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A few months ago I mentioned that I was hosting my site using a "budget shared hosting plan through my reseller site which is comparable to the hosting plans offered by GoDaddy".  In that same article, I also mentioned that although I prefer to run my sites on a Virtual Private/Dedicated Server (VPS/VDS), I wanted to try experimenting with the cheap shared hosting plans despite the plans not offering full MySQL functions such as CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE.  For the most part, my sites have been running fine on the shared hosting plans but I wanted better control (oh how I miss Linux command line via secure shell).  So, I began searching for a better reseller hosting plan.  Unfortunately, my search for the perfect reseller host plan still continues.

I thought my hosting requirements were pretty simple.  I wanted a reseller hosting plan that provided CPanel, PHP5, MySQL5, secure shell, and a license to a client billing system such as ClientExec.  Oh and I wanted to be sure the hosting plans provided were Drupal friendly.  While I host more than just Drupal sites I've found that if the server is configured properly to run Drupal then it can run almost any other PHP-based CMS out there.  All in all I wanted a shared hosting plan where I spent less time managing the server, yet had the controls I needed via a Linux shell.  Simple enough right?  In fact I thought I found a great reseller plan through ResellerZoom (RZ).  However, after spending most of my weekend hours trying to work it all out, I've come to the conclusion I'm still looking for something that works better.

An excellent article at CIO Insight in their "Expert Voices" column concerning IT security.  The article is titled, "IT Security, Reconsidered":

Simple PHP Blog 0.5.0.1, a maintenance release, went public on Tuesday of this week.  I know I don't talk too much about it here, but I still like to keep at least one eye open on this particular blogging application.  For you see, I consider Simple PHP Blog my very first Web content management system (WCMS).

Amy Stephen over at Open Source Community has put together a good summary for how differing open source CMS projects have interpreted the impact the GPL has on third-party extensions/modules/plugins/add-ons.  Movement in the Joomla community ensuring GPL compliance for extensions is what prompted her comparisons of license interpretation between Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress, and XOOPS.

This post you are reading has been saved unpublished for a few days as I have feared it reads too much as a rant.  In this post, I'd like to discuss the difference between good and bad competition when it comes to similar "news sites" such as my own CMS Report.   I also want to touch on about how a CMS such as Drupal and Joomla brings both the good and the ugly online.  Unfortunately as with all technology, the modern CMS not only has been a blessing to sites dishing news for their writers and their users...but also a curse.

"IT today is supporting more business processes than backend processes.  Today, IT has earned a stake at the table, has gone away from the bits and bytes, and is, more than ever, a partner to the business."

-Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture Ltd., "What's Next for IT?", The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2007.

I know this was announced a couple weeks old, but I still wanted to mention it here for the sake of those that like the simple things in life. CMS Made Simple 1.1 was released in mid-July.

The features/improvements in this released included: