Smashing Magazine has posted a couple articles to help web developers and designers with their Wordpress and Drupal sites. Some great suggestions and resources are listed in these articles.
The articles don't include everything, but it's a wonderful start for those just beginning to learn about Drupal or Wordpress. Link found via Nick Lewis' blog.
This Drupal site of mine has taken quite a bit of beating the past couple weeks. While Mollom has been protecting this site well enough from the comment spammers, it isn't designed to prevent the bots from trying to ping me so much. It has been an incredible experience to see the bots try to open every possible URL and directory here at CMSReport.com. But probably the real stress on the site has been my testing of numerous contributed modules that are still under development. Probably using a production server to test new modules isn't the smartest thing for anyone to do, but it does provide a nice adrenaline rush from time to time.
To make a long story short, I'm testing a number of ways I can use a Web content management system more efficiently to run this site. I also want to do some restructuring of the site so that I have more flexibility in the look and feel of the site as well as how the content is delivered. For the most part, I'll be using Pathauto, Views, Panels, and one of the aggregation modules. I'm currently testing the FeedAPI module for aggregation, but none of the aggregation related modules really do what I want them to do. I'll put up a site recipe in the next month or two on the modules I finally settle on to support this site.
Now it is time for me to go. Evidently, one of the modules I've installed is causing some cron issues. Am I having fun, yet? Yes, I am.
Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal. According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet using Drupal 5. Electric Pulp, a local Sioux Falls company, also contributed to the project by doing the design and CSS work.
I don't think I've ever met Tim Broeker, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a Joomla! Core Team connection. Yes indeed, open source does matter.
Updated Sep 8 2008 per comments at CMSReport.com
One of the biggest unknowns for those of us that live in the north central United States...how many Drupal enthusiasts are there in our area? Not knowing the answer to this question has been bothering me. I have also been a little disturbed seeing the map so empty of a Drupal user group for my part of the region. So I'm hoping those of you that are Drupal users from South Dakota and bordering areas will join me and others in the new South Dakota Drupal
Seth Gottlieb, Content Here, recently turned me on to Sacha Chua and her blog. Sacha is an Enterprise 2.0 consultant and application developer for IBM and she also happens to be a very good blogger. What makes her blog interesting, besides being well written, is her posts on corporate use of social technologies given from the perspective of her generation, the Millennials (latest hip word for Generation Y).
While some organizations are still debating about introducing Web 2.0 technologies to their employees, this newest generation now entering the workforce is likely to expect that such technologies are already available to them for use in their daily work tasks. While the use of information technology is often viewed by companies in terms of staying competitive and a requirement for implementing strategic plans, the technologies are also increasingly becoming an essential tool for the human resources department. If you're expecting to attract and keep bright educated Millennials such as Sacha within your organization, you then need to better understand how people in her work cohort are likely to process the work given.
The release of Ubercart 1.0 was announced earlier today. Ubercart is an open source e-commerce package (shopping cart) that fully integrates your online store with the open source CMS, Drupal. We've been watching Ubercart for some time and like some of the look-and-feel it borrows from osCommerce.
Some of the features in Ubercart 1.0 as reported by their shopping cart's Website include:
Jeff Robbins from Lullabot recently interviewed Drupal developer Earl "MerlinofChaos" Miles for an audio podcast. Earl Miles is the lead developer for some of the more popular contributed modules found at Drupal.org. The podcast focuses on his Drupal module work which includes Views, Panels, and Node Queue. Jeff Robbins also managed to ask some non-Drupal questions in the 88 minute recording that I found just as fascinating. Personally, I always enjoy opportunities to get to know more about the developers behind the software I'm using.
Last week, I mentioned that the the Drupal SMFforum Integration module was no longer being supported by the module's project leader, "vb". Apparently, Simple Machines had not granted permission to the module developer to distribute code found in the SMF application as required by the Simple Machines License.
Drupal and WordPress, were the only CMS applications that made it to the winner list in CNET's hosted Webware 100.
The April issue of Adobe Edge contains the article, Review of open source content management systems. The article provides an overview of what the author describes as "five of the top open source software (OSS) solutions". The five open source CMS included in the author's list are CMS Made Simple, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, and XOOPS. After reading the article, I found myself wondering how we "reviewers" can actually improve our reviews of open source CMS. More importantly, I've come to the realization that I can no longer claim to be non-biased in which CMS I believe is the best out there.
The author does a fine job in the article describing the similarities and differences between the CMS being reviewed. However, one of the issues I have in this article and many others I've read that review CMS is the big jumps in the conclusion:
Drupal, Joomla!, and XOOPS are best for building an e-commerce site because all three offer:
- Inventory management
- Support for third-party payment processing mechanisms (such as PayPal)
- Modules for shipping and sales tax calculators
- Shopping cart functionality
While it is true that Drupal, Joomla! and XOOPS can do e-commerce, none of these CMS can do that straight out of the box. I can just imagine a shop owner or design company trying Drupal, Joomla!, or XOOPS for the very first time and wondering, "how the heck do I get a shopping-cart into the CMS?". While the author does hint in the article that third-party modules are needed to make the e-commerce work, I think the author would have been better off better explaining that "some work is required" to get those features into the CMS.