As expected, this week the Drupal development team released Drupal 7.3 and Drupal 7.4. 

Drupal 7.3, a maintenance release which fixes security vulnerabilities is now available for download.

Drupal 7.4 also fixes other issues reported through the bug tracking system.

Upgrading your existing Drupal 7 sites is strongly recommended. There are no new features in these releases. For more information about the Drupal 7.x release series, consult the Drupal 7.0 release announcement.

I usually don't mention upgrades of content management systems that introduce no new features to the user. However, this particular upgrade was personal as it rolled back some previous changes that were causing a lot of grief for a number of contributed modules I want to use on this site.  Needless to say, I upgraded my sites to Drupal 7.4 within hours after the new version was made available to the public.

Lots of changes are starting to take place here at CMS Report. We're now running on a new version of the Drupal content management system!

Over the weekend, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade CMSReport.com from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. It's hard for me to believe that it has been almost half a year since Drupal 7 was released. This was a frustrating upgrade for me as I've traditionally upgraded CMS Report shortly after any new release of Drupal is out. In fact, I have sometimes upgraded a site before the release is official. As a content management system, my five-year hate-love relationship with Drupal is still going on strong.

Despite the usual learning curve associated with a major Drupal upgrade, I ran into two additional problems I've never had to face with this site. First, the CMSReport.com of today is a much more complex site to run, maintain, and upgrade then it was in 2008. With the number of readers and sponsors this site now sees, I just don't have the luxury of blowing up the site and say "oh well" lets start again. Secondly, the selection of premium or contributed themes available for Drupal 7 just plain sucks (there, I said it). I must have spent half of my upgrade time just searching for and then tweaking a Drupal 7 theme. People often complain about the lag time between a Drupal release and the availability of third-party modules. In my opinion, it is the lack of theme development going on with Drupal that is the real problem with Drupal upgrades.

It was five years ago that I posted in programmer tradition here at CMS Report, "hello world". At the time, I expected CMSReport.com to be around for only a couple years which was more than enough time for it to fulfill my purpose. At the time, I had an academic interest in information systems and found that Web-based content management systems were a nice way to put theoretical ideas into practical know-how. This site focused on content management systems in hopes of meeting the few other people out there that shared my interests in CMS.

In that first post, I actually wrote more than "hello world". The full title of the article was "Hello World, New Version". The phrase "new version" was in reference to CMSReport.com not being the first site I created to focus on the CMS.  A couple years earlier, I had tried to start up a website called WebCMS Forum. The online forum was intended to be a "place for those with a passion for web-based applications such as portals, blogs, and forums". I spent a lot of time and money on that site, but in the end few visitors joined in as members to talk about content management systems with me. If Twitter had existed back then I would have easily tweeted "WebCMS Forum RIP #failed".

Looking back at it now, I'm convinced CMS Report is a success because of my experience from failing so miserably with WebCMS Forum. Previously, I had tried to build a site for others to express their passion and obsession for their favorite content management systems. Here at CMSReport.com, I took the opposite approach and built the site for the sole purpose to talk about my passion for content management systems. It was a crazy idea to put my opinions at the center of CMS discussions as even now I do not consider myself an expert in content management systems. It was only by circumstance that I later realized people are attracted to other passionate people that ask questions and are willing to go at great lengths to find the answers. If you're looking for the facts you go to Wikipedia but if you're also looking for great discussion from people asking the same questions as you are; it is the blogs you seek.

Slowly but surely, CMSReport.com has turned into a nice side business for me. The problem is that this site has grown to a point that it demands more of my time than I can currently offer it. The future of CMS Report is now sitting at crossroad. I plan to be spending the next few months deciding where this site should go from here.

Some of the options I am considering for this site include:

• Partnering with others to build a bigger and better CMSReport.com. I wouldn't mind seeing this site become more of a community driven site.
• Selling CMSReport.com, both domain and site, to a company or someone whom can take this site to the next level.
• Returning CMSReport.com back to its roots as a personal blog.

Five years ago, I started CMS Report by wanting to build a website focused on reporting today's news in the world of content management systems (CMS). At the time, I was obsessed with information systems and realized that a CMS is one of the best vehicles to putting the ideals of information systems into practice. My goal was to either blog here at the site about content management or to refer others to CMS stories posted elsewhere. My strategy was to make this site my personal bookmark for stories that would interest me and perhaps a few others that might share my interest in this emerging market of Web content management.

Like most website administrators, I have a long history of fighting spammers and protecting my sites from unwanted content. Over the years I've used a lot of tools and services to block spam from reaching the pages of my sites. In recent years, the service I've relied on most heavily is Mollom.  Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website

Overall I've been very happy with the spam filterering Mollom provides for my sites. However, occasionally Mollom can be too aggressive and remove legitimate story and comment submissions. And when I say "remove" I most definately intend to use the word in the literal way. You see, up to now, Mollom had an "all or none" approach to rejecting or accepting spam. When your stories or comments were rejected, the content submission was simply discarded without review by a human.

