Bryan Ruby

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.

Andrew Lynch posted a fantastic list of 32 Web Frameworks over at memeburn.com. He starts off that list with Ruby on Rails, Django, Drupal, CakePHP...well you get the idea.

Frameworks are built on top of programming languages and provide methods of streamlining some of the more mundane and common tasks associated with web development. In essence, they allow developers to achieve more with less coding, saving both time and money. They provide a range of simple methods that help you connect to a database, authenticate users and build an admin backend, all with a few lines of code.

Be sure to read the complete story so you can see Andrew's review of 32 web frameworks that you have to choose from for your next project.

Accrisoft. A few months ago, I knew little about Accrisoft or their flagship product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS. In early May, CMS Report met with the company for the first time and it was a great opportunity for me to get to know them better. Accrisoft is a company that anybody who is somebody in the content management business definitely needs to get to know better.

It's not that often I become quickly enthralled with a company and their products. Yet, for the past couple months I can't help but think of the first demo I saw of Accrisoft's CMS. It wasn't just the genius simplicity of their blue/green user interface for users and developers that I'm obsessing about either. It is the fact that Accrisoft convinced me it's not only users that need to rethink how websites are managed, but also the many site owners and developers that incorrectly think they don't need a company like Accrisoft.

Accrisoft is a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) Web applications and they definitely made a big splash at last Spring's 2011 CMS Expo. During the expo, I was able to meet up with Accrisoft's CEO, Jeff Kline, as well as their chief technology officer, Mark Zeitler. It wasn't just their product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS, that won me over that day but also their enthusiasm and  technical vision of what the future holds for web content management.

If Accrisoft isn't on your radar it is time to put it there. For the last five years I've focused most of my attention on CMSs that individuals and organizations are more likely to manage and host themselves. Quite frankly, a portion of my DNA is old-school IT and I've stubbornly been unyielding to any notion of running a content management system in the cloud. I've always wanted to maintain as much control as I could on the servers that host my CMS. Control of your IT assets is a good thing, isn't it? The talk of the cloud is just slick marketing talk, isn't it? Accrisoft, as well as Acquia, have persuaded me to believe that it makes perfect business and technical sense to utilize SaaS CMS.

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.

Buried deep in a month's worth of unread emails was a request for me to take a look at Percussion Software’s CM1 web content management system. The claim is that "CM1 transforms the content management experience for organizations with complex content requirements, who lack the scale required to deploy and maintain a traditional WCM". CM1 was designed to allow marketing teams to quickly build and manage highly interactive, social, scalable websites, and open up content contribution to users across their organizations.

WordPress 3.1.3 was made available to the public yesterday. This release is not only a  security update for all previous versions but also offers some new features.

WordPress 3.1.3 contains the following security fixes and enhancements:

MODX, LLC, the company behind the open source MODX content management platform has released a major update to its flagship MODX Revolution with version 2.1. This release extends MODX’s reach beyond the traditional Open Source server infrastructure and into the Microsoft channel by adding support for Microsoft SQL Server.

The folks over at Moodle have released versions 2.0.3 and 1.9.12 of their open source learning management system (LMS). Helen Foster writes in the Moodle announcement:

In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, five security vulnerabilities (4 major, 1 minor) in 2.0.2 and two security vulnerabilities (both major) in 1.9.11 have been discovered and fixed. Thanks to the reporters and to all the team responsible for fixing these security issues.

Some of the new features and improvements in Moodle 2.0.3 include:

CMS Expo in Chicago last week gave me a great opportunity to learn about a variety of content management systems. I spent most of my time at the conference getting out of my comfort zone by visiting with those companies and open source projects that I knew the least about their products and services. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevented me from visiting with my personal favorite CMS, Drupal. By the end of the conference, I felt I needed to treat myself by attending one of the final sessions in the Drupal track, "Social Drupal".

What key activities should you integrate? In what scenarios might you be smarter to leave the heavy lifting to an outsourced solution?  What elements are critically important right now when building your social relevance in the market?  Find this out and more at this practical advice session on how you can be using Drupal to capture the Social Media audience which awaits.

My hope for the session was that it would give me good pointers for how to connect my Drupal sites better to the social web. Lullabot's Blake Hall led this information packed session. Blake began the session by pushing his vision that this session should not just be called "Social Drupal" but also "Community Plumbing (without the crack)". The proposed rewriting of the title for this session is a reminder to the audience that Drupal has always been social.

Blake started the session reminding that one needs to take a look at the bigger picture by taking a look as your site's Social Media Strategy. This strategy would include the following elements:

• Authentic Story
• Honest Dialogue
• Engage your audience
• Activate the social media

While the big picture is always nice consider it's the details that help determine whether your site is going to succeed. From this point forward Blake focused on specifics and I feverishly did my best to keep up. Some of the notable remarks from Blake that caught my attention:

• First step is to take a look at your business goals and the resources you have available when building/supporting your site. Blake of course sees Drupal as being able to address both ends of this equation.
• Some of the social modules for Drupal he recommends include Feeds, Flag, Twitter, Dashboard, Fivestar, Messaging, Radioactivity (gotta check this one out!), and Organic Groups.
• Speaking of organic groups, take a look at groups.drupal.org: especially Social Networking Sites group to tap into Drupal community's expertise on social publishing.

One of the coolest things about CMS Expo 2011 was the opportunity to see five open source CMS "founders" together in one room. On the conference stage were Dries Buytaert (Drupal), Andrew Eddie (Joomla), Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), and Per Ploug-Hansen (Umbraco).