planet drupal

In the world of open source CMS there is no comparison more attention getting than an article comparing Drupal and Joomla!. Probably, the grand daddy Drupal versus Joomla! comparisons of them all was posted over three years ago by the Joomla SEO company, Alledia. I extended the discussion Alledia started with my own comparison between Drupal and Joomla. My article evidently struck a chord in late 2006 and currently is approaching near 200,000 reads.

Good comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! are popular because quality comparisons between the two applications are rare. It's very difficult to have passion for one CMS, be well informed on both CMS, and in the end be non-bias in your comparison. In the three years since I wrote my article, I've only come across three additional comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! that I thought worthy to bookmark.

I haven't updated my own article comparing Drupal and Joomla because I have developed a bias opinion over the years that I can't overcome...I prefer Drupal over Joomla! Both are good applications in their own right, but in the end I almost always recommend Drupal over Joomla!. That's why I'm glad to see Alledia update their own comparison between these popular CMS with Joomla and Drupal - Which One is Right for You? Version 2.

Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most party, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.

I was first introduced to Mollom in the Fall of 2007 as a beta tester. Prior to Mollom, I had been using a number of techniques, modules, and services with limited success in blocking unwanted spam. While some of these filtering methods did help me filter out unwanted content, I was still spending quite a bit of my time moderating the comments for potential spam. Worse, in long absences from the site I had to disable anonymous commenting for fear that I would come back to a site riddled with ads for the latest popular pharmaceutical drugs or some girl that wanted to be seen for a price. That's when Mollom entered the picture and helped stop most of the spam from entering my site.

In the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site. Since, the current statistics provided by Mollom only date back to early 2008, the official number of spam blocked stands at around 77,000. In other words, I receive an average of 120 comments a day that require no moderation on my part.

We lasted nine months. That's right, for nine months we hosted our Drupal site with a shared hosting account. Last January, I knew we were taking a gamble but the monthly cost savings for hosting the site was just too tempting. In this end though, CMS Report was too busy and exceeded the shared hosting provider's CPU usage policy.

So, during the past few days I've been busy moving the site onto a a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server. This time, I'm going with GoDaddy but as far as self-managed VPS/VDS goes there are a lot of good companies you can go with. Although I can do Web server administration in my sleep, I think I'm going to miss having someone else doing the server management for me. I know there are better hosting options for professional Drupal sites but I don't think I'm in need for a high-end hosting plan for this amateur site of mine.

One of the common mistakes website owners make is not recognizing the growth of their site. We all try to do things as cheap as possible and often fail to recognize the increasing size of our content management system or the increasing popularity of our site. In the Fall of 2007 I made this mistake. The hosting provider locked access to my site and I spent a stressful week getting my database from the hosting company and placed onto a new server.

If you've visited CMS Report lately, you likely noticed that we're sporting a new look and feel. Over the years, I've used various Drupal themes and many of those themes were made available for free at Drupal.org. For the past couple years, I used RoopleTheme's LiteJazz. LiteJazz spoiled me. The theme was so well designed that I don't recall having to do the usual hacks to the templates or CSS styles to make it a good fit for CMSReport.com. Thanks RoopleTheme!

Today, I'm using the Extreme Updates. The free theme is designed by Template World and ported to Drupal by 3rdWorld. In my opinion, the Extreme Updates theme has a few flaws in its design that I'm needing to fix. You'll have to be patient with me because I'm not much of a designer. Luckily, the theme utilizes the impressive Genesis package, a start theme for Drupal 6. This is the very first time I've used a Genesis theme but I'm just as impressed with Genesis as I was when I first used Zen, another starter theme for Drupal.

This time around when considering a new theme, I also did something I've never done before. I considered spending money for a theme. In the past, CMSReport.com has never generated the revenue I needed to justify hiring a Drupal service company to design a theme for my site. However, something interesting has happened in the Drupal community, a number of design companies have started to design and sell themes geared toward the smaller Drupal sites like mine.

The availability of quality themes by such companies as community favorite TopNotchThemes shows just how much the Drupal ecosystem has matured over the years. Doesn't it seem just like yesterday when the biggest complaint about Drupal was that there were no good themes available? The future for Drupal theme development looks very bright. My understanding is that there are a number of changes in Drupal 7 that will make the web designers very happy. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see in 2010 the quantity of available Drupal themes reach toward the same numbers that we've seen for Wordpress and Joomla!.

Changing to a new theme also marks the beginning of my desire to move CMSReport.com into some new directions. I want this site to have a more professional and community feel to it. I'm personally tired of reading mostly my own posts here and I think it's time to get a lot more author's involved. These changes will be progressive over the coming months, but won't be settled until the arrival of Drupal 7. As has been since Drupal 4.6, I've always geared the features in my sites to allow for a quick upgrade to the latest version of Drupal. Similar to the past, you just might see this site running a beta or release candiate of Drupal 7 by the end of the year.