Development of the SMFforum Integration module for Drupal is no longer.  Amy Stephen over at OpenSourceCommunity.org pointed out on her blog that the module's project  leader, "vb", pulled the module due to licensing disagreements with SMF LLC.  Amy references vb's original post at the Drupal forum, but she has a lot more to say.  Amy's an active participant in the Joomla! community, a community which had their own issues with a bridge between Joomla! and SMF.

According to vb's post, an email sent by Michael "Oldiesmann" Eshom, Project Manager, Simple Machines LLC stated that:

The problem isn't with the smfforum.module file or the packages distributed on drupal.org. The problem is with the "smf_api_subs.php" file that you're distributing as part of the smf api package - it contains modified versions of several SMF functions, and you did not ask for permission to use this code or distribute it.

It appears that Simple Machines LLC doesn't have so much of a problem with bridging SMF and Drupal as much as they have issues with their own code being used without proper permission.  The Simple Machines License clearly states that "Any Distribution of a Modified Package or derivative requires express written consent from Simple Machines LLC."  No word on whether Simple Machines LLC would endorse the use of their code if permission is asked.

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.

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project leader, has just unveiled his latest Drupal project...Mollom. Mollom's goal is to be an automated content monitoring system with one of its initial services geared toward providing a spam filter and CAPTCHA server for websites.

Dries Buytaert: Mollom, my content monitoring startup -

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

CMSReport.com is one in a number of Drupal sites that have been "secretly" testing Mollom over the past several months. Since installing Mollom, I've been able to sleep at night knowing that Mollom is watching over my site. The amount of time I spend on moderating anonymous comments for potential spam has been significantly reduced thanks to Mollom. This is good stuff from Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen!

Linux.com is featuring a story by Susan Linton titled "Drupal 6 keeps getting better". The author claims she has been using Drupal since version 3.1 and seems to know Drupal well enough to write a decent article. In short, she does a farily nice job of summarizing the features introduced in Drupal 6. However, she ends the article with a rather strange conclusion.

My primary complaint with Drupal is still not addressed in this release. I believe having advertising capabilities is almost a necessity in any content management solution. Instead, Drupal leaves users to their own skills or to use a contributed module. The lack of native advertising support remains a major drawback.

I rarely have seen such request for an "advertisement feature" in the core of any CMS I've reviewed. Yes, some CMS do have an advertisement feature but in most cases the capabilities of such built-in features are usually limited. Either way, I just can't imagine with the latest drive to strip the less needed modules in Drupal 7 and beyond, that the Drupal developers would go for an ad module in the core.

You and I have a dirty little secret. Many of the Web applications that we call content management systems (Web CMS) are not really content management systems. Huh? A lot of this confusion stems from the difficulty most of us have in answering what should be a simple question, what is a content management system? Scott Abel, The Content Wranger, has noted in previous comments that one of the problems in discussions about content management is that we really lack a common definition of CMS.

The problem we have in defining a Web application as a CMS isn't because people haven't offered good definitions for how we should define today's Web CMS. For example, I especially value Dean Barker's interpretation of a CMS at Gadgetopia, What Makes a Content Management System? On the contrary, the challenge for many of us is that what we know in theory is a CMS isn't really what is currently put into practice. The latest generation of Web applications that we are still calling Web CMS simply have moved beyond the scope of content management and into social publishing.

Last night, I took the opportunity to spend some time with the Drupal community at a Twin-Cities Drupal Meetup. My trip to Minneapolis for the meetup was on the tail-end of a 1300 mile drive. Those miles covered a drive that looped me south to the state of Missouri and then eventually back north. My activities during the past week ranged from sleeping in the Missouri woods at an old scout cabin with outhouse included...to having conversations in Minnesota with some of Drupal's brightest and most active members. This was a week of contrasts for me and now that I'm back home, I can't help but acknowledge that there was something different about attending a Drupal meetup in comparison to other meetups, workshops, and conferences I've attended in my fields of interest, information technology and atmospheric science.

It didn't dawn on me until during my drive back to South Dakota on what made the evening so unique to me. The people at this Drupal meetup were all happy. I truly can't tell you the last time I've attended something IT related where someone didn't ruin the day or evening for me with their negativity. Seeing the smile on the faces of others is unfortunately something many of us don't get to see often enough. I imagine that not all Drupal events are this pleasant, but it's going to be difficult in the future for me to find an excuse for not spending more time with other Drupal fans.

A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

As a user of Drupal, let me start by saying thank you to all the developers and advocates that brought Drupal 6 to light. I've been watching Drupal 6 grow from a distance this past year and have made some observations. There is a lot more sweat, tears, and love put into Drupal than most outsiders realize. Those of us that have used Drupal during the past six years owe a lot to those of you active in the Drupal community.

You can check out the release announcement at Drupal.org for all the new features and enhancements that have been rolled into Drupal 6. Let's look at some of the highlighted features in Drupal 6 which I've listed below.

Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com 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. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.

As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.

For those that are curious, I've started an image gallery of screenshots I've taken while playing with Drupal 6. Not much in the gallery yet, but I'll place more in their from my weekend visits with Drupal 6.

As most Drupal users already know by now, Drupal 6 is currently at a Release Candidate 3 stage of development. For the Drupal community, this is a time when the developers are wanting people to test, report, and help fix any bugs found in these development version of the Drupal software. At this stage of development, Drupal.org still does not recommend Drupal 6 to be ran on the production server.

As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running release candidates on a live site. Also, always be sure to make a backup of your data before performing any upgrade or starting testing.

Although, I started CMS Report with a beta version of Drupal 4.7, I was a little more cautious when it came time to upgrade to Drupal 5. During the past few months, I've been very cautious in running the site live with Drupal 6 as I haven't wanted to distract visitors to this site from their routine due to a Drupal meltdown.

However, I have found that I'm lousy at testing software if the software is not being used "live". There just isn't the adrenaline rush I need when I play it safe. So I've decided, when time allows, that I'm going to start running my site on Drupal 6 during the weekends.