If you've ever submitted good clean content to CMSReport.com or another site only to only have it identified and discarded as spam, you have every right to be upset with spam filters. Over the past couple months, I've had a number of people upset that the spam filtering CMS Report has been using rejected their story submission. This may not be all the fault of Mollom either as I was also using the Bad Behavior module too. My apologies to everyone that has gone through this experience when they've submitted legitimate comments and stories to this site. Unfortunately, without spam filtering the content on this site would not be good to view. Spam filtering is a necessary part of maintaining a site open to the public.

Luckily, there has been some improvements in the Mollom for Drupal module that should keep your posts and comments from getting discarded while continuing to protect this site from spam. The module has now been improved to to retain spam comments as unpublished posts in a site's moderation queue. So we're giving the new module a try. I won't promise that your content will not be identified as spam, but I do promise you that every intent is being made to review your comments and stories for publication.

As I  have done each and every year,  I will be taking my annual break from technology. From now through August, I'll be posting and managing the site a little less. I won't be abandoning CMS Report, but you will be seeing me a little less.

During the summer months, I like to slow down my technology usage for a few weeks. I don't think as human beings we were meant to be immersed in the huge quantity of today's digital information. From the moment we are awake to the moment we go to bed, our bodies are being loaded with information. The email, cell phone, and the Internet seem to have a never ending presence in the lives of us IT folks. I don't have much control with removing technology from my work day, but I do have options in my personal life. It's time for me to unplug and officially begin Technology Break 2010.

My slogan for Tech Break 2010 is Run, run as fast as you can! Why the sense of this urgency in this year's slogan?  Well, last year's slogan of Blog less, Relax more didn't do me much good in 2009 as I failed miserably to stay away from the tech. This year, it's going to be even more difficult as today's smartphones pretty much means we now wear a computer tied to our hip. I have a feeling the result of this exercise is that I will end up spending less time with technology, but it will be near impossible to take a complete break from the geek life I've lived with for so long.

As always, I appreciate help in any articles submitted to CMSReport.com.  If you want to really help out, create an account today and start contributing your own CMS stories. I'll be checking email now and then for submitted posts so we make sure you're not waiting too long to see your story published. Have a good rest of the summer!

Every year, I like to slow down my technology usage for a few weeks. I don't think as human beings we were meant to be immersed in the huge quantity of digital information that we are today. From the moment I am awake to the moment I go to bed, my body is being loaded information. The email, cell phone, and the Internet seem to have a never ending presence in the lives of us IT folks. I don't have much control with removing technology from my work day, but I do have options in my personal life. It's time for me to unplug and officially begin my annual Technology Break.

As I  have done each and every year,  I'm taking a break from technology. From now through August, I'll be posting and managing the site a little less. I won't be abandoning CMS Report, but you will be seeing me a little less. My slogan for Tech Break 2009 is Blog less, Relax more.

To be honest, taking a break away from CMS Report is going to be difficult for me. I'm extremely excited with the new look and the new attitude we've found for CMSReport.com. I have additional changes planned for this site and I think most everyone will continue to like the new direction we're taking. However, for an IT guy like me, putting those changes on hold for a few weeks is going to be a challenge. In some ways, I can't wait until August gets here so I can clear the ticket for the site redesign.

As always, I appreciate help in any articles submitted to CMSReport.com.  If you want to really help out, create an account today and start contributing your own CMS stories. I'll be checking email now and then for submitted posts so we make sure you're not waiting too long to see your story published. Have a good rest of July!

I'm doing some maintenance/troubleshooting on the search database at CMS Report.  Until the content is fully indexed, it may be missing from our search page.  Sorry for any inconvenience this may have cause.

A number of content management systems allow for data to be classified using taxonomy (sometimes called categories or tags in a CMS).  Most of us that use CMS and taxonomy aren't experts in how best to structure our vocabulary and usually end up with a mess of terms.  In the end, we have a mess on our hand and wonder how best we should approach cleaning up the terms we're using.

A blog post by Lars Trieloff, The Art of Mining a Folksonomy, gives some great suggestions for cleaning up your taxonomy.  The post was written for the Day's CQ5 CMS, but should be of use to almost any CMS user with taxonomy.

As you all know, CQ5 supports tagging and taxonomies and both side by side. Taxonomies are great, because they allow multi-dimensional classification of content, but sometimes there are things that do not fit into the taxonomy. And this is where it comes handy that you can just type and add a new tag to the standard tag namespace folksonomy. Using this feedback from the folksonomy you and enhance and improve your taxonomy. But what happens if you do not start with a neatly organized taxonomy, but with a wild-west folksonomy that has been created by numerous authors and you want to bring order into the chaos?