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.  

Another Milestone for Acquia, the start-up company founded by Drupal's Dries Buytaert.  I've been reviewing the Acquia products for a couple months and will post my thoughts on it at a later date.

After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my! Complete Story

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

Sends e-mail to notify both registered and anonymous users about new comments on pages where they have commented. The goal is to drive one-time users that comment back to you site to convert them to real registered users. This conversion step is an essential one in building a blog comment community.

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.

1. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox
2. Drupal Developer's Toolbox

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.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book that teaches users to create and modify themes for Drupal websites. Written by prominent Open Source and Content Management expert Ric Shreves, Drupal 6 Themes helps users create a striking new look for their Drupal websites with clean layout and powerful CSS styling.

Drupal is a free Open Source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS). Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence. Written in the programming language PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design means it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.

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 (Mnpls) 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.

Although I had a lot of fun this summer, I allowed a lot of commitments to slip though my fingers.  Many of those commitments were made here at CMS Report.  The following is a list of promises that I haven't kept.  My apologies to those that had expected more.

• I never got around to reviewing Barrie M. North's Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (link via Amazon Associate).  My apologies to the author as well as the publicist.

• After all the experimentation and posts I did before the official release of Drupal 6, I never got around to discussing my experiences with the CMS after Drupal 6.0 was officially released.  For now, let me just say that it has been an experience running a site on Drupal 6 with some of the more essential third-party modules still under development (Views, Panels, Subscriptions, etc).