your server, XOOPS, the database, files used, and the CSS to help optimize your XOOPS site. As usual, some of these same techniques can be applied to more than just one content management system.

Honestly, I'm not trying to put so much focus on Drupal when you consider CMSReport.com is a site that is supposed to put focus on at least 29 other content mangement systems.  It's just that there is so much coming out from the Drupal community that it is hard to ignore.  The latest is Victor Kane's experience with setting up a virtual private server (VPS) for the Drupal CMS.

Well, after realizing the limitations of shared hosting for Drupal development, I decided to go with the big boys and use a dedicated server or VPS solution, at least for development. So I can make a multisite install for the docs and I can make subdomains for each development site.

So after perusing various options, I decided for linode. After checking out the various plans, I decided on the Linode 300, and got 50% more disk space by paying for a year.

The good news for non-Drupal users, is that the VPS how-to can easily be applied to other CMS applications.  Check out the complete story.

Yesterday, I upgraded the PHP version on my server from 5.2.4 to 5.2.5. PHP 5.2.5 brings improved "stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related". I also reintroduced eAccelerator back onto the server. I stopped using eAccelerator last spring, not so much because I had any real issues with it, but because I spent the summer months hosting my sites on the cheap.

This time, when I compiled the new version of PHP 5.2 onto my server, I also made the decision to not load the latest version of PHP 4. Although most of the Web applications I run on the server are PHP 5 compatible, I've always made sure I also had access to a version of PHP 4. The time has finally come though where I really don't have a need or desire to host a content management system that is only PHP 4 compatible.

A nice reminder from Donncha...

Daylight Saving Time (DST) kicked in this morning in Ireland, the UK and many other parts of the world when the clocks went back 1 hour. The US is next week from what I remember. If your server is using UTC time, check Options->General, the “Times in the weblog should differ by” textbox in your blog and adjust accordingly!

Complete Story