This past weekend, I returned from a two week camping vacation in the mountains of Colorado. During those two weeks of little Internet connection...a lot of good content management stories came my way via email but were not posted here at CMS Report. I've decided to go through my mailbag this week and post some of the better stories that were missed in my absence.

A couple weeks ago, Stefane Fermigier sent us an email regarding the release of Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2, an ECM Platform and Document Management application. Stefane writes:

I'm very happy to announce that we have released Nuxeo EP and DM 5.3.2 today.

The release notes are here:

[Broken Link]

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release, which I believe is the strongest we've done so far, and also the one that took the less effort to create thanks to the build and QA process we've put in place in the last year.

We have other new releases coming up in the following days: Nuxeo DAM 1.1 and Nuxeo CMF, and the next release of Nuxeo DM will be Nuxeo DM 5.4, scheduled around October this year.

Remember also that we have the Nuxeo World conference in November.
Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy using Nuxeo DM 5.3.2. We've upgraded our intranet to use this version (over 5.3.1) in the final days of testing the new release, and I can tell you it is noticeably snappier and overall more pleasant to use than the 5.3.1.

I will be taking my annual break from technology. From now through August, I'll be posting and managing the site a little less. I won't be abandoning CMS Report, but you will be seeing me a little less.

It has been an extremely long time since I've done any type of comparision between Drupal and Joomla!. While I like to keep a close eye on both of these open source content management systems...I just haven't felt the need to compare the two applications with each other. The rhythm of each of the two CMS are so different that I honestly don't know what I would write in the Drupal vs Joomla post. Comparing Drupal and Joomla with each other is like comparing Country music and Jazz with each genre not really capable of diminishing the importance of the other.

This isn't to say such comparisons can't be interesting and useful. I definitely know how popular Drupal vs. Joomla! articles can be and the number of visitors such articles will bring to a site.  If you're interested in reading a new Drupal vs Joomla article, you can find such an article at Achieve Internet.

Some of the comparisons are out of date or lack sufficient technical detail to fully support their conclusions. Furthermore, both Joomla! and the Drupal CMS are on the verge of releasing new versions, Joomla! 1.6 and Drupal 7, that will move both products in a positive direction.

This series of articles attempts to address where the technologies stand now, with a keen eye on the fact that both are moving targets as they approach new releases. The focus will be on using the web design software to build enterprise level websites, including those for large businesses, government agencies, and sizable non-profits, as this is the focus of Achieve Internet, based in San Diego, CA. We will examine the following topics from a technical perspective: baseline content management system (CMS) functionality, back-end appearance and functionality, and coding & customization.

If you're interested in hearing more from Achieve Internet, the article you'll want to read is Joomla! vs. Drupal for enterprise web development, Part 1.

What does an orange have to do with WordPress? Michael Fields uses the metaphor to explain how taxonomies work in WordPress and what that means for your site. Video via WordPress.TV.

Some of the most enjoyable Drupal moments for me was the time I spent in 2009  testing Acquia's Search for Drupal. Acquia Search is a plug-and-play service within the Acquia Network, built on Apache Solr and available for any Drupal 6 site.

I think Acquia Search is probably one of the most significant services provided on the Acquia Network and the feature that will continue to attract businesses to not only Acquia but also Drupal. So although I'm no longer on the Acquia network, I'm pleased to hear that new features have been added to this Apache Solr implementation.

Some of the more significant features being added to Acquia Search include:

• Attachment Indexing - Utilizing the Apache Solr Attachment module you can now search the text in document files such as PDF and Word documents. This is big! Even cooler, those documents can searched locally or remotely.
• Multi-site Searches - Search multiple Drupal sites at once.
• Update to Solr 1.4.1 which fixes a number of bugs.
• Wildcard Searches
  

Last week was a very frustrating time for me. For whatever reason, an unusually number of botnets decided to zero in on my Drupal site and created what I call an unintentional  Denial of Service attack (DOS). The attack was actually from spambots looking looking for script vulnerabilities found mainly in older versions of e107 and WordPress. Since the target of these spambots were non-Drupal pages, my Drupal site responded by delivering an unusually large number of "page not found" and "access denied" error pages. Eventually, these requests from a multitude of IPs were too many for my server to handle and for all intents and purposes the botnet attack caused a distributed denial of service that prevented me and my users from accessing the site.

These type of attacks on Drupal sites and numerous other content management systems are nothing new. However, my search at Drupal.org as well as Google didn't really find a solution that completely addressed my problem. Trying to prevent a DDoS attack isn't easy to begin with and at first the answers alluded me.

I originally looked at Drupal for the solution to my problems. While I've used Mollom for months, Mollom is designed to fight off comment spam while the bots attacking my sight were looking for script vulnerabilities that didn't exist. So with Mollom being the wrong tool to fight off this kind of attack, I decided to take a look at the Drupal contributed model Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts which prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots then blocks such access and logs their attempts. I actually installed an "unofficial" version of the Bad Behavior module which packages the Bad Behavior 2.1 scripts and utilizes services from Project Honey Pot.

As I had already suspected, looking for Drupal to solve this botnet attack wasn't the answer. Pretty much all Bad Behavior did for me was to take the time Drupal was spending delivering "page not found" error pages and use it to deliver "access denied" error pages. My Drupal site is likely safer with the Bad Behavior module installed, but it was the wrong tool to help me reduce the botnets from overtaxing Drupal running on my server. Ideally, you would like to prevent the attacks ever reaching your server by taking a look at such things as the firewall, router, and switches. However, since I didn't have access to the hardware, I decided it was time to look at my Apache configuration.

A new version of CMS Made Simple was released this past weekend. CMS Made Simple 1.8 offers a number of new features to enhance performance not only of the website itself, but to make doing some mundane tasks faster and easier.

Some of the more significant changes in CMS MadeSimple include:

"You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?"

Andy Grove, Intel CEO 1987-2005, Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs, BusinessWeek, July 1, 2010