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.

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I'm spending time Friday and this weekend upgrading the software I use to run CMSReport.com. You'll have to excuse the mess as I'm working with a lot of themes/modules for Drupal 6 that are still under development. Feel free to report problems below, but note that the WYSIWYG for comments is currently offline. working but considered under "test mode".

Bryan

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.

  New minor versions of Drupal were released this week, Drupal 4.7.11 and Drupal 5.6 (see excerpt below). In case you're wondering, I have already updgraded this site to Drupal 5.6...no problems, no worries.

Drupal 4.7.11 and 5.6 are now available for download. These are maintenance releases that fix problems reported using the bug tracking system, as well as security vulnerabilities.

Upgrading your existing Drupal sites is strongly recommended.

Download

• Download Drupal 5.6.
• Download Drupal 4.7.11.

read more

As a sidebar, Drupal 6 Release Candidate 2 is also out. I promise, we'll be one of the first sites to go Drupal 6 once the software goes "gold". We may break a few things, but well worth the price for some IT glory!

Unfortunately, I'm a little under the weather with some type of cold bug. So if you're wondering why I've been slow to post "featured stories", now you know.

I also found being sick and installing a CMS don't mix. I tried installing the latest development version of Drupal at drupal6.cmsreport.com...only to find out I installed it here at cmsreport.com. Luckily, I was able to quickly restore the site. Either way, this sucks...

"One of my heroes, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today, whom I’ve written much aboutBlog Herald, has simplified the issue of content theft into two brilliant and understandable articles. and love his work on the Blog Herald, has simplified the issue of content theft into two brilliant and understandable articles."

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