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.

"Great two part interview with Matt Mullenweg from WordPress By Rafe Needleman where Matt discusses all kinds of interesting issues.

• Video 1 covers: WordPress.org and WordPress.com; blogging; video; international impact of blogging on freedom of expression; government censorship; blogging in US politics and a lack of authenticity; monetizing content with Google Adsense; whether there is still growth potential in the Blogisphere; Microsoft and Sun.
• Video 2 is about: simplistic and important blogger stats; predictable release cycles..."

A recent study by WebmasterWorld found that an estimated 77% of all blogs on Google’s Blogspot service were spam. Similarly, AOL Hometown, had well over 80% of its results turn out to be spam. Even MSN Spaces, which as not mentioned in the report, is claimed to host an estimated ten percent of spammer Web site.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s Wordpress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

Complete Story

Akismet announced that a new version of the Movable Type plugin (Version 1.03) has been made available. Akismet is a service for blog applications and other content management systems that filter out comment spam and trackback spam. The new Movable Type plugin for Akismet was necessary because many users were having problems with the previous plugin breaking after users upgraded to Movable Type 3.31.

A download link to the new plugin can be found on the original announcement posted at Akismet.

"There have been some big spikes in spam lately, and yesterday was the first day we processed more than 3 million comments. The spam has been coming in hard and fast, according to Six Apart’s status blog it was even the cause of Typepad downtime this morning."

Complete Story

A few months ago, I posted that I use Akismet in both Drupal and Wordpress. Akismet is a spam filtering service that can be used in content management systems via plug-ins and modules. The Akismet plugin ships with Wordpress 2, but some setup is required.

While visiting my Wordpress site I noticed the specific number of comment spams the Akismet filter had caught so far and made sure I took a screenshot. The image below was taken by me and I assure you that no altering of the photo was done. I'll let you be the judge whether you agree that spam through site comments represent the evil the number shown implies.

I do use Akismet to filter out the spam that is posted through comments here at CMS Report. As most of you know by now, my content mangement system of choice for this site is Drupal. The Akismet module for Drupal is now at version 1.1.2 and available at phpMiX.org (Open Source experiments).

"PunBB is cool forum software, which is now even cooler that it has spam protection.

Per Soderlind has written an Akismet spam protection mod for PunBB. Per said:

Thank you for making Akismet, I finally got rid of spam from my forum.

I’ve added it to our development page, which now features 24 different application and language implementations of Akismet."

Complete Story

"This will probably be the last spam milestone we blog for a while, but a few hours ago Akismet passed 100,000,000 spams blocked. Whoa.

When we hit one million spams blocked I talked about how much time Akismet has saved its users if you made the assumption of 1 second per spam that Akismet caught and you never had to see. Going by that same formula, Akismet has now saved folks 27,777 hours or about 3.2 years of consectutive 24-hour days.

This of course doesn't include time saved by regular commenters not having to deal with difficult-to-read CAPTCHA images, boil-the-ocean authentication schemes, or complicated confirmation systems."