Nick Lewis posted his list of 40+ Essential Dupal Modules. The majority of the contributed modules on his list should be well known by most Drupal users.
If you are new to drupal, then this list is for you. These are some of the best of the best drupal modules. Everything from standard framework modules, to location and mapping is covered.
There are a number of nice features and improvements that are included with the new WordPress 2.9. Probably the feature that will get everyone's attention is the improvements in the media-handling of images and videos. The improvements in this latest version of WordPress continue to show why this open source blogging application excels in usability.
Four features that the developers are highlighting in WordPress 2.0 include:
In the world of open source CMS there is no comparison more attention getting than an article comparing Drupal and Joomla!. Probably, the granddaddy Drupal vs Joomla! comparisons of them all was posted over three years ago by the Joomla SEO company, Alledia. I extended the discussion Alledia started with my own comparison between Drupal and Joomla. My article evidently struck a chord in late 2006 and currently is approaching near 200,000 reads.
Good comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! are popular because quality comparisons between the two applications are rare. It's very difficult to have passion for one CMS, be well informed on both CMS, and in the end be non-bias in your comparison. In the three years since I wrote my article, I've only come across three additional comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! that I thought worthy to bookmark.
I haven't updated my own article comparing Drupal and Joomla because I have developed a bias opinion over the years that I can't overcome. Both are good applications in their own right, but in the end I almost always recommend Drupal over Joomla!. That's why I'm glad to see Alledia update their own comparison between these popular CMS with "Joomla and Drupal - Which One is Right for You? Version 2".
Not having the opportunity to own an iPhone due to lack of coverage by phone carrier AT&T, I haven't been a smartphone user. Then a few weeks ago my carrier, Verizon, introduced the Motorola Droid and I purchased my first smartphone. Since then, I've been carrying the Droid where ever I go and taking full advantage of the phone's features.
Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most part, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.
After four years, WordPress has finally earned respect from the judges in Packt Publishing's 2009 Open Source CMS Award. WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award and is finally being recognized for its evolution from a blogging application to a full fledged Web content management system. Packt also declared MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position in this award.
We are pleased to announce that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress has won this Award for the first time in the past four years, earning itself a place in the Hall of Fame category for the Award next year.
While WordPress occupied the top spot in the Overall Award, the other two extremely popular finalists MODx and SilverStripe tied for the first runner up position. After Pixie and Pligg sharing a similar result for the Most Promising CMS category, this is the second time the combined opinion of judges and the public was evenly divided for two CMSes, awarding each of them a first runner up spot.
It is important to note that neither Drupal nor Joomla! competed in the Overall Best category as previous winners in this category compete in the Hall of Fame category. This year, Drupal out competed Joomla! in both the Hall of Fame category as well as the Best Open Source PHP CMS category. Joomla! may be out of luck this year but you surely can't count them out as the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 version should keep them competitive for next year. With three CMS now included in the Hall of Fame it should be an interesting rivalry between the three in 2010.
Some personal notes about the 2009 winners: As one of the judges for the Overall Best Open Source CMS, I too thought WordPress earned the spot for first place. However, I thought DotNetDuke should have been a runner up as I was impressed with it from a usability perspective. Similar to last year, I plan to eventually write a post of my review and the order in which I judged the CMS to be the best among the five finalists for this category. For now though, I don't want to take the spotlight away from either MODx or SilverStripe as the well deserved runner up winners.
Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing's 2009 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS. Instant replay at the finish line may have been required as Packt reports that Wordpress and Joomla! were not too far behind the leading CMS.
We are pleased to announce that Drupal has won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. This category featured a very close contest between the top three, Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla! in which Drupal ended up as the overall choice for the judges and the public.
We lasted nine months. That's right, for nine months we hosted our Drupal site with a shared hosting account. Last January, I knew we were taking a gamble but the monthly cost savings for hosting the site was just too tempting. In this end though, CMS Report was too busy and exceeded the shared hosting provider's CPU usage policy.
I do my best to keep my two IT world's separated. One of those worlds of course is my obsession with content management systems which includes this blog and numerous discussions with almost anyone interested in CMS. The second world is my IT position as a federal employee for a small government field office. In order to avoid conflicts of interest, rarely do I allow those two worlds to cross one another. You'll find very little mention on this blog of my work for the federal government. At the same time, very few people in my agency are even aware of my CMS side hobby.
Earlier this week, Lullabot's Jeff Robbins posted an article about his company giving Drupal on-site training to employees within the Department of Commerce. In his post Jeff discusses the interest those employees have in Drupal as well as mentioning that the door continues to widen for Drupal in the federal government.
We had a great week of on-site training at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC last week. They've already launched recovery.commerce.gov in Drupal and they're currently in the process of rebuilding Commerce.gov as a Drupal site. We spent the week with their team making sure that they understood not only how to build and present a Drupal site, but also the benefits of the Drupal community. They're a smart bunch and it's always fun to watch the synapses sparking as people realize all of the ways that they can snap together Drupal's pieces to create interesting web functionality.
There seems to be quite a buzz around Drupal in the government and as the Commerce team walked around the building with Drupal books under their arms, they got lots of comments from people in other bureaus, saying, "Oh! Drupal! We're thinking about using Drupal." Word is starting to get around about Drupal as a great platform for government websites.
Jeff Robbins is correct in saying that until recently, there was a lot of hesitation to using open source CMS such as Drupal for government portals and content delivery. I know earlier this decade my agency's Webmaster had considered using Drupal before deciding to build the agency's own CMS in-house. During this time period Drupal 4.5 was available but while my interest in information systems was growing, I had never really looked into Drupal (Mambo was in the open source CMS headlines back then) . However, just the possibility of my agency considering the use of Drupal during that time helped motivate me to learn more about Drupal.