Drupal

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.

The year 2008 was another great year for CMS Report. In 2008, we posted close to 500 articles to the front page. Below are the ten most read articles that were posted for the year.

Similar to last year, three of the top stories have little to do with content management systems.  It seems that there is more interest in gadgets than content management systems!  Hopefully CMS Report can help change that.

CMS Wire recent took a look at Technorati's Top 100 blog sites and determined which CMS the sites were using most.  They concluded, not surprisingly, that Wordpress was the most popular CMS with 34% of the top sites using the blogging application.

Simply put, we found that WordPress dominates the list, that Movable Type comes in with a respectable second [16%], and the rest are either custom jobbies or a smattering of other platforms which are, relatively speaking, eating dust.

For the second straight year, Packt Publishing has announced Drupal as the recipient of its Overall Open Source CMS Award.  Drupal was also the winner this year in the award category for Best PHP Open Source CMS.

Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.

Joomla! also placed second in the Overall category followed by DotNetNuke for third position.

Drupal was announced the winner in Packt Publishing's 2008 award for Best PHP Based Open Source CMS.

The Award for the best Open Source Content Management System written on a PHP/MySQL platform is today announced as Drupal. Receiving $2,000 as the judges’ and publics favourite, Drupal finishes ahead of Joomla! and CMS Made Simple, who finished on equal points as joint runners up and collect $500 each.

Earlier today, Packt Publishing announced the winners of their 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People Award.  The MVP is a new category for Packt's annual Open Source CMS Awards.  In this category, "names were put forward by members of the Content Management System's development team and community and represent the exceptional support, guidance, and sheer amount of time that the MVPs have given up to support the development and growth of the respective CMS". 

Instead of just copying the winners list from Packt's site, I had hoped to do something different here. I started with a goal to look for each of the MVP's personal blog or project site,  I had hoped to find acknowledgments of the award was given by the MVP themselves or by someone else on their behalf.  Evidently I started searching a little too early and I only came across mentions of the awards from three four of the projects: Drupal (Earl Miles), Joomla! (Johan Janssens), and XOOPS (Onakazu). Plus... Plone.

Below are some excerpts from or about these open source MVPs.  If you are aware of more of the award winners recognizing or being recognized for their contributions...I would appreciate a link to the post.  Open source contributors like these MVPs deserve all the recognition we can give them.

CMS Critic posted a good interview of Drupal Founder, Dries Buytaert.  During the past couple months, Dries and a few other open source project leaders have graciously offered to me their time for an interview.  Unfortunately, I've been so busy that I've delayed the interviews until I have the time to do it right. 

We were very pleased to have a chance to interview Dries Buytaert, founder of the legendary Drupal content management system. He shares his thoughts on its success, future and how it came to be in this intriguing and indepth discussion. We had so many questions, that we are only publishing part one while he works on the second half.

Complete Story

Drupal 6.5 and Drupal 5.11 were released yesterday.  These new versions of Drupal are maintenance releases fixing problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as critical security vulnerabilities.  If you take a look at the release notes, you'll find that Drupal's core developers and security teams have been hard at work improving this open source content management system.  With all the hard work done for you, it only makes sense to upgrade your Drupal site today (yes, we're running Drupal 6.5).

Details and download links can be found at Drupal.org.  

I began running this website on Drupal 6 shortly after the official release.  Before then, I periodically installed development versions of Drupal 6 on the production server during the weekends so others could judge the progress that was being made.  During this period, I made the claim that I didn't really need any contributed modules to run my site on Drupal 6.

As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity.

It could have been a bold statement that I made at the beginning of the year.  Although Drupal 6 interest has finally overtaken Drupal 5, there still are a number of popular modules still under the designation of release candidate, beta, and even alpha.  My site has shown that you don't have to always wait for contributed modules to upgrade a site to the latest version of Drupal.  However, my statement was a lie. By the time Earl Miles released Views 2.0 Beta 1, I found I didn't want to live without my essential modules for very long.

The following are a list of contributed Drupal modules that I wouldn't want to do without here at CMSReport.com.  I am neither the first word nor the last word of which modules you should be running for your Drupal site.  In fact, by coincidence, Kathleen Murtagh has just written a similar list of contributed modules that should be considered.  Some of the modules on my list are still going through their development phase and you'll have to assess the risk of using the modules on your own sites.  Personally, I like to take the risk for my hobby sites such as these, but I am more cautious when using development code for sites managed at my day job.  Whichever modules you choose, be sure to thank the developers that have made your site possible. 

Contributed modules used at CMSReport.com

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